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

Bitcoin network


The network is based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol. Various nodes exchange transactions and blocks in this network. Every node in this Bitcoin network is treated equally. One advantage of this is that each node has the option of taking different roles, depending on each person's preference on how they want to participate in the Bitcoin network.

Types of nodes

Before we discuss the types of nodes, let's discuss some of the primary functionalities that the nodes perform:

  • Wallet
  • Mining
  • Full blockchain
  • Routing

Majorly, there are two types of nodes in the Bitcoin network. We'll now go into some brief details on each.

Full node

A full node is made up of the wallet, miner, complete blockchain, and the routing network. These nodes maintain a complete up-to-date record of the blockchain. The full nodes verify every transaction on the blockchain network.

Lightweight nodes

Lightweight nodes perform transactions on the blockchain. They do not contain the entire blockchain, instead just a subset...