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

What makes an application decentralized


Earlier in this book, we discussed distributed versus decentralized systems. A distributed system is one that is made up of a number of computers, with the work of the system distributed across all of these machines. Typically, the computers in a distributed network are placed in different geographical regions to protect the system from outages such as power failures, natural disasters, or military events. A decentralized network is not only distributed geographically but also in terms of authority and control. A distributed system such as the Amazon cloud can be worldwide in scope but still under the control of a central authority. A decentralized system has no central authority.

Defining a decentralized application

A well-known resource to blockchain-based decentralized applications is the whitepaper written by David Johnson entitled The General Theory of Decentralized Applications, DApps. In this whitepaper, he identifies four key criteria to be a...