Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By : Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By: Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks, making it permission-less. This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-world projects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-e applications for blockchain. You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more. The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Overview of Ethereum


Ethereum is a decentralized platform, which allows us to deploy DApps on top of it. Smart contracts are written using the solidity programming language. DApps are created using one or more smart contracts. Smart contracts are programs that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third party interface. In Ethereum, smart contracts can be written in several programming languages, including Solidity, LLL, and Serpent. Solidity is the most popular of those languages. Ethereum has an internal currency called ether. To deploy smart contracts or to call their methods, we need ether. There can be multiple instances of a smart contract just like any other DApp, and each instance is identified by its unique address. Both user accounts and smart contracts can hold ether.

Ethereum uses blockchain data structure and proof-of-work consensus protocol. A method of a smart contract can be invoked via a transaction or via another method. There...