Читать книгу Bitcoin For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 41

So now you know about the Bitcoin network — thousands of nodes holding a copy of the ledger, along with wallets owned by ordinary Bitcoin owners (like you) which send transactions to the network. Now let’s look at the actual ledger.

You found out earlier why a blockchain is known as a blockchain: because it chains blocks of data together. What does that mean, though? How are blocks chained together? Let us explain. (By the way, we’re focusing here on the Bitcoin blockchain; blockchains can be used for many different purposes, and may have different characteristics, but they generally follow the same overall structure.)

First, we start with blocks of data. In the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, each block of data contains information about transactions. We’ll explain addresses in a moment, but suffice it to say that a transaction is a record of a transfer from one address in the blockchain to another address.

Wallets send transactions to the network, and the nodes add them to a list of transactions that need to be added to the blockchain. Every ten minutes, more or less, these transactions are gathered together into a block of data, and added to the blockchain. But remember, these blocks are not merely connected to one another; they are chained together. In a sense, they are locked together, and this is done using a complicated piece of mathematics called hashing.