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

Block time


The block difficulty formula we saw earlier uses a 10-second threshold to make sure that the difference between the time a parent and child block mines is in is between 10-20 seconds. But why is it 10-20 seconds and not some other value? And why there such a constant time difference restriction instead of a constant difficulty?

Imagine that we have a constant difficulty, and miners just need to find a nonce to get the hash of the block less and equal to the difficulty. Suppose the difficulty is high; then in this case, users will have no way to find out how long it will take to send ether to another user. It may take a very long time if the computational power of the network is not enough to find the nonce to satisfy the difficulty quickly. Sometimes the network may get lucky and find the nonce quickly. But this kind of system will find it difficult to gain attraction from users as users will always want to know how much time it should take for a transaction to be completed, just...