Book Image

Blockchain Development with Hyperledger

By : Salman A. Baset, Luc Desrosiers, Nitin Gaur, Petr Novotny, Anthony O'Dowd, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Weimin Sun, Xun (Brian) Wu
Book Image

Blockchain Development with Hyperledger

By: Salman A. Baset, Luc Desrosiers, Nitin Gaur, Petr Novotny, Anthony O'Dowd, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Weimin Sun, Xun (Brian) Wu

Overview of this book

Blockchain and Hyperledger are open source technologies that power the development of decentralized applications. This Learning Path is your helpful reference for exploring and building blockchain networks using Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and Hyperledger Composer. Blockchain Development with Hyperledger will start off by giving you an overview of blockchain and demonstrating how you can set up an Ethereum development environment for developing, packaging, building, and testing campaign-decentralized applications. You'll then explore the de facto language Solidity, which you can use to develop decentralized applications in Ethereum. Following this, you'll be able to configure Hyperledger Fabric and use it to build private blockchain networks and applications that connect to them. Toward the later chapters, you'll learn how to design and launch a network, and even implement smart contracts in chain code. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to build and deploy your own decentralized applications by addressing the key pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Blockchain Quick Start Guide by Xun (Brian) Wu and Weimin Sun • Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger by Nitin Gaur et al.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

An overview of Ethereum


In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin sent an email to the blockchain community announcing a white paper outlining the idea for Ethereum. He described it as a universal platform with internal languages, so anyone could write an application. According to Vitalik, the original idea for Ethereum was to create a general-purpose blockchain for fintech. Ethereum is a variation on Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, which is a blockchain focusing on payments, Ethereum is a programmable, general-purpose blockchain. The introduction of smart contracts is the key to differentiating Ethereum from Bitcoin.

A well-known analogy to describe Ethereum and smart contracts, which bring together untrusting parties trading digital or digitized physical assets, is a vending machine, as described at the end of Chapter 12, Introduction to Blockchain Technology

After a vending machine is made, nobody, including the machine owner, can change the rules. A buyer does not need to worry about the owner altering...