Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Third Edition

By : Imran Bashir
Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Third Edition

By: Imran Bashir

Overview of this book

Blockchain is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, with applications in finance, government, media, and other industries. With a legacy of providing technologists with executable insights, this new edition of Mastering Blockchain is thoroughly revised and updated to the latest blockchain research with four new chapters on consensus algorithms, Serenity (the update that will introduce Ethereum 2.0), tokenization, and enterprise blockchains. This book covers the basics, including blockchain’s technical underpinnings, cryptography and consensus protocols. It also provides you with expert knowledge on decentralization, decentralized application development on Ethereum, Bitcoin, alternative coins, smart contracts, alternative blockchains, and Hyperledger. Further, you will explore blockchain solutions beyond cryptocurrencies such as the Internet of Things with blockchain, enterprise blockchains, tokenization using blockchain, and consider the future scope of this fascinating and disruptive technology. By the end of this book, you will have gained a thorough comprehension of the various facets of blockchain and understand their potential in diverse real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
23
Index

Wallets and client software

As Ethereum is under heavy development and evolution, there are many components, clients, and tools that have been developed and introduced over the last few years.

Wallets

A wallet is a generic program that can store private keys and, based on the addresses stored within it, it can compute the existing balance of ether associated with the addresses by querying the blockchain. It can also be used to deploy smart contracts. In this chapter, we will introduce the MetaMask wallet, which has become the tool of choice for developers.

Having discussed the role of wallets within Ethereum, let's now discuss a number of common clients. The following is a non-exhaustive list of the client software and wallets that are available with Ethereum.

Geth

This is the official Go implementation of the Ethereum client.

The latest version is available at the following link: https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/.

Eth

This is the...