Horizontal Analysis of the Main Blockchain Architecture Written to CTO

I often hear people talk about blockchain. Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, various blockchain systems or blockchain-based applications have been developed and applied to a large number of scenes, and blocks. The chain technology itself is constantly changing and improving.

The blockchain is also known as a distributed ledger, and corresponds to a centralized ledger, such as a bank. Unlike centralized accounts, distributed ledgers rely on redundantly storing ledger data in all participating nodes to ensure the security of the ledger. Simply put, the blockchain uses three underlying technologies: peer-to-peer networking, cryptography, and distributed consistency algorithms. Often, the blockchain system also "freely comes with" a feature called a smart contract. Although smart contracts are not an integral part of the blockchain system, the decentralized nature of the blockchain makes it a good place to provide a trusted computing environment for smart contracts.

In order to adapt to the needs of different scenarios, the blockchain system often needs to be modified in order to meet specific business requirements, such as identity authentication, consensus mechanism, key management, throughput, response time, and privacy. Protection, regulatory requirements, etc. However, companies that actually use blockchain systems often do not have the ability to perform such transformations. Therefore, some frameworks for customizing dedicated blockchain systems have emerged on the market, and these frameworks can be easily customized for enterprises. A blockchain system for its own business needs.

This article will make a horizontal comparison of several typical blockchain frameworks on the market today to see what they have and what is the difference between them. In order to maintain the objectivity and fairness of the comparison, this article will only discuss the open source blockchain framework.

A brief introduction to each blockchain architecture

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is derived from a paper published in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", which is described in the article. An electronic currency he calls "bitcoin" and its algorithm. In the next few years, Bitcoin continued to grow and mature, and its underlying technology was gradually recognized and abstracted. This is blockchain technology. As the originator of the blockchain, Bitcoin has a pivotal position in the large family of blockchains. The number of Altcoins developed based on Bitcoin technology is as large as the stars in the sky.

The purpose of Nakamoto's design of Bitcoin is to realize an electronic cash system based entirely on a peer-to-peer network, so that online payment can be initiated directly by one party and paid to the other party without any intermediary. In summary, he hopes that Bitcoin can achieve the following design goals:

Can issue currency without a central agency

Can pay without an intermediary

Keep users anonymous

Transaction cannot be revoked

From the perspective of the electronic cash system, these goals have been basically achieved in Bitcoin, but there are still some technical issues to be resolved, such as extended attacks, block capacity limitations, block forks, scalability and so on.

In terms of application scenarios, a large number of digital currency projects are currently designed based on the bitcoin architecture, in addition to some practical application cases, such as color coins, tØ and so on.