Book Image

Blockchain By Example

By : Bellaj Badr, Richard Horrocks, Xun (Brian) Wu
Book Image

Blockchain By Example

By: Bellaj Badr, Richard Horrocks, Xun (Brian) Wu

Overview of this book

The Blockchain is a revolution promising a new world without middlemen. Technically, it is an immutable and tamper-proof distributed ledger of all transactions across a peer-to-peer network. With this book, you will get to grips with the blockchain ecosystem to build real-world projects. This book will walk you through the process of building multiple blockchain projects with different complexity levels and hurdles. Each project will teach you just enough about the field's leading technologies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Quorum, and Hyperledger in order to be productive from the outset. As you make your way through the chapters, you will cover the major challenges that are associated with blockchain ecosystems such as scalability, integration, and distributed file management. In the concluding chapters, you’ll learn to build blockchain projects for business, run your ICO, and even create your own cryptocurrency. Blockchain by Example also covers a range of projects such as Bitcoin payment systems, supply chains on Hyperledger, and developing a Tontine Bank Every is using Ethereum. By the end of this book, you will not only be able to tackle common issues in the blockchain ecosystem, but also design and build reliable and scalable distributed systems.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Say Hello to Blockchain

What is blockchain? Certainly, with the huge hype around it, you must have heard or come across this questionit might be even the reason why you are reading this book. Let's discover, in this first chapter from a developer's standpoint, what's behind the hype.

As you might know, blockchain is an emerging technology that has the potential to dramatically revolutionize many different fields. This potential is primarily based on its ability to offer people a trustworthy channel to transfer value or real assets (tokenization) over the internet.

Blockchain has the capacity to move us from the internet of information to the internet of value, potentially breaking our existing financial systems.

Blockchain is in many ways a revolution, similar to the internet when it was conceived—certainly not a passing trend. The reason for this is that it presents a solution to a previously unsolved financial dilemma. For the first time in history, we are able to establish trust within trustless environments (such as the internet), without relying on an authority. As a result, some refer to blockchain as a trust machine.

The potential impact of blockchain is hugeit goes far beyond the mere decentralization of the financial sector. In fact, its ability to circumvent intermediaries opens the door to redefine almost every field revolving around technology—even the internetpushing us toward a peer-to-peer world.

Through this short introduction, I am trying to give you a foretaste of the importance of our topic, and to confirm that your choice to learn about the technology is timely. As the book's name suggests, the approach we will be following throughout this book is to build concrete blockchain projects, instead of laying out abstract concepts.

Nonetheless, in spite of its less technical nature, the prime objective of this introductory chapter is to provide you with the necessary background to build the various projects presented in this book.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What cryptocurrency is
  • What blockchain is
  • How to send and receive bitcoins
  • How to store data into a bitcoin blockchain using JavaScript
  • An overview of blockchain types

However, this chapter doesn't intend to cover:

  • The underlying cryptography
  • Cryptocurrency trading

In this chapter, the first part will introduce basic concepts. The second part will be practical, and we will discover how to interact with the blockchain, using the famous Hello World example to get you started.