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

Catastrophic bugs


The upside of an immutable ledger is that nothing can be hidden or altered. The downside of an immutable ledger is that nothing can be hidden or altered—including bugs. In the case where networks such as Ethereum write the smart contract code into the chain itself, this means that code bugs cannot be fixed easily; the original code will remain on the blockchain forever. The only workaround is the modular code where each section references some other section, and these pointers have programmatic ways of being updated. This allows the authors of a DApp to upload a new piece of code and adjust the pointers appropriately. However, this method too has issues. Making these updates requires a specific authority to update the code.

Having a central authority that is necessary for updates just creates new problems. Either that authority has centralized control over the decentralized app (which means it is no longer decentralized) or a governing system must be written onto the blockchain...