Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By : Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By: Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with applications in industries such as finance, government, and media. This Learning Path is your guide to building blockchain networks using Ethereum, JavaScript, and Solidity. You will get started by understanding the technical foundations of blockchain technology, including distributed systems, cryptography and how this digital ledger keeps data secure. Further into the chapters, you’ll gain insights into developing applications using Ethereum and Hyperledger. As you build on your knowledge of Ether security, mining, smart contracts, and Solidity, you’ll learn how to create robust and secure applications that run exactly as programmed without being affected by fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll explore how blockchain solutions can be implemented in applications such as IoT apps, in addition to its use in currencies. This Learning Path also highlights how you can increase blockchain scalability, and discusses the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to tackle pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle and confidently design and deploy decentralized applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
15
Blockchain - Outside of Currencies
16
Scalability and Other Challenges
Index

Litecoin


Litecoin is a fork of the bitcoin source code released in 2011. It uses Scrypt as PoW, originally introduced in the Tenebrix coin. Litecoin allows for faster transactions as compared to bitcoin due to its faster block generation time of 2.5 minutes. Also, difficulty readjustment is achieved every 3.5 days roughly due to faster block generation time. The total coin supply is 84 million.

Scrypt is a sequentially memory hard function that is the first alternative to the SHA-256-based PoW algorithm. It was originally proposed as a Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF). The key idea is that if the function requires a significant amount of memory to run then custom hardware such as ASICs will require more VLSI area, which would be infeasible to build. The Scrypt algorithm requires a large array of pseudorandom bits to be held in memory and a key is derived from this in a pseudorandom fashion.

The algorithm is based on a phenomenon called Time-Memory Trade-Off (TMTO). If memory...