Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By : Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun
Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By: Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a technology that powers the development of decentralized applications.This technology allows the construction of a network with no single control that enables participants to make contributions to and receive benefits from the network directly. This book will give you a thorough overview of blockchain and explain how a blockchain works.You will begin by going through various blockchain consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash functions. You will then learn the fundamentals of programming in Solidity – the defacto language for developing decentralize, applications in Ethereum. After that, you will set up an Ethereum development environment and develop, package, build, and test campaign-decentralized applications.The book also shows you how to set up Hyperledger composer tools, analyze business scenarios, design business models, and write a chain code. Finally, you will get a glimpse of how blockchain is actually used in different real-world domains. By the end of this guide, you will be comfortable working with basic blockchain frameworks, and develop secure, decentralized applications in a hassle-free manner.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Ethereum Fundamentals

Ethereum is an open source public blockchain and is considered to be an alternative coin to Bitcoin. A Canadian cryptocurrency researcher and programmer, Vitalik Buterin, proposed the idea in late 2013. Founded by an online crowdsale that took place in the middle of 2014, the platform went live at the end of July 2015. The DAO event in 2016 led to a hard fork, resulting in a split into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

In this chapter, we cover the following topics about Ethereum:

  • Overview of Ethereum
  • Basic concepts such as ether, ERC20 tokens, smart contracts, EVM, gas, accounts, and oracles
  • The Ethereum performance issue and ongoing efforts to address the issue, such as PoS, Casper, Plasma, and Sharding