✅ You Understand How Blockchain Networks Work
Master nodes, peer-to-peer networking, and decentralization
Your Progress
0 / 5 completed🎓 Key Takeaways
Congratulations! You've mastered blockchain nodes and network architecture. Let's review the essential concepts you've learned.
📚 Core Concepts Mastered
Full nodes validate everything independently. Light nodes trust full nodes. Archive nodes keep complete historical state for advanced queries.
Peer-to-peer mesh network with no hierarchy. Each node connects to 8-125 peers, creating redundant paths that resist censorship and failure.
DNS seeds, hardcoded IPs, and peer exchange work together to help new nodes find peers and maintain connections as the network changes.
Full sync validates all blocks (slow, secure). Fast sync skips old validation. Snap sync downloads state snapshot (fastest). Trade-offs everywhere.
💡 Practical Insights
The only way to truly verify blockchain data yourself. Third-party services (exchanges, wallets) could lie - your own node can't be fooled.
Network security scales with node count and geographic distribution. Bitcoin's 15,000+ nodes make it nearly impossible to attack or censor.
P2P topology is slower and requires more bandwidth than client-server. But the trade-off - censorship resistance - is worth it for blockchain's purpose.
Bitcoin: 500GB+, Ethereum: 1TB+. Node storage requirements increase over time. Light nodes and state pruning help manage this growth.
🎯 Test Your Knowledge
Answer these questions to verify your understanding: