Build Your Own Blockchain: A Python Tutorial

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Blockchain is arguably one of the most significant and disruptive technologies that came into existence since the inception of blockchain python tutorial programming Internet. It's the core technology behind Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies that drew a lot of attention in the last few years. As its core, a blockchain is a distributed database that allows direct transactions between two parties without blockchain python tutorial programming need of a central blockchain python tutorial programming. This simple yet powerful concept has great implications for blockchain python tutorial programming institutions such as banks, governments and marketplaces, just to name blockchain python tutorial programming few.

Any business or organization that relies on a centralized database as a core competitive advantage can potentially be disrupted by blockchain technology. Putting aside all the hype around the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the goal of this blog post is to give you a practical introduction to blockchain technology.

Sections 1 and 2 cover some core concepts behind blockchain, while section 3 shows how to implement a blockchain using Python. We will also implement 2 web applications to make it easy for end users to interact with our blockchain.

Please note that I'm using Bitcoin here as a medium for explaning the more general technology of "Blockchain", and most of the concepts described in this post are applicable to other blockchain use cases and crypto-currencies. It all started with a white paper released in by an unknown person or entity using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. In the original Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi described how to build a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a centralized institution.

This system solves an important problem in digital money called double-spending. If Alice and Bob use digital money, then the problem gets more complicated. Digital money is in digital form and can be easily duplicated.

This problem is called double-spending. One way of solving the double-spending problem is to have a trusted third party a bank for example between Alice, Bob and all other participants in the network. This third party is responsible for managing a centralized ledger that keeps track of and validates all the transactions in the network. The drawback of this solution is that for the system to function, it requires trust in a centralized third party. To solve the double-spending problem, Satoshi proposed a public ledger, i.

The goal of this section is to go deeper into the technical building blocks that power the blockchain. We will cover public key cryptography, hashing functions, mining and security of the blockchain. Public-key cryptography, or asymmetrical cryptography, is any cryptographic system that uses blockchain python tutorial programming of keys: This accomplishes two functions: I recommend this articleif you're interested in the complete technical details of Bitcoin wallets.

To send or receive BTCs, a user starts by generating a wallet which contains a pair of private and public keys. She then blockchain python tutorial programming the transaction using her private key.

A computer on the blockchain uses Alice's public key to verify that the transaction is authentic and adds the transaction to a block that will be later added to the blockchain. All Bitcoin transactions are grouped in files called blocks. Bitcoin adds a new block of transactions every 10 minutes. Once a new block is added to the blockchain, it becomes immutable and can't blockchain python tutorial programming deleted or modified.

A special group of blockchain python tutorial programming in the network called miners computers connected to the blockchain are responsible for creating new blocks of transactions. A miner has to authenticate each transaction using the sender's public key, confirm that the sender has enough balance for the requested transaction, and add the transaction to the block.

Miners are completely free to choose which transactions to include in the blocks, therefore the senders need to include a transaction fee to incentivise the miners blockchain python tutorial programming add their transactions to the blocks.

For a block to be accepted by the blockchain, it needs to be "mined". To mine blockchain python tutorial programming block, miners need to find an extremely rare solution to a cryptographic puzzle. If a mined block is accepted by the blockchain, the miner blockchain python tutorial programming a reward in bitcoins which is an additional incentive to transaction fees.

The mining process is also referred blockchain python tutorial programming as Proof of Work PoWand it's blockchain python tutorial programming main mechanism that enables the blockchain to be trustless and secure more on blockchain security later.

To understand the blockchain's cryptographic puzzle, we need to start with hash functions. A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to data of fixed size.

The values returned by a hash function are called hashes. Hash functions are usually used to accelerate database lookup by detecting duplicated records, blockchain python tutorial programming they are also widely used in cryptography. A cryptographic hash function allows one to easily verify that some input data maps to a given hash value, but if the input blockchain python tutorial programming is unknown, it is deliberately difficult to reconstruct it by knowing the stored hash value.

Bitcoins uses a cryptographic hash function called SHA SHA is applied to a combination of the block's data bitcoin transactions and a number called nonce.

By changing the block data or the nonce, we get completely different hashes. For a block to be considered valid or "mined", the hash value of the block and blockchain python tutorial programming nonce needs to meet a certain condition. For example, the four leading digits of the hash needs to be equal to "". We can increase the mining complexity by making the condition more complex, for example we can increase the number of 0s that the hash value needs to start with.

The cryptograhic puzzle that miners need to solve is to find a nonce value that makes the hash value satisfies the mining condition. You can use the app below to simulate block mining. When you type in the "Data" text box or change the nonce value, you can notice the change in the hash value. When you click the "Mine" button, the app starts with a nonce equals to zero, computes the hash value and checks if the leading four digits of the blockchain python tutorial programming value is equal to "".

If the leading four digits are not equal to "", it increments the nonce by one and repeats the whole process until it finds a nonce value that satisify the condition. If the block is considered mined, the background color turns green. As discussed in the previous section, transactions are grouped in blocks and blocks are appended to the blockchain.

Any changes to the data in any block will affect all the hash values of the blocks that come after it and they will become invalid. This give the blockchain its immutability characteristic.

You can use the app below to simulate a blockchain with 3 blocks. When you type in the "Data" text box or change the nonce value, you can blockchain python tutorial programming the change in the hash value and the "Prev" value previous hash of the next block.

After mining the 3 blocks, try changing the data in block 1 or 2, and you will notice that all the blocks that come after become invalid. Both mining simulators above were adapted from Anders Brownworth's excellent Blockchain Demo. All the miners in the Bitcoin network compete with each other to find a valid block that will be added to the blockchain and get the blockchain python tutorial programming from the network. Finding a nonce that validated a block is rare, but because of the number of miners, the probability of a miner in the network validating a block is extremely high.

The first miner to submit a valid block gets his block added to the blockchain and receives the reward blockchain python tutorial programming bitcoins.

But what happens if two miners or more submit their blocks at the same time? If 2 miners solve a block at almost the same time, then we will have 2 different blockchains in the network, and we need to wait for the next block to resolve the conflict. Some miners will decide to mine on top of blockchain 1 and others on top of blockchain 2.

The first miner to find a new block resolves the conflict. In short, if there is a conflict on the blockchain, then the the longest chain wins. In this section, we will cover the most popular ways for performing double-spending attacks on the blockchain, and the measures that users should take to prevent damages from them. An attacker sends the same coin in rapid succession to two different addresses.

To prevent from this attack, blockchain python tutorial programming is recommended to wait for at least one block confirmation before accepting the payment. An attacker pre-mines a block with a transaction, and spends the same coins in a second transaction before releasing the block. In this scenario, the second transaction will not be validated. To prevent from this attack, it is recommended to wait for at least 6 block confirmations before accepting the payment.

The attacker starts by making a transaction that is brodcasted to the entire network, and then mines a private blockchain where he double-spends the coins of the previous transaction. Since the attacker owns the majority of the computing blockchain python tutorial programming, he is guaranteed that he will have at some point a longer chain than the "honest" network.

He can then release his longer blockchain that will replace the "honest" blockchain and cancel the original transaction. In this section, we will implement a basic blockchain and a blockchain client using Python. Our blockchain will have the following blockchain python tutorial programming.

The blockchain implementation is mostly based on this github project. I made a few modifications to the original code in order to add RSA encryption to the transactions. Wallet generation and transaction encryption is based on this Jupyter notebook. You can download the complete source code from https: Please blockchain python tutorial programming that this implementation is for educational purposes only and shouldn't be use in production as it doesn't have good security, doesn't scale well and lacks many important features.

In your browser, go to http: Blockchain python tutorial programming order to make or view transactions, you will need at least one blockchain node running to be covered in next section. These are the 4 pieces of information that a sender needs to create a transaction.

The line below initate a Python Flask app that we will use to create different APIs to interact with the blockchain and its client. Below we define the 3 Flask routes that returns html pages. One html page for each tab. If you don't specify a port number, it will default to port The line below initate a Python Flask app that we will use to create different APIs to interact with the blockchain.

Below we define the 2 Flask routes that return the html pages for our blockchain frontend dashboard. In this blog post, we covered some core concepts behind blockchain and we learned how to implement one using Python. For the sake of simplicity, I didn't cover some technical details, for example: Wallet addresses and Merkel trees.

If you want to learn more about the subject, I recommend reading the original Bitcoin white paper and follow up with bitcoin wiki and Andreas Antonopoulos's excellent book: Programming the Open Blockchain.

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This tutorial will walk you through the basics of how to build a blockchain from scratch. Focusing on the details of a concrete example will provide a deeper understanding of the strengths and limitations of blockchains.

At its core, a blockchain is a distributed database with a set of rules for verifying new additions to the database. Alice and Bob, who will trade virtual money with each other.

Next, we want to create a function to generate exchanges between Alice and Bob. For bitcoin, the validation function checks that the input values are valid unspent transaction outputs UTXOs , that the outputs of the transaction are no greater than the input, and that the keys used for the signatures are valid.

In Ethereum, the validation function checks that the smart contracts were faithfully executed and respect gas limits. Here are a set of sample transactions, some of which are fraudulent- but we can now check their validity! Each block contains a batch of transactions, a reference to the hash of the previous block if block number is greater than 1 , and a hash of its contents and the header.

For each block, we want to collect a set of transactions, create a header, hash it, and add it to the chain. As expected, the genesis block includes an invalid transaction which initiates account balances creating tokens out of thin air. The hash of the parent block is referenced in the child block, which contains a set of new transactions which affect system state.

We can now see the state of the system, updated to include the transactions:. And even if we are loading the chain from a text file, e. In an actual blockchain network, new nodes would download a copy of the blockchain and verify it as we just did above , then announce their presence on the peer-to-peer network and start listening for transactions.

Bundling transactions into a block, they then pass their proposed block on to other nodes. If we recieve a block from somewhere else, verifying it and adding it to our blockchain is easy. Now assume that the newBlock is transmitted to our node, and we want to check it and update our state if it is a valid block:.

We can derive the system state from a downloaded copy of the blockchain, validate new blocks that we recieve from the network, and create our own blocks. We could extend this to include special transaction types or full smart contracts. More on that in the future! Very good and simple explanation of the priciple of block chains. I followed the instructions step by step and have got now an idea how it might work in reality. Thanks for posting this tutorial.

Perhaps someone has a continuation of this tutorial how to deal with conflicts when multiple miners create blocks at roughly the same time? Thanks for checking this in Python3! I just posted an update also on github which should address Python 3 compatibility issues, tested on Python 3.

Thank you very much for the outstanding article! Thank you for the explanation! After reading all the math calculations about difficulty of blocks, probability of finding one, deflation pace, profitability of mining etc. One more question — if I may: We check this by building up the current state of the blockchain, starting at the genesis block, and saving the blockchain state in local memory or a database as mentioned in the previous answer.

Thank you once again! It seems re-generated pair of keys may work as well as the original. Could be great if you add the code to your article. Ah, ok- now I understand what you meant! Anyone with the public key can then verify that the signature is valid for that specific transaction- without being able to know anything about the private key! Any changes to the transaction contents would require a different signature, so having the public key and the signature allows a node to verify that the transaction was created by the account owner, and has not been tampered with.

This is used in some creative ways, e. Public cryptography key as a wallet ID makes everything clear. Yet another simple yet great concept. Thank you for the replies and the article! Hey can u briefly explain the framework for creating blockchain application not for transaction but for documents storage. There are a number of approaches for this; the simplest is to hash the contents of the document and an address to the document into the message contents rather than having the message have a target and amount.

This proves existence of a specific version of the document at a given location. More complicated versions which work like IPFS are outside of the scope of this tutorial, but there are other resources for understanding that project! Is there a specific reason for this or could we just use the txnCount variable in the blockContents dictionary? I would also been interested in understanding the mechanism according to which transactions get allocated to nodes for block creation.

I know bitcoin uses the longest chain rule to solve concurrent blocks creation but I cannot figure out how this would work in code. When a transaction is generated how is it decided which node should process it and add it to a block? Are transaction assigned to multiple nodes at the same time?

How the transactions buffer can be kept synchronized across the nodes? The consensus mechanism is an emergent property of the network dynamics, and so is harder to model in a single-node representation like this one.

Roughly, the network is a peer-to-peer network in which nodes pass messages and block onwards to all their listed peers. This allows a node to identify the longest chain which it receives from the rest of the network; as well as develop a queue of messages to bundle into blocks.

The transactions will typically be ordered by the miner fees or gas price in Ethereum for batching into blocks. Thank you for the clarification. I think I underestimated the speed information can propagate across peer networks. I had stuck in my mind the idea that it was not possible that a reasonably big amount of peers could sync transactions in time to avoid a massive duplication of jobs, but apparently the speed is high enough to allow processed transactions to be removed from working buffers fast enough to avoid continuous conflicts.

The scenario I have in mind is similar to a found rising: All the other nodes can then decide how much to contribute to the request. Can be all from only one node or smaller amounts from multiple nodes. Once the total for the transaction is 0 request and supply net each other then the transaction is ready to be added to the block. I think it should be rather straightforward to implement, the only complexity I see is in linking requests and supply with some sort of ID in order to decide when the request is solved.

I guess I can solve potential conflicts of oversupply when creating the block, by discarding the final redundant transaction based on timestamp or by reducing the value in case the supplied amount is too high. This is something that you could definitely code up in a smart contract in Solidity and deploy on the Ethereum network to test out. Only if there are some nonlinear interactions between submissions would you need to worry about transaction ordering- but this again could be captured with a queue within a smart contract to accomplish the same goal.

Thanks for the clarification. I think Blockchain can prevent attacker in vehicular communication and allow a good multicast communication among nodes. Do you have any idea of how I can do it and help me?? I was curious on how you would go about adding more transactions to make more blocks in the blockchain? Hi, first of all thanks fot this great article, just one question. In case of we have several pear-to-pear nodes, there is a chance of chain inconsistancy. I mean than on different nodes transaction with number N could be different.

Question is, how to properly merge chains copies from different nodes? Is there some master Node should be implemented to be a single source of true for chain consistency? I will update you in case if I find something interesting regarding storage sharding topic. About the privacy — since governments have started to be very active with their attempts to control crypto-currencies. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email.

For convenience, this is a helper function that wraps our hashing algorithm if type msg! Updated state, with additional users added to state if necessary NOTE: This does not not validate the transaction- just updates the state! Assume that the transaction is a dictionary keyed by account names Check that the sum of the deposits and withdrawals is 0 if sum txn.

True False False True False. This becomes the first element from which everything else will be linked. If we got a valid state, not 'False' txnList.

We can now see the state of the system, updated to include the transactions: On a blockchain network, this becomes important in two ways: When we initially set up our node, we will download the full blockchain history.

After downloading the chain, we would need to run through the blockchain to compute the state of the system. To protect against somebody inserting invalid transactions in the initial chain, we need to check the validity of the entire chain in this initial download. Once our node is synced with the network has an up-to-date copy of the blockchain and a representation of system state it will need to check the validity of new blocks that are broadcast to the network.

We will need three functions to facilitate in this: A simple helper function that makes sure that the block contents match the hash checkBlockValidity: Checks the validity of a block, given its parent and the current system state.

We want this to return the updated state if the block is valid, and raise an error otherwise. Check the validity of the entire chain, and compute the system state beginning at the genesis block.