Book Image

Blockchain Quick Reference

By : Mariko Amekodommo, Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt
Book Image

Blockchain Quick Reference

By: Mariko Amekodommo, Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt

Overview of this book

Blockchain Quick Reference takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology and is designed for those who want to polish their existing knowledge regarding the various pillars of the blockchain ecosystem. This book is your go-to guide, teaching you how to apply principles and ideas for making your life and business better. You will cover the architecture, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and terminologies of the blockchain technology, before studying how they work. All you need is a curious mind to get started with blockchain technology. Once you have grasped the basics, you will explore components of Ethereum, such as ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts, in order to build simple Dapps. You will then move on to learning why Solidity is used specifically for Ethereum-based projects, followed by exploring different types of blockchain with easy-to-follow examples. All this will help you tackle challenges and problems. By the end of this book, you will not only have solved current and future problems relating to blockchain technology but will also be able to build efficient decentralized applications.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Cryptocurrency mining

Cryptocurrency mining is performed by full nodes, that are part of the blockchain; mining is performed only by blockchains with a PoW based consensus system. Transactions are confirmed by the consensus system, and blocks of these transactions are created to be added to the blockchain; once a new block is added to the blockchain, which is commonly known as block is found, there is a certain reward, which is given to the miner for performing the task of adding the block in the blockchain; the process is not that simple, though. These blocks are added after performing a resource-intensive validation process to validate a transaction. The resource-intensive task is basically the hashing of certain algorithms associated with the currency.

Since the block generation time is kept to around 10 minutes, when the hashing power of miners increases, the difficulty has...