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

Performance


Another problem inherited from Bitcoin is that Ethereum is slow. It is many magnitudes slower than other platforms that host transaction data, for instance a traditional database. For example, it takes an average of 10 minutes to build a new record for Bitcoin. As a rule of thumb, after waiting for six new blocks to be built, a transaction is considered to be finalized (the same as a commitment in a database). This means that, on average, a requester will wait for one hour to see a request completed. In Ethereum, the average time for miners to build a block is 17 seconds and it is recommended you wait for 12 blocks before a transaction is confirmed. This is 12 * 17 = 204 seconds, or 3.4 minutes' waiting time for a user. Here, waiting for a few subsequent blocks to be built before confirming a transaction is useful. At any point, Ethereum can have competing chains. The waiting gives Ethereum sufficient time to work out the issue of having competing chains and reach a consensus...