Cypherium Technical Background;network
Intro
Blockchain is classified into two based on network admission mechanism
i) Permissioned
ii) Permissionless (open to any participant) e.g Cypherium
Blockchain is a data ledger shared across nodes. This nodes stores and replicate consistent transactions. It has three layers called Network, Consensus and Smart contract. For the purpose of this article we will discuss in details the Cypherium network in Blockchain technology. A collection of interconnected nodes is called a Network; to exchange informations. These nodes include servers, computers, mobile devices e.t.c. the network nodes can be configured to communicate with other nodes.
i) As a centralized system for instance client-server system that has one or more central servers in communication with one or more client devices in communicaton with client devices
ii) As a decentralized system such as P2P network. In P2P network the nodes called peers can be connected to other nodes in the network and can share resources among themselves without been monitored by a server or host. P2P networks are implemented using file sharing systems and blockchain technologies.
A transaction based system processes data in units of transactions. An example is Sabre used by travel agents or companies to process transactions used in booking airline tickets. These transactions may have diverse characteristics such as format, content depending on the system. A transaction can be a message, event or process initiated by a user or computer program and may provide a single unit of work in the system.A transaction can contain data pertaining to an electronic funds transfer or to an event when parties enter an agreement i.e contracts. Although in Bitcoin transaction refers to transfer of an amount of Bitcoin currency from one account to another. There is an increasing demand for speed in transaction processing and convenience therefore, some transaction-based systems were built on network infrastructures. However, these systems made use of centralized servers and stored their datas in a centralized database but the results were not satisfactory. Failure of the centralized server could cause catastrophic results to the transaction-based system.
Hence, A decentralized/distributed transaction based system that rely minimally on centralized servers were implemented on a P2P network making it reliable. The use of a centralized host server is eradicated. Data distributed in a P2P system can be stored as many copies. A single network node can contain copies of data set in a transaction based system. This can cause complicated and dynamic component inter-dependencies. Questions or challenges such as
i) How a transaction data is organized and stored ,
ii)How a consensus is reached by network nodes to confirm or reject a new transaction request,
iii)How network nodes within a system are authenticated arise
Numerous schemes have been designed to ensure each network node effectively stores and verifies the system data with corporation of other nodes. Blockchain scheme has its transaction data organized in discrete blocks. The blocks may be linked to a predecessor or parent block by storing cryptographic hash value of the parent or by using hash values, digital signatures of one or more preceding blocks. The content in each block can be verified against its cryptographic hash value stored in a subsequent adjacent block. Therefore, verification of the accuracy of a current block enables the network nodes to verify preceding blocks without contact.
Conclusion
Cypherium makes a major advancement in decentralized ledger technology. To ensure validity and consistency of data over nodes in a network, Blockchain uses consensus mechanism.
