Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By : Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By: Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain applications provide a single-shared ledger to eliminate trust issues involving multiple stakeholders. It is the main technical innovation of Bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for Bitcoin transactions. Blockchain Developer's Guide takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology. It begins with the basic design of a blockchain and elaborates concepts, such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and other related terminologies. You will then explore the components of Ethereum, such as Ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts that you need to build simple DApps. Blockchain Developer's Guide also explains why you must specifically use Solidity for Ethereum-based projects and lets you explore different blockchains with easy-to-follow examples. You will learn a wide range of concepts - beginning with cryptography in cryptocurrencies and including ether security, mining, and smart contracts. You will learn how to use web sockets and various API services for Ethereum. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be able to build efficient decentralized applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Blockchain Quick Reference by Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt • Building Blockchain Projects by Narayan Prusty
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Concept of a trustless system


While doing a financial transaction using fiat currency, we have a third-party ledger that maintains information about every transaction. Some of these third-party trust systems are VISA, MasterCard, banks, and so on.

Blockchain has changed the landscape of this trustless system by making everyone part of the ledger. Hence, it is sometimes even called a distributed ledger; everybody doing a transaction in blockchain has a record of other transactions that have happened or are happening in the blockchain-based Bitcoin system. This decentralized ledger gives multiple authenticity points for every transaction that has happened; plus, the rules are pre-defined and not different for each wallet user.

On a further note, blockchain does not actually eliminate trust; what it does is minimize the amount of trust and distributes it evenly across the network. A specific protocol is defined using various rules that automatically encourage patrons on the basis of the rules followed. We will be discussing this in depth in later chapters.