anders94/blockchain-demo

Blockchain Demo

A web-based demonstration of blockchain concepts.

This is a very basic visual introduction to the concepts behind a blockchain. We introduce the idea of an immutable ledger using an interactive web demo that is available here:

http://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/

Setup

Get the code:

git clone https://github.com/anders94/blockchain-demo.git

Install dependencies:

cd blockchain-demo
npm install

Run the server:

npm start

OR

./bin/www

#For windows: if the above command didn't work, use this (make sure you have Node.js installed in your system):

node ./bin/www      

Point a web browser at the demo:

http://localhost:3000

Setup using Docker

Get the code:

git clone https://github.com/anders94/blockchain-demo.git

Run the Docker setup:

cd blockchain-demo
docker-compose up -d

Point a web browser at the demo:

http://localhost:3000

Optional Configuration

You can adjust the "number of zeros" required by the demo by editing the first two lines of public/javascripts/blockchain.js.

Because there are 16 possible characters in a hex value, each time you increment the difficulty by one you make the puzzle 16 times harder. In my testing, a difficulty of 6 requires a maximumNonce well over 500,000,000.

If you adjust the difficulty above 4, blocks will show up as not mined because the demo data assumes 4 zeros for a signed block. For example, on the http://localhost:3000/block page with a difficulty of 6, the first nonce that works is 8719932 yielding a hash of 000000669445c22167511857d8f3b822b331c3342f25dfdcb326e35c1a7aa267. This gets out of hand fairly quickly though. Here's some time estimates at the various thresholds.

In the production bitcoin blockchain, block 458,091 has the hash digest 00000000000000000000011246f099d94f91628d71c9d75ad2f9a06e2beb7e92. That's 21 zeros in a row! That one block would take this software approximately 8,454,989,768,407,765 years to mine.

Public Private Key Demo

The 2nd part of the 101 session:

• https://github.com/anders94/public-private-key-demo

Send Thanks

Bitcoin gratefully accepted: 1K3NvcuZzVTueHW1qhkG2Cm3viRkh2EXJp