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

Introduction to LightWallet


LightWallet is an HD wallet that implements BIP32, BIP39, and BIP44. LightWallet provides APIs to create and sign transactions or encrypt and decrypt data using the addresses and keys generated using it.

LightWallet API is divided into four namespaces, that is, keystore, signing, encryption, and txutils. signing, encrpytion, and txutils provide APIs to sign transactions, asymmetric cryptography, and create transactions respectively, whereas a keystore namespace is used to create a keystore, generated seed, and so on. keystore is an object that holds the seed and keys encrypted. The keystore namespace implements transaction signer methods that requires signing the we3.eth.sendTransaction() calls if we are using Hooked-Web3-Provider. Therefore the keystore namespace can automatically create and sign transactions for the addresses that it can find in it. Actually, LightWallet is primarily intended to be a signing provider for the Hooked-Web3-Provider.

A keystore instance...