A blockchain is a data structure that provides decentralized, peer-to-peer data distribution. Bitcoin is the most well-known blockchain, but in the next decade we will see many more blockchains. Most listeners probably know that you could just fork the code of Bitcoin to start your own blockchain–but wouldn’t it be nice to know how to build a blockchain from scratch?

Daniel van Flymen is the author of the Medium article Learn Blockchains by Building One. In his post, he walks you through how to write the code for a blockchain–just like any other web app. He starts with raw Python code, defines the data structures, and stands up his simple blockchain app on a web server to give a toy example for how nodes in a blockchain communicate.

For me, this was a great article to read. I have reported on blockchains for over a year, but had not seen such a clear example with executable, simplified code.

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