So I started with the Coursera Specialisation in Blockchain by the University of Buffalo. The course seems good and a little self-paced, a nice thing for me since I like to read stuff than watch hours of video for the courses.
The first module started with a task to read the WhitePaper of Bitcoin. Let's unveil what all it holds.

Verifying the transactions

Each owner transfers the coin to the
next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.

Transaction Process

TimeStamp Server

A timestamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash, such as in a
newspaper. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in
its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it.

Network

The steps to run the network are as follows:

  1. New transactions are broadcast to all nodes
  2. Each node collects new transactions into a block.
  3. Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
  4. When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
  5. Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
  6. Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.

Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on
extending it. This is what prevents hackers. Pretty cool right?! If someone wants to hack then they will have to gather enough computational power and then try and beat the already existing longest node. Which in fact is near to impossible!

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