Introduction to Python Blockchain

In the blockchain tutorial, we took a detailed look at the theory behind blockchain. Blockchain is the fundamental building block behind Bitcoin, the world’s most popular digital currency. That tutorial delved into the intricacies of Bitcoin and fully explained the blockchain architecture. The next step is to build our own blockchain.

Satoshi Nakamoto created the world’s first virtual currency – Bitcoin. Seeing Bitcoin’s success, many others created their own virtual currencies. Litecoin, Zcash, and many others are examples.

Now, you might also want to launch your own currency. Let’s call it TPCoin (TutorialsPoint Coin). You’ll write a blockchain to record all transactions involving TPCoin. TPCoin can be used to buy pizza, burgers, salads, and more. Perhaps other service providers will join your network and start accepting TPCoin as currency for their services. The possibilities are endless.

In this tutorial, let’s learn how to build such a system and launch your own digital currency on the market.

Components Involved in Blockchain Project Development

The entire blockchain project development consists of three main components:

• Client
• Miner
• Blockchain

Client

A client is someone who purchases goods from other vendors. A client can also be a vendor themselves and accept payment for goods they provide. We will assume here that the client can be both a vendor and a recipient of TPCoins. Therefore, we will create a client class in the code that has the ability to send and receive currency.

Miner

A miner is someone who extracts transactions from the transaction pool and assembles them into a block. Miners must provide valid proof of work to receive mining rewards. All fees collected by the miner are kept by the miner. The miner can use this money to purchase goods or services from other registered vendors on the network, just like the client described above.

Blockchain

Finally, a blockchain is a data structure that links all mined blocks in chronological order. This chain is immutable and therefore untouchable.

You can follow this tutorial by typing the code for each step in a new Jupyter notebook. Alternatively, you can download the entire Jupyter notebook from www.anaconda.com.

In the next chapter, we will develop a client that uses our blockchain system.