Blexchain

Mini blockchain implementation in Elixir

This development is inspired on Haseeb Qureshi Ruby's implementation:

• His talk here
• His code here

As for this code

Build the docker image

Considering you are in the root directory of the repo, then

$ docker build -t <IMAGE NAME> .

Finally, create the network the future nodes will share, let's name it blexnet

$ docker network create blexnet

Start the blockchain network

To start the network (genesis node), just start the first container, i.e.

$ docker run --name node --network blexnet <IMAGE NAME>

And then, to join consecutive nodes to the network, a peer ip address needs to be specified, i.e.

$ docker run --name node2 --network blexnet -e PEER=172.18.0.2 <IMAGE NAME>

$ docker run --name node3 --network blexnet -e PEER=172.18.0.3 <IMAGE NAME>

$ docker run --name node4 --network blexnet -e PEER=172.18.0.2 <IMAGE NAME>

PEER can be any peer ip address already existing in the network.

Submit a transaction

Even though any http client can be used to make post requests to the api in order to submit transactions, there is a mix task available for that as well (easier, right?). All three arguments must be specified, i.e.

$ docker exec node3 mix blexchain.transfer from:172.18.0.2 to:172.18.0.3 amount:100

from and to are the peer ip addresses whose nodes are running on.

node3 can actually be any node in the network

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To run the test suite locally, do so via mix test