Blockchain From Scratch with Rust Day 1

Description

We're building our own blockchain from scratch with Rust and I'm really excited about it. This idea came up a lot in our Discord and now it actually seems doable. We'll use Rust, some popular standard libraries, and try to land on a good theme since every other crypto project seems to have one. StorageCoin, ComputeCoin, smart contracts, we could include anything we want. The plan is to actually build a real blockchain, not just a token or an ERC20 contract on Ethereum. I want us to use a post quantum hash algorithm because with quantum computers on the horizon, keeping things secure is important, and NIST has some approved options we can use. Our blockchain will need to be decentralized and use a consensus algorithm, so everyone ends up with the same copy even if blocks travel different paths. For the dev environment, Ganache is for Ethereum so it is not what we need here. We need to think about consensus, block size, mining difficulty, I want to start off with something simple, like an easy difficulty where maybe the miner just has to find a hash with a certain number of "S" letters in it; the more S’s, the higher the difficulty. We'll reward whoever solves the block and let everyone broadcast their solutions. We also need to consider 51% attacks and ways to prevent a single group from taking over; maybe we use a weighted network so trusted nodes have more say, though this opens other problems to solve as well. For smart contracts, I'm looking at embedding Lua since it’s lightweight and easy to use, and there is a good Rust library, mLua, that lets us run Lua code inside Rust. We'll use SQLite as our ledger and define a schema for how transactions are recorded. The basics of a blockchain are like a spreadsheet: each row is a record, and each record has a signature based on the previous one to chain them all together. We’re already wrestling with some technical issues like getting LuaJIT to run properly on my machine and might end up using Docker for a smoother setup. Once smart contract code can eval successfully, that will get us a long way toward running logic on-chain. We’ve got some goofy feature ideas, like distributed AI training where miners could run AI jobs and get rewarded, or even some meme concepts for fun, but core features will be quantum resistance, Lua for contracts, and maybe AI later. We got our repo up on GitHub under "Steven Coin" for now but the name can change. It’s a solid start: Rust is set up, Lua works, and we’re ready to keep building. There’s a lot to figure out still, especially around how transactions, blocks, and signatures interact, but I’m stoked to see where this goes.