Chapter 16: Background Concepts for Blockchain

Understanding blockchain requires some background in two different areas of computer science and mathematics, namely cryptography and distributed computing. In this chapter, we provide a minimal introduction to these two areas.

Digital information appears in various forms. Examples would be messages on social networks, financial transactions and images. Whatever be the form, at a very basic level, any particular digital information can be considered to be a sequence of bits. The length of the sequence is not fixed. It can vary quite a bit, from a few hundred bits for a short message to a billion (or more) bits for a large image.