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)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Say Hello to Blockchain, serves as a general introduction, and explains the general concepts on which blockchain technology is based.

Chapter 2, Building a Bitcoin Payment System, introduces the specifics of Bitcoin by first building a customer-friendly payment system, before moving on to looking in more detail at the use of smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Chapter 3, Building Your Own Cryptocurrency, builds on the general understanding of Bitcoin learned in the previous chapter to then create a new currency based on the Bitcoin code base.

Chapter 4, Peer-to-Peer Auction in Ethereum, introduces the basic features, concepts, and tools of Ethereum that are required to build a decentralized application. This chapter introduces the Solidity smart contract language that is used extensively in later chapters.

Chapter 5, Tontine Game with Truffle and Drizzle, builds on the previous Ethereum chapter to create a more complex decentralized application, leveraging more advanced features of Solidity, together with the Truffle development environment.

Chapter 6, Blockchain-Based Futures System, continues to build on the previous two Ethereum chapters, this time focusing on how smart contracts can interact with the outside world using oracles and third-party APIs.

Chapter 7, Blockchains in Business, introduces the idea of private enterprise blockchains and their use cases, before detailing how to implement a private network using an enterprise-focused fork of Ethereum called Quorum.

Chapter 8, Creating an ICO, continues the theme of using the Ethereum blockchain for business by describing, in detail, how to create and run an initial coin offering, also known as a token sale.

Chapter 9, Distributed Storage – IPFS and Swarm, builds on the previous Ethereum chapters to explore how to incorporate decentralized file storage in a decentralized application.

Chapter 10, Supply Chain on Hyperledger, introduces the third blockchain network of the book: Hyperledger. This chapter introduces the main concepts and basic features of Hyperledger, and how it differs from Bitcoin and Ethereum, before describing a practical implementation of how Hyperledger can be used to run a supply chain.

Chapter 11, Letter of Credit (LC) Hyperledger, builds on the basics from the previous chapter to implement a letter of credit issued between two banks and two transacting customers.