Blockchains are one of the core backbones for decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. In this easy-to-understand guide, we cover the fundamentals of blockchains and the problems they solve.

Expected time to completion: 1-2 hours

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

The Current System

Imagine Joe is your best friend. He’s traveling overseas and on the fifth day of his vacation he calls you and says: “Dude, I need some money. I’ve completely run out.”

You, being the nice person you are, reply “sending some right away,” and hang up.

There has been a lot of flux and discussion in the bitcoin community about what happened on August 1, 2017 and what it means for the future. Prior to the split that created Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the Bitcoin community was faced with a lot of unanswered questions: Will the cryptocurrency split into two new ones? Will it not? What is BIP 91? What is BIP 148? What is SegWit?

This guide will walk you through the whole situation as it unfolded, and to help you understand what actually happened and why the bitcoin ended up getting split into two — Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), it’s best to take a look at one of the fundamental issues of cryptocurrency and the various proposed solutions.

On one side, there are the people who manage the open source software for bitcoin. They are the organisation/community that keeps the development on the bitcoin protocol running. On the other side are the miners, who deploy computing resources to run the bitcoin network (blockchain). Both sides are crucial to keep the bitcoin running — one side can’t do it without the other. To fully understand the ...

If you've ever wanted to learn how to implement your own blockchain from scratch, then this guide is for you.

You've no doubt read countless articles touting the advantages of decentralized blockchains — however, there's no comparison between amount you'll learn about the actual protocol by programming it, rather than just reading about it.

Generating a Seal (aka Proof-of-Work)

We’ll use this magic machine to generate a seal for our page. Like always, we’ll start with an imaginary situation.

Imagine you're given two boxes. The first box contains the number 20893. I, then, ask you, “Can you figure out a number that when added to the number in the first box and fed to the machine will give us a word that starts with three leading zeroes?”

IOTA is a decentralized distributed ledger that was designed primarily for the Internet of Things. Unlike other cryptos based on the Blockchain technology, IOTA works on the Tangle Network technology— which is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).

The Tangle Network enables IOTA to work in a faster and smarter way that was not possible with blockchains. In a more connected network, IOTA opens a variety of use cases that cannot be replicated with the blockchain technology.

IOTA is designed to make IoT achieve the next level of networking — think of connected devices with sensor technology, machine to machine communication, smart cities, pay on demand and other IoT concepts which were otherwise not very feasible with blockchains.

What is a DAG and how does Tangle work?

A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a finite graph wit...