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

Bitcoin limitations

Various limitations in Bitcoin have also sparked some interest in altcoins. Some alternative coins were explicitly developed to address shortcomings in Bitcoin. The most prominent and widely discussed limitation is the lack of anonymity in Bitcoin. We will now discuss some of the limitations of Bitcoin.

Privacy and anonymity

As the blockchain is a public ledger of all transactions and is openly available, it becomes easy to analyze it. When combined with traffic analyses, transactions can be linked back to their source IP addresses, thus possibly revealing a transaction's originator. This is a big concern from a privacy point of view.

In the Bitcoin domain. it is a recommended and common practice to generate a new address for every transaction, which allows some level of unlinkability. However, this is not enough, and various techniques were developed and successfully used to trace the flow of transactions throughout the network and link them...