BITSHARES: public ledger

• As in other crypto-currencies, the public ledger of BitShares is built and stored in a linked series of blocks, known as a blockchain.

• The ledger provides a permanent record of transactions that have taken place, and also establishes an order in which trans- actions have occurred. Hence, every content of the blockchain can be assigned an permanent and unique identifier in form of a scalar number.

• Every full node in the BitShares network stores a full copy of this blockchain and can verify its validity and the evaluate new blocks.

  Every block contains:

• a reference to the previous block,
• a timestamp,
• a hash of a secret,
• the secret of the previous hash,
• a set of transactions, and
• a signature by the block producing authority

• the consensus mechanism allows for synchronous block production with constant block confirmation times, e.g., one block every 5 s.

•. Since the blocks mainly embrace customer transactions but has to perform time intensive tasks, or execute rare events from time to time, some actions such as reenumeration of blockchain- based votes and rare events such as newly registered block producers (witnesses) are carried out more rarely but still on a frequent so called maintenance interval.