Building A Bitcoin-Like Blockchain In JavaScript

Coding your own Blockchain will help you to understand the internals of Bitcoin.

The Blockchain is a real technological revolution that promises to profoundly change many industries in the future. In the field of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is the first successful implementation of the Blockchain. This implementation is even a phenomenal success that has made Bitcoin the most successful asset of the decade.

The Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto and made public on January 3, 2009. The internal functioning of the Bitcoin is detailed in its white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” which is a real gold mine for any developer wishing to implement a Blockchain equivalent to that of the Bitcoin.

On reading this white paper, you will notice the existence of three main parts in the Bitcoin Blockchain:

Its internal core with the validation of transaction blocks via the mining process.

Local management of transactions on the Blockchain.

Peer-to-Peer networking of the Blockchain.

In this story, I propose to learn how to build the internal core of a Blockchain whose functioning will be equivalent to the Bitcoin. I will use the JavaScript programming language but the concepts presented can easily be applied in other languages.