Technologies of Blockchain – Part 1: The Foundations
Blockchain is not just a single technology but a package of a number of technologies and techniques. The rich lexicon in the blockchain includes terms such as Merkle trees, sharding, state machine replication, fault tolerance, cryptographic hashing, zero-knowledge proofs, zkSNARKS, and other exotic terms.
In this four-part series, we will provide a very high-level overview of each of the main components of technology. In reality, the number of technologies, variations, configurations, and considerations of trade-offs are numerous. Each piece in this puzzle was motivated by certain business requirements and technical considerations.
In this first part, we look at the origins of the ‘chain’ and the most important technological advancement that makes blockchain (and all e-commerce) possible, i.e., the Internet.