Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By : Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By: Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with applications in industries such as finance, government, and media. This Learning Path is your guide to building blockchain networks using Ethereum, JavaScript, and Solidity. You will get started by understanding the technical foundations of blockchain technology, including distributed systems, cryptography and how this digital ledger keeps data secure. Further into the chapters, you’ll gain insights into developing applications using Ethereum and Hyperledger. As you build on your knowledge of Ether security, mining, smart contracts, and Solidity, you’ll learn how to create robust and secure applications that run exactly as programmed without being affected by fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll explore how blockchain solutions can be implemented in applications such as IoT apps, in addition to its use in currencies. This Learning Path also highlights how you can increase blockchain scalability, and discusses the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to tackle pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle and confidently design and deploy decentralized applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
15
Blockchain - Outside of Currencies
16
Scalability and Other Challenges
Index

Bitcoin limitations


Various limitations in Bitcoin have also sparked some interest in altcoins, which were developed specifically to address limitations in Bitcoin. The most prominent and widely discussed limitation is the lack of anonymity in Bitcoin. We will now discuss some of the limitations of Bitcoin.

Privacy and anonymity

As the blockchain is a public ledger of all transactions and is openly available, it becomes trivial to analyze it. Combined with traffic analyses, transactions can be linked back to their source IP addresses, thus possibly revealing a transaction's originator. This is a big concern from a privacy point of view.

Even though in Bitcoin it is a recommended and common practice to generate a new address for every transaction, thus allowing some level of unlinkability, this is not enough, and various techniques have been developed and successfully used to trace the flow of transactions throughout the network and link them back to their originator. These techniques analyze...