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

Peer discovery


For a node to be part of the network, it needs to connect to some other nodes in the network so that it can broadcast transactions/blocks and listen to new transactions/blocks. A node doesn't need to connect to every node in the network; instead, a node connects to a few other nodes. And these nodes connect to a few other nodes. In this way, the whole network is connected to each other.

But how does a node find some other nodes in the network as there is no central server that everyone can connect to so as to exchange their information? Ethereum has its own node discovery protocol to solve this problem, which is based on the Kadelima protocol. In the node discovery protocol, we have special kind of nodes called Bootstrap nodes. Bootstrap nodes maintain a list of all nodes that are connected to them over a period of time. They don't hold the blockchain itself. When peers connect to the Ethereum network, they first connect to the Bootstrap nodes ,which share the lists of peers...