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

Limitations of smart contracts


Smart contracts hold tremendous power, but they do have limitations. It is important to note that these systems are only as good as the people building them. So far, many smart contract systems have failed due to unforeseen bugs and events that were not part of the initial design. In many cases, these were merely technical flaws that can at least be fixed in time. However, with the recent rush to use blockchain technology for everything, we are likely to start seeing more substantial failures as people fail to understand the limits of the technology. For blockchain to truly have a maximum business impact, both its advantages and limitations have to be addressed.

Data quality and mistakes

Like all systems, smart contracts are only as good as the data they act on. A smart contract that receives bad or incorrect information from the network will still execute. On blockchain systems, this can be a huge issue as most transactions initiated by a human or a contract...