Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By : Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By: Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain applications provide a single-shared ledger to eliminate trust issues involving multiple stakeholders. It is the main technical innovation of Bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for Bitcoin transactions. Blockchain Developer's Guide takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology. It begins with the basic design of a blockchain and elaborates concepts, such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and other related terminologies. You will then explore the components of Ethereum, such as Ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts that you need to build simple DApps. Blockchain Developer's Guide also explains why you must specifically use Solidity for Ethereum-based projects and lets you explore different blockchains with easy-to-follow examples. You will learn a wide range of concepts - beginning with cryptography in cryptocurrencies and including ether security, mining, and smart contracts. You will learn how to use web sockets and various API services for Ethereum. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be able to build efficient decentralized applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Blockchain Quick Reference by Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt • Building Blockchain Projects by Narayan Prusty
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introducing Ethereum


Ethereum is a blockchain-based system with special scripting functionality that allows other developers to build decentralized and distributed applications on top of it. Ethereum is mostly known among developers for the easy development of decentralized applications. There are differences between Ethereum and blockchain. The most important difference is that Ethereum blockchain can run most decentralized applications.

Ethereum was conceptualized in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, cryptocurrency researcher and developer. It was funded by a crowd sale between July and August 2014. Ethereum has built-in Turing, a complete programming language, that is, a programming language meant to solve any computation complexity. This programming language is known as Solidity and is used to create contracts that help in creating decentralized applications on top of Ethereum.

Ethereum was made live on July 30, 2015, with 11.9 million coins pre-mined for the crowd sale, to fund Ethereum development...