Читать книгу Blockchain Data Analytics For Dummies - Michael G. Solomon - Страница 69

In this section, you discover what data gets stored in blocks on a blockchain. Although each blockchain implementation differs in its low-level details, the concepts are generally consistent across blockchain types.

Because the purpose of this book is to introduce you to the most important concepts of blockchain analytics, I won’t cover the specific technical details of every blockchain. Instead, you learn about the specific features of the most popular public blockchain implementation, Ethereum. If you don't use Ethereum, don’t worry — the concepts you learn here will apply easily to any other blockchain implementation.

The main difference between the most popular types of blockchain is the way in which they handle transactions. Bitcoin uses the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model, in which each transaction spends some of what was leftover from a previous transaction, and then creates new output that is the remaining (unspent) balance after processing a transaction. The other main approach to handling transactions is the Account/Balance model, which Ethereum uses. In the Account/Balance model, each account has a recorded balance, and transactions add to, or subtract from, that balance. The Account/Balance model is similar to a traditional ledger. I focus on Ethereum and the Account/Balance model in this book.