Blockchain Programming in iOS
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Blockchain is the technology behind popular cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. The main concept behind Blockchain is to provide a distributed ledger which is not controlled by one central party. In this post I will show you how you can use iOS/MacOS to create a very basic Blockchain in Swift language.
NOTE: This post does not cover nodes/peers, validation, rewards etc.
The quickest and the easiest way to to get started is by using Swift Playgrounds. For this particular demo, I used macOS Playgrounds since it has some useful functions for generate SHA hash.
Implementing the Block Class
The first step is to implement the Block class which will represent a single block in a .. blockchain. The implementation is shown below:
The details of the Block class is shown below:
- index — The position of block in the blockchain. Index of 0 means that the block is the first block in the blockchain. Index of 1 means it is the second block in the blockchain.. you get the idea right!
- dateCreated — The date when the block was created
- previousHash — The hash value of the previous block
- hash — The current hash of the block
- nonce — Auto incremented number which plays an important role for mining the hash
- data — Any valuable asset. This can be money, medical information, real estate information etc
- key — This is a computed property which is passed to the hashed function
Implementing the Blockchain Class
The Blockchain class requires an instance of a block to initialize itself. This block is also known as genesis block, since it is the first block in the block chain. The implementation of Blockchain class…
