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Mastering Blockchain

You're reading from   Mastering Blockchain A deep dive into distributed ledgers, consensus protocols, smart contracts, DApps, cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, and more

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781839213199
Length 816 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
Languages
Concepts
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Author (1):
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Imran Bashir Imran Bashir
Author Profile Icon Imran Bashir
Imran Bashir
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Toc

Table of Contents (24) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Blockchain 101 2. Decentralization FREE CHAPTER 3. Symmetric Cryptography 4. Public Key Cryptography 5. Consensus Algorithms 6. Introducing Bitcoin 7. The Bitcoin Network and Payments 8. Bitcoin Clients and APIs 9. Alternative Coins 10. Smart Contracts 11. Ethereum 101 12. Further Ethereum 13. Ethereum Development Environment 14. Development Tools and Frameworks 15. Introducing Web3 16. Serenity 17. Hyperledger 18. Tokenization 19. Blockchain – Outside of Currencies 20. Enterprise Blockchain 21. Scalability and Other Challenges 22. Current Landscape and What's Next 23. Index

The Bitcoin network

The Bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network where nodes perform transactions. They verify and propagate transactions and blocks. Nodes called miners also produce blocks. There are different types of nodes on the network. The two main types of nodes are full nodes and simple payment verification (SPV) nodes. Full nodes, as the name implies, are implementations of Bitcoin Core clients performing the wallet, miner, full blockchain storage, and network routing functions. However, it is not necessary for all nodes in a Bitcoin network to perform all these functions. SPV nodes or lightweight clients perform only wallet and network routing functionality.

Versioning information is coded in the Bitcoin client in the version.h file, which is available here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/0cda5573405d75d695aba417e8f22f1301ded001/src/version.h#L9.

Some nodes are full blockchain nodes with a complete blockchain as they are more secure and...

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