Blockchain and crypto get a lot of press these days, but most people still struggle to understand them. As with many technical topics, the blogosphere is little help to the curious reader. Sometimes it uses analogies so abstract as to be useless, such as extremely complex math problems, or a highly complex computing process, which are glosses implying that the reader–or perhaps the writer as well–can’t understand the facts. Or sometimes it delves into so much detail as to be useless to most readers unless they already understand–a chicken and egg problem. This post is an attempt to strike a happy medium and explain how blockchain works, for people who are curious, but not technical experts. (Like me!)
To demystify blockchain, we need to understand a few concepts:
- What is blockchain?
- What are cryptocurrencies?
- What is mining?
- Why is the blockchain trustworthy?
What is Blockchain?
A blockchain is a kind of ledger. Most people don’t use physical ledgers, like the one pictured above, these days, but your bank statement is a ledger. A ledger is just a sequential list of transactions. Ledgers are designed to be auditable, so they allow additions but not deletions or changes. Once a transaction (like a deposit or withdrawal) is recorded, it can’t be erased or changed — it is in the ledger forever. So, for example, if your bank makes a mistake and pays the wrong amount from your account, the bank will not erase that transaction. It will credit an amount back to your account in a balancing transaction.
A distributed ledger or decentralized ledger is just a series of electronic transaction records, each of which contains details like the amount transferred and the date.
But a blockchain is different from your bank statements because it is a chain–the transaction records are linked together in a sequence that cannot be changed, even if the storage location of the records is separated. Each transaction record is called a block. (Actually, each block usually contains multiple transactions, so this is a simplification.) Unlike a paper ledger, or even your bank statement, each block also contains a cryptographic pointer to find the previous block. That way, the chain can always be reconstructed from its pieces. Anyone who wants to verify the chain can do so by following the links back one at a time. If a link is not in the sequence, it’s not legitimate.
The pointer is created with a method called a hash. Hashes have all kinds of uses computing. In blockchain, a hash is a unique number (or series of characters) that is generated automatically based on the information in the block. It is like a fingerprint: If you have the fingerprint, and you have the block, you can tell easily whether the two of them match, and the fingerprint corresponds to the record.
A decentralized ledger exists on various computers known as nodes. These computer nodes all work independently in a peer-to-peer network. A node often maintains a local copy of the entire blockchain since its beginning.
So in sum:
- A blockchain is an electronic ledger
- Each block in the chain is connected to the last one using a hash
- It is decentralized because it exists independently on many computer nodes
How do Blockchains Work?
Most blockchains are permissionless and public, meaning they are not controlled by a central authority, like a bank or government, and all participants can access a copy of every transaction. That means all participants can verify the chain for themselves, without relying on a central authority. Even though blockchains are not encrypted, their information can still be secured. Bitcoin, for example, uses pseudonyms to identify parties conducting transactions, so their personal information will not be publicly available. But the pseudonymous information is accessible to anyone. You can find some examples here.
The key characteristic of public decentralized ledgers is that they can be trusted by participants without the need to trust a central authority, like a bank. This quality makes them extremely resistant to tampering, because all the copies stored across the network need to be attacked at the same time for an attack to be successful. As an analogy, suppose your identity was secured by a passport only, and anyone who had your passport could claim they were you. That would be a single point of failure in security. But in real life, many people know you, and you have multiple IDs, so even if someone stole your passport, you would be able to prove they were not you. For your identity to be truly stolen, there would need to be a vast conspiracy to remove most of the traces of your identity. Blockchains work like that. For the information to be corrupted, so many people would have to collaborate that it is highly unlikely to happen. In other words, they work by consensus, and with enough participants, consensus is quite reliable.
So in sum:
- Most blockchains are unpermissioned.
- Unpermissioned blockchains rely on consensus and transparency, instead of trust in a single authority, for legitimacy.
What is Cryptocurrency?
Blockchains have lots of uses, but one of the most popular is to legitimize and track private currency like Bitcoin.
Currency is a unit of value that can be exchanged for goods and services or saved for future use. Currency is fungible–one dollar is as good as another. The auditable and sequential qualities of ledgers, and their ability to make balancing transactions, work for currency because currency is fungible.
Currency is also scarce. Scarcity is a basic economic principle. Currencies don’t represent value if they have an infinite supply. If you could print up money on your computer printer, it would immediately lose all its value. No one would accept it for goods or services that have real-world value, because they could print up their own. In a way, currency is like a group hallucination. If we all behave as if currency has value, then it does. Once people lose confidence in the stability of currency, it loses value quickly, as in episodes of hyperinflation.
You have heard of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether and Dogecoin. These are private currencies that are transacted on a blockchain. The blockchain is the method of making transactions, and the cryptocurrency is what is being transacted. A blockchain is not a cryptocurrency, any more than a bank ledger is money.
Unlike Dollars and Pounds and Rupees, cryptocurrencies are not usually authorized by a government. Government-authorized currencies are called fiat currencies, because the government uses its legal authority (fiat) to require that its citizens accept that currency to pay off debts. A currency meeting this requirement is called legal tender. The value of a fiat currency is based largely on the reputation of the government that issues it. While almost anything can be used as a currency — gold, stamps, or poker chips– a fiat currency is usually more stable, because the government works to manage its stability.
At least in the US, it is not exactly illegal to create your own currency. In fact, the US has a long history of private money. There are plenty of currencies issued by local governments, banks, or private citizens. These are sometimes called scrip or community currencies. Sometimes, scrip can be exchanged for anything of value, and sometimes, it can only be exchanged for specific things. A frequent flyer mile, for example, is a kind of currency that can be exchanged for airline tickets or other things of value, depending on what the issuing airline allows. Anyone can invent a currency. And anyone can invent a cryptocurrency.
But governments can issue cryptocurrencies, too, just like they do coins or paper money. At least one country (El Salvador) has adopted Bitcoin as its legal tender, and many countries are expected to create fiat cryptocurrencies in the near future. Some governments have banned private cryptocurrencies (like China), but even in the case of China, some expect a fiat currency to eventually replace the banned community currencies.
Also, not all blockchains are created for cryptocurrencies. Blockchains have many applications other than currency transactions. NFTs, for example, are managed on blockchains. Blockchains can be used for secure records of real estate deeds or voting in elections.
So, in sum, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, managed on a blockchain and not a fiat currency. But:
- Currency is a generally accepted unit of value.
- All cryptocurrencies are managed on blockchains, but not all blockchains are for cryptocurrencies.
- There are many cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin.
- Not all cryptocurrencies are community currencies. They can be fiat currencies as well.
What is Mining?
This section discusses verification of new blocks for Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a proof of work system to verify transactions. (Others, like Ether 2.0, use a proof of stake system.)
You have probably read that mining requires a lot of computing time and energy, but what exactly are those computers doing?
At a high level, Bitcoin miners compete to verify new transactions on the blockchain. The miner to first successfully verify a block wins a reward for doing the work. The reward is currently a fraction of a Bitcoin (and by design, will decrease over time until there is no remaining incentive). Currently, the reward for verifying a transaction is 6.25 bitcoins–which as of January 2022 was worth more than $260,000. Miners also earn transactions fees based on the size and content of the transactions.
But verifying takes a lot of work–though this is where the metaphor starts to wobble, because it is computer work, not work by people with picks and shovels. Because Bitcoin mining requires intensive computing work, that work is not sensible to do via your average desktop computer. You could mine on your home computer if you wanted to try, and used the right software (for example the open source CGMiner), but you would probably not win any Bitcoin, because another miner with faster equipment would likely win the competition instead of you. Also, your electricity cost would probably be greater than your yield. So, professional Bitcoin miners use special hardware, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). A GPU is a kind of computer chip that was designed to process graphics, mainly for video gaming. But because of their fast processing power, they are now popular for number-crunching applications like AI and Bitcoin mining. At this point, due to the expense of mining, many miners work in pools, and split the proceeds.
How Does Mining Work?
Bitcoin miners compete to do the proof of work to verify each new block on the chain.
The bitcoin system resets the level of difficulty — how hard it is to verify a block–after each 2016 blocks, which happens about every two weeks. The system is designed so that a new block is expected to be created about every 10 minutes, but that is just an average target. Sometimes blocks are found more quickly, and sometimes less quickly, depending on how lucky the miners are. The current difficulty setting, and time to the next calculation, can be found here. (Difficulty is expressed in a format where the first two are the exponent and the next six hexadecimal digits are the coefficient.) Every full node re-calculates difficulty automatically and independently.
The puzzle Bitcoin miners are trying to solve, in order to win their reward, is to generate a number called a nonce that produces a hash within the difficulty tolerance set by the blockchain system. Nonce is an abbreviation for “number only used once.” A nonce is a 4-byte number. It is one of the inputs for the hash.
The most important quality of a hash algorithm is that if you use identical input, you will always get identical output. So, you can easily check to see if the input is the same input you expected, but you can’t tell from the hash what the input actually is. The fingerprint analogy holds up here — you can verify the identity of a person with a fingerprint, but fingerprints don’t tell you what the person is like; it’s an identity, not a blueprint.
The Bitcoin hash is done using a variant of the SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). This kind of hash takes in data of any length, and spits out a 256-bit (32 bytes) hash value, which is usually represented as a hexadecimal (base 16) number of 64 digits. The SHA-2 family of algorithms are patented in US patent 6829355. The United States has released the patent under a royalty-free license. If you want to see how the algorithm works, take a look at the patent disclosure. It is a complex mathematical formula, but the algorithm isn’t secret. This is what most articles and blogs mean when they refer to “math puzzles” or “complex algorithms.”
And no matter how long your input is–one character or thousands–the resulting hash using SHA-2 will be 64 characters. Also, the SHA-256 algorithm is designed to produce output that will appear to be a random sequence. So, the only way to get the specific hash for specific input data is to perform the hash.
The implication is that the fastest solution to create a hash within the difficulty level is “brute-force,” or trying solutions at random. The SHA-256 algorithm cannot be reverse engineered. So brute force is what miners do. They make their computers generate and test as many different hashes as fast as possible, until they find a value that fits the difficulty target.
When Bitcoin miners compete to verify a new block, they use the following as input to create their hashes:
- The new blocks on the blockchain for the 10 minute period to be verified
- The hash for the previous block (which has already been verified)
- The nonce, which is generated randomly
The puzzle is solved when the resulting hash value is less than or equal to the current difficulty target value. If a nonce doesn’t work to create a hash that meets that condition, the miner moves on to the next nonce–that’s why the nonce is only used once.
Professional miners submit thousands of hashes to the system per second. The more hashes they can submit in the 10-minute time period, the more likely they will win the reward. That means the miners with faster computers win more often.
The winner of the mining contest then updates the blockchain ledger by adding a newly mined block covering all of the newly verified transactions to the chain. The winning miner claims the block mining reward by adding it as a transaction on the new block. This reward come from new coins, whereas all of the other verified transactions on the block come from existing coins.
The system then moves on to the next block to be verified. This happens about every 10 minutes.
How is the Blockchain Validated?
Blockchain works because of three concepts: mining (scarcity), validation, and trust.
Validation is not the same as mining. Validation of the chain happens at two checkpoints. First, on input: when someone wants to makes a transaction on the blockchain, the transaction is sent to a node. Remember that the blockchain is stored on many independent nodes, and these nodes communicate with each other in a distributed network. So, when a transaction is sent to one node, that node shares the transaction with other nodes connected to it on the network. Those nodes, in turn, populate the transaction to other nodes in the network, until the entire network includes the same transactions.
A node validates the transaction to ensure it is in the proper form and adds the transaction to a transaction pool, which is like a clearing house where transactions await mining of the block that will include them. The pending transactions become part of a candidate block. Miners can choose to construct and mine a candidate block for some or all of the transactions in the pool, but the more they include, the higher their reward will be. (The way transactions are chosen to be included in candidate blocks depends on their age, size, priority and other factors, explained in the above link.)
When the mining proof of work has been completed, the winning miner transmits the new block to other nodes on the network. Each node validates the new block to ensure it is in the correct form, and that the winner produced a hash with the proper difficulty, and then adds it to the chain. The new block is then populated throughout the network.
Why is the Blockchain Trusted?
You may be wondering, at this point, what is the point of all this trouble. Mining via proof of work is not the same as trust–it is an incentive for maintaining the chain. It also creates scarcity for new coins. In other words, proof of work is an arbitrary task that is designed to be difficult to perform. This means new coins, created via mining, will enter the system at a regular rate.
But the proof of work, and the Bitcoin reward for doing it, is also an incentive for nodes to maintain the chain. Every mining node must maintain an entire copy of the chain. And because the reward for mining is in Bitcoin, the miners have an incentive to maintain the integrity of the chain. If the chain fails, their rewards will have no value.
How do all the nodes trust the new block? They trust it because it would be virtually impossible to mine a new block without doing the proof of work. While mining is hard, validating the mining is relatively trivial. The proof of work is how miners know they’ve spent enormous resources and reached consensus on a particular sequence of blocks, and are worthy of the reward they got.
The proof-of-work process has two important consequences. The first is consensus: all nodes in the decentalized network can easily agree on which blocks are valid, via their hash. The second is immutability: due to transparency, it is virtually impossible to fool an honestly run node into accepting any blockchain but the true one.
You may have read that blockchains are vulnerable to 51% attacks, which could happen if one party, or group of collaborating parties, control 51% of hash power of the chain. This kind of attack can lead to something called double spending, and other problems. But even if that occurred, anyone could identify the false transactions, and the price of Bitcoin would probably immediately plummet. For cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, transparency is a deterrent to malfeasance, holding the purchasing power of Bitcoin as collateral for the integrity of the ledger.
In sum:
- Transparency is why the blockchain is trusted.
- Transparency and proof-of-work create the incentives to maintain a legitimate chain.
Long-Term Viability of Bitcoin
You have certainly read in the news that Bitcoin mining uses huge amounts of energy, and is therefore ecologically unsustainable. But there are other reasons why Bitcoin faces sustainability challenges.
Because the total number of coins is limited, the incentives to mine will eventually dwindle. As the difficulty gets harder and the rewards lower, only an astronomical and sustained increase in speculative value would provide enough incentive to mine. So it’s likely that, eventually, that incentive will fail. When the mining incentive fails, the incentive to maintain the chain may also fail, and transactions will likely become too slow to be of use.
Also, in practice, Bitcoin has become less decentralized than it appears. At this point, a small number of mining cooperatives do most of the mining. The top 0.1% (about 50 miners) control nearly 50% of mining capacity. Control of the blockchain is in effect becoming centralized, and that centralized control is not transparent. As difficulty increases, this centralization will likely continue. This does not necessarily mean that the chain is likely to be corrupted, but it does tarnish the ideal of Bitcoin as a currency run by a community.
Also, the original lure of anonymous trading is waning. Anonymity has made Bitcoin notorious for illegal activity like ransomware and drug trades. As illustrated by the FBI’s recent seizure of Bitcoins, pseudonymous trading is not a failsafe to achieve true anonymity. As a pseudonym “becomes enmeshed in the public web of transactions, maintaining anonymity takes more operational security than most users can manage.”
Adding all this up, Bitcoin is likely to lose utility and value over time. In other words, the design is not truly scalable or sustainable. Perhaps owning Bitcoin will become, over time, more like owning rare coins than owning currency. But when that happens to Bitcoin, there will be many other cryptocurrencies standing ready to take its place.
In sum:
- Bitcoin has a lifespan, and unlike traditional fiat currencies, that lifespan is designed to be finite.
Do You Want to Know More?
I hope this article has helped you understand more about crypto and blockchain. If you have suggestions or corrections, please contact me.
If you want to know more, here are some of the best resources I found when researching this topic:
- Coinbase’s Crypto Basics.
- The Federalist Society’s video on Bitcoin mining and on Bitcoin in monetary policy .
- Here is an example of a block, showing the nonce, the transactions it covers, and other details.
- Patrick Boyle’s video on legal tender and private money. I highly recommend Boyle’s videos on finance and economic topics.
- O’Reilly’s Mining and Consensus. This contains a wealth of detail about how validation and mining work.
- David Rosenthal presentation on the future of cryptocurrency. This presentation is very detailed, but extremely insightful on the sustainability of Bitcoin and other non-permissioned blockchains.
- Is blockchain “open source”? Not exactly, although all blockchains use open source software elements. (That link goes to an article on this topic that I co-wrote a few years ago on this topic, when everyone seemed to be asking me this question.)
