Understanding the Blockchain
Nick Furneaux · 2018
Understanding the blockchain in a conceptual way can help an analyst better comprehend how criminals might leverage the technology to either facilitate a crime or hide their activities. This could be illegal purchasing, money laundering, or carrying out a fraud of some type—which can all be achieved on a blockchain system. This chapter explains how to extract raw hexadecimal information from a block on the chain and analyzes its key components. It looks at the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum headers. When conducting an investigation, the investigator will often stumble across a block number, which is also referred to as the block height. Forks in a blockchain are often considered to be very complex, but in reality, this concept is not very difficult to understand. Several different types of forks relate to a blockchain and this chapter discusses a type of orphan fork.