Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By : Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun
Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By: Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a technology that powers the development of decentralized applications.This technology allows the construction of a network with no single control that enables participants to make contributions to and receive benefits from the network directly. This book will give you a thorough overview of blockchain and explain how a blockchain works.You will begin by going through various blockchain consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash functions. You will then learn the fundamentals of programming in Solidity – the defacto language for developing decentralize, applications in Ethereum. After that, you will set up an Ethereum development environment and develop, package, build, and test campaign-decentralized applications.The book also shows you how to set up Hyperledger composer tools, analyze business scenarios, design business models, and write a chain code. Finally, you will get a glimpse of how blockchain is actually used in different real-world domains. By the end of this guide, you will be comfortable working with basic blockchain frameworks, and develop secure, decentralized applications in a hassle-free manner.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


Blockchain is an emerging technology. Thanks to its immutability, transparency, the consensus mechanism for avoiding double spending, along with other clever designs such as blocks chained with the hashes of the previous blocks, the technology allows untrusting parties to trade with each other. In this chapter, we explained the basic concepts of its important features. Most of the discussions were about Bitcoin, which is the mother of the technology. We briefly talked about Ethereum, which extended Bitcoin and introduced the concept of smart contracts. The introduction of smart contracts makes the Ethereum blockchain generic and allows us to develop applications beyond the borderless cash payment use case for which Bitcoin was invented. The concept of an enterprise chain, along with one of the examples, Hyperledger, was mentioned as well. Finally, we briefly touched on the evolution of blockchain to give readers an idea of the trend in the technology. In the next chapter, we will discuss the concepts of Ethereum in detail.