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

Privacy


One of the supposed advantages of blockchains is that they can be run anonymously. However, if this anonymity is ever broken, the immutable ledger means that every transaction throughout time can now be traced perfectly. Maintaining perfect anonymity is extremely hard, and even if one person is successful, if the people they do business with are not also anonymous as well, then statistical techniques can be used to narrow down the possibilities of their identity considerably.

While many people think about anonymity in terms of avoiding law enforcement or taxation, it is not only governments that might be interested in this information. For instance, plenty of criminal organizations would love to be able to identify wealthy but unassuming people. An organization could trace large holdings or transactions of cryptoassets to a specific person and use that as a targeting method for kidnapping or extortion. Add the immutability of cryptotransactions and this could make such attacks very...