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

Nodes and miners

The Ethereum network contains different nodes. Some nodes act only as wallets, some are light clients, and a few are full clients running the full blockchain. One of the most important types of nodes are mining nodes. We will see what constitutes mining in this section.

Mining is the process by which new blocks are selected via a consensus mechanism and added to the blockchain.

As a result of the mining operation, currency (ether) is awarded to the nodes that perform mining operations. These mining nodes are known as miners. Miners are paid in ether as an incentive for them to validate and verify blocks made up of transactions. The mining process helps secure the network by verifying computations.

At a theoretical level, a miner node performs the following functions:

  • It listens for the transactions broadcasted on the Ethereum network and determines the transactions to be processed.
  • It determines stale ommer blocks and includes...