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

Chapter 10. Alternate Blockchains

In the previous chapters, we learned about blockchain, its structure, components, mechanism and the biggest use case of blockchain, Bitcoins. In the last chapter, we discussed cryptocurrency wallets, and their role and usage with a blockchain. Most of our discussion surrounds Bitcoins and other cryptocurrency.

The success of Bitcoin brought a lot of attention to the technology and the underlying blockchain ledger system, and the community started creating alternate cryptocurrency based on blockchain, making slight modifications to the parameters of Bitcoin, each time trying to improve in one way or another. Subsequently, various organizations started creating alternatives to blockchain by making slight modifications or changes but keeping the core definition of blockchain, that being a public ledger, intact. Some of the projects trying to create alternative blockchain did not gain much attention, but others managed to get a lot of attention and community...