Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Fourth Edition

By : Imran Bashir
5 (3)
Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Fourth Edition

5 (3)
By: Imran Bashir

Overview of this book

Blockchain is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, it has had a massive impact in many sectors, including finance, supply chains, healthcare, government, and media. It’s also being used for cutting edge technologies such as AI and IoT. This new edition is thoroughly revised to offer a practical approach to using Ethereum, Hyperledger, Fabric, and Corda with step-by-step tutorials and real-world use-cases to help you understand everything you need to know about blockchain development and implementation. With new chapters on Decentralized Finance and solving privacy, identity, and security issues, as well as bonus online content exploring alternative blockchains, this is an unmissable read for everyone who wants to gain a deep understanding of blockchain. The book doesn’t shy away from advanced topics and practical expertise, such as decentralized application (DApp) development using smart contracts and oracles, and emerging trends in the blockchain space. Throughout the book, you’ll explore blockchain solutions beyond cryptocurrencies, such as the IoT with blockchain, enterprise blockchains, and tokenization, and gain insight into the future scope of this fascinating and disruptive technology. By the end of this blockchain book, you will have gained a thorough comprehension of the various facets of blockchain and understand the potential of this technology in diverse real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
23
Index

Innovations in Ethereum

In this section we will cover some of the innovations in Ethereum. Ethereum is under constant development. Just like BIPs, we have Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPS) in Ethereum to suggest and implement improvements in Ethereum. You can track EIPs here: https://eips.ethereum.org. Now we will cover some important improvements.

Difficulty time bomb

In addition to timestamp difference-based difficulty adjustment, there is also another element that increases mining difficulty exponentially after every 100,000 blocks. This is the so-called difficulty time bomb, or ice age, introduced in the Ethereum network, which will make it very hard to mine on the Ethereum blockchain at some point in the future.

Once activated, over time, the difficulty bomb makes mining on Ethereum 1.x so prohibitively slow that it becomes infeasible, resulting in a so-called “ice age.” In other words, this mechanism exponentially increases the PoW mining difficulty...