Validating a new block

Although blocks are created by a miner node after validating all the previous blocks in the chain, it is the responsibility of each node in the network to perform a block validation to ensure that the block can be appended to the local copy of the blockchain. Block validation is a simple process of checking whether the latest block has a pointer or hash reference pointing to the previous block. When a block includes complex data, such as a set of transactions, independent transactions have to be verified to validate the block. Since we will not be dealing with any complex data inside the block, verifying transactions is beyond the scope of this chapter.