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

Test networks

The Ethereum Go client (https://geth.ethereum.org), Geth, can be connected to the test network using the following command:

$ geth --testnet

This command will connect to the Ropsten network, which is a pre-configured proof of work (PoW) test network.

Geth installation was described in Chapter 12, Further Ethereum. Please refer back to this chapter for more detail.

A sample output is shown in the following screenshot. The screenshot shows the type of the network chosen and various other pieces of information regarding the blockchain download:

Figure 13.1: The output of the geth command connecting to Ethereum testnet Ropsten

A blockchain explorer for testnet is located at https://ropsten.etherscan.io and can be used to trace transactions and blocks on the Ethereum test network.

There are other test networks available too, such as Rinkeby and Görli (also referred to as Goerli). Geth can be issued with a command-line flag...