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

Summary


Smart contracts are agreements written into code between different parties. The critical aspects of smart contracts is that they contain promises that are in digital form. All of these promises can be executed using digital protocols for communication performance. The outcomes of the contracts are triggered automatically.

At this point, you should have a solid understanding of what smart contracts are, how they work, and their strengths and limitations. You should be able to understand the dangers inherent in smart contract ecosystems and be able to gauge possible risks in the development of smart-contract-based systems. At a minimum, you should recognize the need for careful and thorough evaluation of smart contracts for security reasons. Remember, with smart contracts, the code is executed with little or no human intervention. A mistake in a smart contract means the damage done by the mistake will multiply as fast as the code can be run.

Next, we are going to dive into Ethereum further...