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

Accessing the centralized apps


A DApp shouldn't depend on centralized apps because of a single point of failure. But in some cases, there is no other option. For example, if a DApp wants to read a football score, then where will it get the data from? Although a DApp can depend on another DApp, why will FIFA create a DApp? FIFA will not create a DApp just because other DApps want the data. This is because a DApp to provide scores is of no benefit as it will ultimately be controlled by FIFA completely.

So in some cases, a DApp needs to fetch data from a centralized application. But the major problem is how the DApp knows that the data fetched from a domain is not tampered by a middle service/man and is the actual response. Well, there are various ways to resolve this depending on the DApp architecture. For example, in Ethereum, for the smart contracts to access centralized APIs, they can use the Oraclize service as a middleman as smart contracts cannot make direct HTTP requests. Oraclize provides...