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Table Of Contents

Building Blockchain Projects

By : Narayan Prusty

3.8 (20)

Buy this Book

Building Blockchain Projects

3.8 (20)

By: Narayan Prusty

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks, making it permission-less. This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-world projects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-e applications for blockchain. You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more. The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Understanding Decentralized Applications

What is a DApp?

Decentralized autonomous organization

User identity in DApps

User accounts in DApps

Accessing the centralized apps

Internal currency in DApps

What are permissioned DApps?

Popular DApps

Summary

Understanding How Ethereum Works

Overview of Ethereum

Ethereum accounts

Transactions

Consensus

Timestamp

Nonce

Block time

Forking

Genesis block

Ether denominations

Ethereum virtual machine

Gas

Peer discovery

Whisper and Swarm

Geth

Ethereum Wallet

Mist

Weaknesses

Serenity

Summary

Writing Smart Contracts

Solidity source files

The structure of a smart contract

Data location

What are the different data types?

Control structures

Creating contracts using the new operator

Exceptions

External function calls

Features of contracts

Libraries

Returning multiple values

Importing other Solidity source files

Globally available variables

Ether units

Proof of existence, integrity, and ownership contract

Compiling and deploying contracts

Summary

Getting Started with web3.js

Introduction to web3.js

Building a client for an ownership contract

Summary

Building a Wallet Service

Difference between online and offline wallets

hooked-web3-provider and ethereumjs-tx libraries

What is a hierarchical deterministic wallet?

Introduction to key derivation functions

Introduction to LightWallet

Building a wallet service

Summary

Building a Smart Contract Deployment Platform

Calculating a transaction's nonce

Introducing solcjs

Building a contract deployment platform

Summary

Building a Betting App

Introduction to Oraclize

Working with strings

Building the betting contract

Building a client for the betting contract

Summary

Building Enterprise Level Smart Contracts

Exploring ethereumjs-testrpc

What are event topics?

Getting started with truffle-contract

Introduction to truffle

Summary

Building a Consortium Blockchain

What is a consortium blockchain?

What is Proof-of-Authority consensus?

Introduction to parity

Summary

Writing Smart Contracts

In the previous chapter, we learned how the Ethereum blockchain works and how the PoW consensus protocol keeps it safe. Now it's time to start writing smart contracts as we have have a good grasp of how Ethereum works. There are various languages to write Ethereum smart contracts in, but Solidity is the most popular one. In this chapter, we will learn the Solidity programming language. We will finally build a DApp for proof of existence, integrity, and ownership at given a time, that is, a DApp that can prove that a file was with a particular owner at a specific time.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics: