From the course: Building an Ethereum Blockchain App: 1 Introduction to Blockchain

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What is a chain of blocks?

What is a chain of blocks? - Ethereum Tutorial

From the course: Building an Ethereum Blockchain App: 1 Introduction to Blockchain

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What is a chain of blocks?

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- In the last episode, you learned about hashes and hashing functions. But you may wonder, what does a hash have to do with a blockchain? Well, actually, hashes make blockchains possible. A blockchain is a chain of blocks. You know, a block is a collection of transactions. But how are they linked together? They're linked together using the output of the hash function. The way it works is when you start a brand new blockchain, you actually start with one block, and it's called the Genesis block. The Genesis block isn't linked to anything because it's the only one there. Then you add the next block which, by the way, the Genesis block is block zero. In computer science, we start things at zero. We don't start counting at one. So the next block is actually block one. How do I make it a chain? What I do is I take the hash value of block zero, and I store that in block one. Now, in real blockchain, we're going to have…

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