Blockchain 101

Transactions, Blocks, Consensus, Protocols, and Networks

Martin Thoma
Level Up Coding
Published in
5 min readJun 15, 2021

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Photo by Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash

Bitcoin and Ethereum made it to the news in 2021 due to all-time high price records. People know that they somehow are related to “the blockchain”, but very often the knowledge is rather fuzzy. During the onboarding process at my new job at Cashlink, I’ve participated in several learning sessions given by Niklas Baumstark which sharpened my knowledge.

After reading this article, you will know the basic terminology and be able to set the concepts into context.

This article will not go into different use-cases of blockchains. If you’re looking for that, please read:

Transactions

A transaction (short: TX) consists of one or more operations, security features, fees, and time bounds.

The operations can be anything, but a coin/token transfer is the most typical one. In Ethereum, a smart contract call would be another type of operation.

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I’m a Software Engineer with over 10 years of Python experience (Backend/ML/AI). Support me via https://martinthoma.medium.com/membership