Block Convey Blockchain Infrastructure

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” ~Metadata in Bitcoin’s genesis block

Satoshi Nakamoto’s main contribution is to specify the architecture of a distributed ledger maintained endogenously by its users free of any preliminary permission requirement. A series of challenges may be apparent to the reader. As new peers may join or leave the network arbitrarily and anonymously, how can one establish a trust relationship whose standards are high enough that they can support a system? How do you demonstrate ownership of an account? Where to store the accounting ledger to maintain balances and transactions?

Despite the magnitude of these challenges, we now have an idea of the basic building blocks of a blockchain for some time through recent innovations and improvements in this sector, making our process of solving the problems much more straightforward.

Reaching consensus on which blocks/transactions to accept as valid in a distributed system is challenging. Consensus algorithms have to be resilient to failures of nodes, message delays and corrupt messages, as well as unreliable, unresponsive, or even deliberately malicious nodes.