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

Timestamp


The formula to calculate the target of a block requires the current timestamp, and also every block has the current timestamp attached to its header. Nothing can stop a miner from using some other timestamp instead of the current timestamp while mining a new block, but they don't usually because timestamp validation would fail and other nodes won't accept the block, and it would be a waste of resources of the miner. When a miner broadcasts a newly mined block, its timestamp is validated by checking whether the timestamp is greater than the timestamp of the previous block. If a miner uses a timestamp greater than the current timestamp, the difficulty will be low as difficulty is inversely proportional to the current timestamp; therefore, the miner whose block timestamp is the current timestamp would be accepted by the network as it would have a higher difficulty. If a miner uses a timestamp greater than the previous block timestamp and less than the current timestamp, the difficulty...