Week 4: Blockchain Visualization

Hello everybody, and welcome back to my blog!

My fourth week has been a continuation of the implementation of my coding project. This week has been less technical than others and has been focusing more on the visual aspect of my project. The most significant feedback I got while proposing my project has been that it is a necessity for my research and project to have a visual aspect to further illustrate what’s happening within the code. As always, view my project as it evolves here.

Most of the coding I have done this week has been around the graphical user interface (GUI). The code was an adaptation of a similar bit of code I programmed for my capstone neuroscience brain fair project. I used a Python library called Tkinter to read a blockchain’s information in JSON format and display it in a digestible and intuitive way. You can see a sneak peek of how this will look here:

Here you can see an example of the visualization of a proof of work chain. At the top is a scrollable list of blocks on chain read from a JSON file, and on the bottom left corner is a functioning hash example. There is a lot of work left to do such as making the block contain all the proper block info (these are missing timestamps, signers, proper hashes, proper previous hashes, etc). I think this is necessary for my project because a major goal of mine was to better learn blockchain in order to teach and explain it. This format of displaying information is a bit more intuitive because you can see how pieces of information are hashed and also see the chain info represented as blocks in an ordered list. Once I have the visuals complete and the proof of stake chain fully implemented then will come the bulk of my research: a novel consensus algorithm.