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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

Blockchain

As we discussed in Chapter 1, Blockchain 101, a blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions. Specifically, from Bitcoin's perspective, the blockchain can be defined as a public, distributed ledger holding a timestamped, ordered, and immutable record of all transactions on the Bitcoin network. Transactions are picked up by miners and bundled into blocks for mining. Each block is identified by a hash and is linked to its previous block by referencing the previous block's hash in its header.

The data structure of a Bitcoin block is shown in the following table:

Field

Size

Description

Block size

4 bytes

The size of the block.

Block header...

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