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

Algorithms

In this section, we will discuss the key algorithms in detail. We'll be looking at the two main types of fault-tolerant algorithms, CFT and BFT.

CFT algorithms

We'll begin by looking at some algorithms that solve the consensus problem with crash fault tolerance. One of the most fundamental algorithms in this space is Paxos.

Paxos

Leslie Lamport developed Paxos. It is the most fundamental distributed consensus algorithm, allowing consensus over a value under unreliable communications. In other words, Paxos is used to build a reliable system that works correctly, even in the presence of faults.

Paxos was proposed first in 1989 and then later, more formally, in 1998 in the following paper:

Lamport, L., 1998. The part-time parliament. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 16(2), pp.133-169.

The paper is available here:

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf.

Note that Paxos works...