"Building a Lightweight Blockchain in Go from Scratch"

Hey Gophers and blockchain enthusiasts! 👋

I recently built Lite-Blockchain, a minimal yet functional blockchain implementation in Go. The goal was to demystify how blockchains work under the hood while leveraging Go’s simplicity and concurrency features. Let me walk you through what I learned!

Why Build a Blockchain in Go?

Go’s native support for concurrency (goroutines, channels) and efficient performance makes it a great fit for distributed systems like blockchains. Plus, its simplicity helps keep the codebase clean and educational.

Key Features

• Proof-of-Work (PoW) Consensus: A Simple mining mechanism to secure the chain.

• Transaction System: Create and validate transactions.

• Pure Go: No external dependencies—just the standard library.

• Lightweight: Perfect for learning (under 500 LOC).

Code Snippets

Here’s a peek at how blocks are structured:

go

Copy

Download

type Block struct {  
    Timestamp    int64  
    Transactions []*Transaction  
    PrevHash     []byte  
    Hash         []byte  
    Nonce        int  
}

And how transactions are added:

go

Copy

Download

func (bc *Blockchain) AddTransaction(sender, recipient string, amount int) {  
    tx := NewTransaction(sender, recipient, amount)  
    bc.PendingTransactions = append(bc.PendingTransactions, tx)  
}

Why Go for Blockchain?

• Concurrency: Goroutines make parallel mining or network synchronization easier to model.

• Performance: Faster than interpreted languages like Python.

• Simplicity: Explicit error handling and no inheritance headaches.

Try It Out!

1. Clone the repo:

bash

Copy

Download

git clone https://github.com/sumeetingenuity/Lite-Blockchain.git

2. Run the example:

bash

Copy

Download

go run main.go

Contribute or Learn

This project is open-source and meant to be a learning resource! Feel free to:
⭐ Star the repo if you find it useful.
🐞 Open issues for bugs or feature requests.
🔧 Submit PRs for improvements (e.g., adding a P2P network layer).

Check out the GitHub repo to dive deeper!