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)

Altcoins

After the release of Bitcoin, there has always been a large community supporting cryptocurrencies. Also, since Bitcoin and blockchain are open source, a lot of people within the community started to create their cryptocurrencies offering similar services that provide different consensus methods and so on, in comparison to Bitcoin.

Since Bitcoin is the first and, by far, most dominant cryptocurrency, all other cryptocurrencies are known as Alternative Coins or Altcoins. The first Altcoin was Namecoin, introduced in 2011. After that, a lot of Altcoins have been introduced; a few of them were popular and also started to be used as mainstream coins, whereas others were less popular. As of now, there are more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies in existence. There are two broad categories in the alternative cryptocurrency sphere. If an alternative blockchain platform is to be created...