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

Mining hardware


The cryptocurrency mining community has gone through a lot of innovation and resistance hand-in-hand to take care of the core principles of blockchain. Mining can be done using home-based computers and specialized hardware. The types of hardware commonly used for cryptocurrency mining are discussed in the following sections.

CPU-based mining

This was the first type of mining available in the official Bitcoin client. During the initial days of Bitcoin, home-based computers were able to mine coins. With the advent of more powerful and specialized hardware, Bitcoin mining is no longer preferred for mining Bitcoins. Other coins still support CPU mining, but as the coins' difficulty grows with time, mining of those types of coins also becomes infeasible.

GPU-based mining

Since the difficulty of the blockchain network increases incrementally over time, CPU mining becomes infeasible, or it sometimes becomes impossible to mine the coin using a CPU. Considering this, miners started to...