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

Scalability and decentralization


One of the key advantages of blockchain is decentralization, which is the removal of any single authority to control the network. Unfortunately, this has a downside, which is its effect on the performance of a system. Blockchain systems work by keeping all the nodes of the network in sync by trying to achieve consensus so that every computer running a blockchain sees the same system state. More nodes on the network typically result in less centralization. This also means that more work must be done to ensure that all the network participants are in agreement with each other, which limits performance and scalability.

There are a few reasons why a larger number of nodes hinders performance:

  • Each node typically must process all transactions. The higher the number of transactions to be processed, the more processing power and network throughput that each node requires. As requirements go up, the network becomes less decentralized as fewer and fewer groups can afford...