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

Forking


A fork is said to have happened when there is a conflict among the nodes regarding the validity of a blockchain, that is, more than one blockchain happens to be in the network, and every blockchain is validated for some miners. There are three kinds of forks: regular forks, soft fork, and hard fork.

A regular fork is a temporary conflict occurring due to two or more miners finding a block at nearly the same time. It's resolved when one of them has more difficulty than the other.

A change to the source code could cause conflicts. Depending on the type of conflict, it may require miners with more than 50% of hash power to upgrade or all miners to upgrade to resolve the conflict. When it requires miners with more than 50% of hash power to upgrade to resolve the conflict, its called a soft fork, whereas when it requires all the miners to upgrade to resolve the conflict, its called a hard fork. An example of a soft fork would be if update to the source code invalidates subset of old blocks...