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

Ethereum basic concepts


Ethereum builds on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, including key features such as a distributed ledger containing chained blocks, the proof-of-work algorithm, and so on. However, its biggest addition is the introduction of smart contracts, which are coded in a Turing-complete scripting language. Because of this new addition, unlike Bitcoin or its non-smart contract close relatives, Ethereum allows developers to address generic business problems.

Before getting to the basic concepts, we summarize some useful facts on Ethereum as follows:

  • Ethereum has three main ingredients:
    • Decentralization: For guaranteed execution
    •  Hashes: For safeguarding the world state
    •  Signatures: For authorizing programs and transactions
  • Since Ethereum is a blockchain, it uses mathematical algorithms to replace intermediary entities and bring untrusting parties together to do businesses.
  • Ethereum blockchain brings trust in data due to its ability to verify the validity of data on a node via its consensus...