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I am not sure this question is really for this forum. But to be honest, I could not think of a better one.

This question is about blockchains in general. As far as I know, there is no site for general blockchain questions, only specific to ethereum, bitcoin - or this one.

I wonder why blocks are used at all. Is it to define a contained structure to allow for the mining or staking rewards? In other words, for bitcoin and/or Proof-of-Work, to construct the challenge in order to solve it, and assign the mining reward? While for PoS, simply the structure required so a specific reward can be assigned to validators?

I mean, it could just be as easily a chain of transactions without a block right? In which case, each single transaction would have to be "mined", making the protocol inefficient? Or maybe some other data structure?

Does anyone know fundamental research about this problem? Other data structures used? Thanks.

unsafe_where_true
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Things are grouped into blocks for a variety of reasons:

  • It keeps related thing together and in a fixed order within the block; like we bind the pages of a diary in volumes, say one page (thing) per day and a volume (block) per year.
  • It's less work to account for many things; like a librarian prefers to account for books, not their individual pages.
  • When signing things (as often in blockchains), signing blocks of things reduces the computational work and space overhead to sign, the work to verify the signature of all the things, and (for small enough blocks) only marginally increases the work to verify that one particular thing has been signed. This one reason is on-topic on crypto-SE, and why I answered.

The blockchain concept is vague, so I can't be more precise. There are more usage-specific reasons. Crypto-SE is for cryptography, not cryptocurrencies.

fgrieu
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