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

Chapter 5. Bitcoin

In earlier chapters, we discussed blockchain, its components, and its structure in detail. We also discussed cryptography, the mechanics behind blockchain, and how blockchain is revolutionizing the network world. In this chapter, we will be discussing Bitcoin's origins.

We will discuss the introduction of Bitcoin, its history, and how it became one of the biggest revolutions of financial history in such a short space of time. We will also dive deep into other aspects of Bitcoin, such as its encoding system, transaction process, network nodes, and we'll briefly cover the mining of Bitcoins.

The topics that we will cover in this chapter include the following:

  • The history of Bitcoin
  • Why Bitcoin is volatile
  • Keys and addresses
  • Transactions
  • Blocks
  • Bitcoin network
  • Wallets