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

Ethereum accounts


To create an Ethereum account, we just need an asymmetric key pair. There are various algorithms, such as RSA, ECC, and so on, for generating asymmetric encryption keys. Ethereum uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). ECC has various parameters. These parameters are used to adjust speed and security. Ethereum uses the secp256k1 parameter. To go in depth about ECC and its parameters will require mathematical knowledge, and it's not necessary to understand it in depth for building DApps using Ethereum.

Ethereum uses 256-bit encryption. An Ethereum private/public key is a 256-bit number. As processors cannot represent such big numbers, it's encoded as a hexadecimal string of length 64.

Every account is represented by an address. Once we have the keys we need to generate the address, here is the procedure to generate the address from the public key:

  1. First, generate the keccak-256 hash of the public key. It will give you a 256-bit number.
  2. Drop the first 96 bits, that is, 12 bytes...