Hey Hive community, as I mentioned earlier, I have seriously started my journey into Web3 and blockchain, and I have decided to document everything here while building in public. This week I focused on understanding why blockchain exists, what problems it solves, and what makes it fundamentally different from traditional systems. I explored its core characteristics like decentralization, immutability, transparency, and trustless execution, which completely shifted the way I look at digital systems.
From there, I moved deeper into the technical foundation by studying hashing and how it differs from encryption, why hashing is one-way, and how even the smallest change in input drastically changes the output. I also learned about important blockchain concepts such as nonce, mining, consensus mechanisms, and Proof of Work, which helped me understand how distributed networks maintain security without relying on a central authority.
To strengthen my fundamentals, I read the whitepaper of Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which gave me clarity on transaction structure, peer-to-peer architecture, digital signatures, and how ownership is transferred without intermediaries. Seeing how such a simple yet powerful idea laid the foundation for an entire decentralized ecosystem was eye-opening.
After that, I dived into public key cryptography where I studied public and private key pairs, bits and bytes, different encoding formats, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, and digital signatures. Understanding how blockchain authorizes transactions through cryptographic signatures made everything more concrete, and one realization stood out strongly — your private key truly represents your ownership in a decentralized world.
Instead of keeping this knowledge theoretical, I implemented public-private key generation and basic wallet logic in my GitHub repository (https://github.com/Faizaan-Alam/web-based-wallet.git)
to practice signing and verification mechanisms. Currently, I am studying transactions in greater depth along with HD wallets, mnemonics, seed phrases, and deterministic key generation, and I can clearly see how blockchain beautifully combines cryptography, distributed systems, mathematics, and economic incentives into one powerful architecture.
I would genuinely appreciate your feedback on my GitHub project and suggestions on how I can improve it.
I would also love to know what you think I should build next to strengthen my practical understanding of Web3 development as I continue sharing my learning journey here on Hive.
