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

Backups


In most blockchains, each computer acting as a full participant in the network holds a complete copy of all transactions that have ever happened since the launch of the network. This means that even under catastrophic duress, as long as a fraction of the network computers remains functional, a complete backup will exist.

In PoS chains, there tend to be far fewer full participants so the number of backups and distribution is far less. So far, this reduced level of redundancy has not been an issue.

Consistency

As discussed in prior chapters, hashing and the Merkle root of all transactions and behaviors on the blockchain allow for an easy calculation of consistency. If consistency is broken on a blockchain, it will be noticed instantly. Blockchains are designed to never be inconsistent. However, just because data is consistent does not mean it is accurate. These issues will be discussed in Chapter 20Scalability and Other Challenges.

Peer-to-peer systems

Most computer systems in use today...