I’m working on a functional mini-Blockchain implementation in Scala. I’ve given this a lot of thought but still can’t comprehend the most suitable data structure to model a Blockchain. Specifically :-

1.) It can’t be a simple Linked list/Stack, because there are forks , which means that two different blocks can refer to the same Block.Should it be a List of top blocks , i.e. a list of topmost(heightwise) blocks ? I can then traverse the blockchain by starting my traversal from either of the topmost blocks.

2.) How do I make a block point to the previous block ? I know that every block has the hash of the previous block. But how is that enough for me to go from a block to the block it refers to in my blockchain data structure ?

Would really appreciate any help I can get.