Book Image

Ethereum Projects for Beginners

Book Image

Ethereum Projects for Beginners

Overview of this book

Ethereum enables the development of efficient, smart contracts that contain code. These smart contracts can interact with other smart contracts to make decisions, store data, and send Ether to others.Ethereum Projects for Beginners provides you with a clear introduction to creating cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. As you make your way through the book, you’ll get to grips with detailed step-by-step processes to build advanced Ethereum projects. Each project will teach you enough about Ethereum to be productive right away. You will learn how tokenization works, think in a decentralized way, and build blockchain-based distributed computing systems. Towards the end of the book, you will develop interesting Ethereum projects such as creating wallets and secure data sharing.By the end of this book, you will be able to tackle blockchain challenges by implementing end-to-end projects using the full power of the Ethereum blockchain.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributor
Preface
Index

Overview of blockchain and Ethereum


Here, we will provide a short overview of Ethereum and blockchain in general. We will have a little look under the hood so that you can get a better understanding of how Ethereum and blockchain make these great products—these great use cases that we've seen are possible.

Going from Bitcoin to Ethereum

Bitcoin was the first blockchain, but Bitcoin was only meant for payments. People started discovering that Bitcoin could be used for other scenarios; we call this Colored Coins. Bitcoin had a surprisingly open design and one guy, Vitalik Buterin, decided to start developing Ethereum on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. But, due to limitations in Bitcoin, Ethereum now has its own blockchain.

The following table shows the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum:

Bitcoin

Ethereum

Used for payments

Used for code and logic

It is a digital currency

It is a smart contract platform

Average block time/transaction processing time of 10 minutes

Average block time/transaction processing time of only 17.5 seconds

It is not Turing complete

It is Turing complete

Bitcoin and Ethereum are both blockchains. They both rely heavily on private/public-key cryptography, and even though Bitcoin is primarily a form of payment, both can be used to transfer value, although, with the Ethereum blockchain, value will be processed with logic. Both are completely immutable.

The following are the things to remember for blockchains:

  • When something is in the blockchain, it's final. That means there's no rolling back of anything you do, so even with your code, you have to find special way to update it.
  • Your private key is your digital identity, so don't lose it!
  • Blockchain is not standalone; it's usually used in conjunction with other technologies, mostly frontend technology or backend technology.