Book Image

Mastering Blockchain

Book Image

Mastering Blockchain

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a distributed database that enables permanent, transparent, and secure storage of data. The blockchain technology is the backbone of cryptocurrency – in fact, it’s the shared public ledger upon which the entire Bitcoin network relies – and it’s gaining popularity with people who work in finance, government, and the arts. Blockhchain technology uses cryptography to keep data secure. This book gives a detailed description of this leading technology and its implementation in the real world. This book begins with the technical foundations of blockchain, teaching you the fundamentals of cryptography and how it keeps data secure. You will learn about the mechanisms behind cryptocurrencies and how to develop applications using Ethereum, a decentralized virtual machine. You will explore different blockchain solutions and get an exclusive preview into Hyperledger, an upcoming blockchain solution from IBM and the Linux Foundation. You will also be shown how to implement blockchain beyond currencies, scability with blockchain, and the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Blockchain
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Theoretical foundations


In this section, various theoretical concepts are introduced to the reader that have been developed with the introduction of different altcoins in the past few years.

Alternatives to Proof of Work

The Proof of Work (PoW) scheme in the context of cryptocurrency was first used in bitcoin and served as a mechanism to provide assurance that a miner had completed the required number of work in order to find a block. This in return provided decentralization, security, and stability for the blockchain. Also, this is the main vehicle in bitcoin for providing decentralized distributed consensus. PoW schemes are required to have a much desired property called progress freeness, which basically means that the reward for consuming computational resources should be random and proportional to the contribution made by the miners. In this case, some chance of winning the block reward is given to even those miners who have comparatively less computational power. The term progress freeness...