Book Image

Blockchain for Business 2019

By : Peter Lipovyanov
Book Image

Blockchain for Business 2019

By: Peter Lipovyanov

Overview of this book

Blockchain for Business 2019 is a comprehensive guide that enables you to bring in various blockchain functionalities to extend your existing business models and make correct fully-informed decisions. You will learn how decentralized applications are transforming numerous business sectors that are expected to play a huge role in the future. You will see how large corporations are already implementing blockchain technology now. You will then learn about the various blockchain services, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and others to understand their use cases in a variety of business domains. You will develop a solid fundamental understanding of blockchain architecture. Moving ahead, you will get to grips with the inner workings of blockchain, with detailed explanations of mining, decentralized consensus, cryptography, smart contracts, and many other important concepts. You will delve into a realistic view of the current state of blockchain technology, along with its issues, limitations, and potential solutions that can take it to the next level. By the end of this book, you will all be well versed in the latest innovations and developments in the emerging blockchain space.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Hash functions

In the previous sections, we said that all nodes store identical copies of the blockchain database, didn't we?

And that's an issue that undoubtedly results in a lot of data storage and redundancy. However, it is the price we have to pay in order to obtain a truly decentralized peer-to-peer system without any middlemen.

Moreover, datasets can be different in size, some blocks may have 200 transactions, other blocks may have 500 transactions, and others may have 1,000 transactions. All these transactions also typically vary in the size of the information they contain in terms of kilobytes. The only capacity limit in the Bitcoin blockchain protocol is on the size of each block, which has been 1 megabyte since 2010. It was recently amended to effectively 1.4 MB with the latest upgrade of the Bitcoin software. But again, block sizes can vary up to that limit...