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

Proof of existence, integrity, and ownership contract


Let's write a Solidity contract that can prove file ownership without revealing the actual file. It can prove that the file existed at a particular time and finally check for document integrity.

We will achieve proof of ownership by storing the hash of the file and the owner's name as pairs. We will achieve proof of existence by storing the hash of the file and the block timestamp as pairs. Finally, storing the hash itself proves the file integrity; that is, if the file was modified, then its hash will change and the contract won't be able to find any such file, therefore proving that the file was modified.

Here is the code for the smart contract to achieve all this:

contract Proof 
{ 
    struct FileDetails 
    { 
        uint timestamp; 
        string owner; 
    } 

    mapping (string => FileDetails) files; 

    event logFileAddedStatus(bool status, uint timestamp, string owner, string fileHash); 

    //this is used to store the...