Book Image

Blockchain for Business 2019

By : Peter Lipovyanov
Book Image

Blockchain for Business 2019

By: Peter Lipovyanov

Overview of this book

Blockchain for Business 2019 is a comprehensive guide that enables you to bring in various blockchain functionalities to extend your existing business models and make correct fully-informed decisions. You will learn how decentralized applications are transforming numerous business sectors that are expected to play a huge role in the future. You will see how large corporations are already implementing blockchain technology now. You will then learn about the various blockchain services, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and others to understand their use cases in a variety of business domains. You will develop a solid fundamental understanding of blockchain architecture. Moving ahead, you will get to grips with the inner workings of blockchain, with detailed explanations of mining, decentralized consensus, cryptography, smart contracts, and many other important concepts. You will delve into a realistic view of the current state of blockchain technology, along with its issues, limitations, and potential solutions that can take it to the next level. By the end of this book, you will all be well versed in the latest innovations and developments in the emerging blockchain space.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Issues faced by blockchain

Decentralized systems are great in many aspects, but they are inherently disadvantaged versus centralized systems in the important aspects of scalability and governance. Running consensus among all nodes on the network just takes too much time and energy. Contrast this with a network with just one central server. Surely it will run faster? But we have already discussed the disadvantage of the central server model: it has a central point of failure. Therefore, there is a trade-off between scalability and speed on one hand, and security on the other hand.

Scalability

Blockchains, at present, are notoriously slow compared to centralized payment processing networks, such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal...