[dabockster]

Related, how does the blockchain structure look on paper? As in a data structure? What fields does it have?

I have a project idea, but I want to build the data structure from scratch as opposed to cargo culting something on top of Ethereum.

[mbrock]

It looks basically just like a Git repository. Mining is like competing for a chance to merge a bunch of other people's commits (because you get a "commit fee" for each of them). And you always want to merge into the longest repository, because otherwise you're receiving those commit fees in a fork that's unlikely to be cared about.