rust-chain

A small proof-of-work blockchain in Rust with deterministic block construction, ledger validation, concurrent mining, and explorer-style CLI commands.

Features

• Proof-of-work blocks with configurable difficulty.
• Deterministic block transaction hashing via a Merkle root.
• Reward halving schedule with validation against tampered rewards.
• Ledger-based transfer validation that rejects overspending.
• Concurrent mining workers for block search.
• Seeded simulation runs so the same command can be reproduced exactly.
• Explorer commands for chain summaries, balances, block inspection, and account history.

Running

cargo run -- demo [chain_length] [difficulty_bits] [workers] [seed]

Legacy positional demo usage still works:

cargo run -- [chain_length] [difficulty_bits] [workers] [seed]

Explorer Commands

Summarize the chain:

cargo run -- summary 12 12 4 7

Show ranked balances:

cargo run -- balances 12 12 4 7

Inspect one block:

cargo run -- block 4 12 12 4 7

Inspect one account:

cargo run -- account alice 12 12 4 7

Run cargo run -- help to print the full command list and defaults.

Testing

cargo test

Good Next Additions

• Persist chains to disk and reload them between runs.
• Add signed transactions instead of trusting plain account names.
• Separate a mempool from mined blocks.
• Add peer-to-peer synchronization between nodes.
• Export blocks and balances as JSON for external tooling.