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)

Catastrophic bugs

The upside of an immutable ledger is that nothing can be hidden or altered. The downside of an immutable ledger is that nothing can be hidden or altered—including bugs. In the case where networks such as Ethereum write the smart contract code into the chain itself, this means that code bugs cannot be fixed easily; the original code will remain on the blockchain forever. The only workaround is the modular code where each section references some other section, and these pointers have programmatic ways of being updated. This allows the authors of a DApp to upload a new piece of code and adjust the pointers appropriately. However, this method too has issues. Making these updates requires a specific authority to update the code.

Having a central authority that is necessary for updates just creates new problems. Either that authority has centralized control...