Byzantine General - Proof of Work consensus and Mining in Bitcoin Blockchain

Analogical to a Byzantine general scenario wherein a number of armies intending to attack an enemy fort need to reach a consensus of day/time to attack, this video explains how Bitcoin nodes attain consensus vide the Proof-of-work method on the same lines. This video builds up from brief history from David Chaum and Adam Bach works onwards to Wei Dai works on Blind signatures, Hash Cash and Proof-of-Work to understand concept of nonce and consensus mechanism in a Bitcoin Blockchain. Further this video brings out the reward mechanics in the Bitcoin eco-system and also Mining methods and types

Hashes & Merkle Trees in Blockchain Mechanics

Hash Functions take input of any length and produce a fixed-length string which means that one can use hashes on something as small as a few characters or as large as an entire document or even files of huge sizes in GBs and above. 

On the other hand enabled by these hash functions, Merkle tree represent hash-based data structure that is a generalization of the hash list and represent structure in which each leaf node is a hash of a block of data, and each non-leaf node is a hash of its children. Both Hash functions and Merkle Trees are cardinal to the mechanics of any Blockchain. 

This video focuses on a simple explanation of understanding Hashes and Merkle Trees. Hash functions SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 have been discussed in little detail being peculiar to Bitcoin blockchain.