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

Classification

The consensus algorithms can be classified into two broad categories:

  • Traditional—voting-based consensus
  • Lottery-based—Nakamoto and post-Nakamoto consensus

Traditional voting-based consensus has been researched in distributed systems for many decades. Many fundamental results and a lot of ground-breaking work have already been produced in this space. Algorithms like Paxos and PBFT are prime examples of such types of algorithms. Traditional consensus can also be called fault-tolerant distributed consensus. In other words, this is a class of consensus algorithms that existed before Bitcoin and has been part of distributed system research for almost three decades.

Lottery-based or Nakamoto-type consensus was first introduced with Bitcoin. This class can also be simply called blockchain consensus.

The fundamental requirements of consensus algorithms boil down to safety and liveness conditions. A consensus algorithm must be able to satisfy the safety and liveness...