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Blockchain Quick Start Guide
Blockchain Quick Start Guide

Blockchain Quick Start Guide: A beginner's guide to developing enterprise-grade decentralized applications

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Blockchain Quick Start Guide

Ethereum Fundamentals

Ethereum is an open source public blockchain and is considered to be an alternative coin to Bitcoin. A Canadian cryptocurrency researcher and programmer, Vitalik Buterin, proposed the idea in late 2013. Founded by an online crowdsale that took place in the middle of 2014, the platform went live at the end of July 2015. The DAO event in 2016 led to a hard fork, resulting in a split into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

In this chapter, we cover the following topics about Ethereum:

  • Overview of Ethereum
  • Basic concepts such as ether, ERC20 tokens, smart contracts, EVM, gas, accounts, and oracles
  • The Ethereum performance issue and ongoing efforts to address the issue, such as PoS, Casper, Plasma, and Sharding

An overview of Ethereum

In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin sent an email to the blockchain community announcing a white paper outlining the idea for Ethereum. He described it as a universal platform with internal languages, so anyone could write an application. According to Vitalik, the original idea for Ethereum was to create a general-purpose blockchain for fintech. Ethereum is a variation on Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, which is a blockchain focusing on payments, Ethereum is a programmable, general-purpose blockchain. The introduction of smart contracts is the key to differentiating Ethereum from Bitcoin.

A well-known analogy to describe Ethereum and smart contracts, which bring together untrusting parties trading digital or digitized physical assets, is a vending machine, as described at the end of Chapter 1, Introduction to Blockchain Technology

After a vending machine is made...

Ethereum basic concepts

Ethereum builds on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, including key features such as a distributed ledger containing chained blocks, the proof-of-work algorithm, and so on. However, its biggest addition is the introduction of smart contracts, which are coded in a Turing-complete scripting language. Because of this new addition, unlike Bitcoin or its non-smart contract close relatives, Ethereum allows developers to address generic business problems.

Before getting to the basic concepts, we summarize some useful facts on Ethereum as follows:

  • Ethereum has three main ingredients:
    • Decentralization: For guaranteed execution
    •  Hashes: For safeguarding the world state
    •  Signatures: For authorizing programs and transactions
  • Since Ethereum is a blockchain, it uses mathematical algorithms to replace intermediary entities and bring untrusting parties together...

Performance

Another problem inherited from Bitcoin is that Ethereum is slow. It is many magnitudes slower than other platforms that host transaction data, for instance a traditional database. For example, it takes an average of 10 minutes to build a new record for Bitcoin. As a rule of thumb, after waiting for six new blocks to be built, a transaction is considered to be finalized (the same as a commitment in a database). This means that, on average, a requester will wait for one hour to see a request completed. In Ethereum, the average time for miners to build a block is 17 seconds and it is recommended you wait for 12 blocks before a transaction is confirmed. This is 12 * 17 = 204 seconds, or 3.4 minutes' waiting time for a user. Here, waiting for a few subsequent blocks to be built before confirming a transaction is useful. At any point, Ethereum can have competing...

Summary

Ethereum was developed on top of Bitcoin by introducing smart contracts along with Turing-complete scripting languages such as solidity. Ethereum is a general-purpose platform for DApp development. The platform is very popular. However, Ethereum is not mature yet. Compared to Bitcoin, it is more vulnerable to hacking, since any human errors in writing a smart contract are visible to everybody. It inherited the performance issue from Bitcoin. Many initiatives are ongoing to address this scalability problem. In the next chapter, we will dive into the details of solidity, the most popular language for writing Ethereum smart contracts.

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Key benefits

  • Understand the key concepts of decentralized applications and consensus algorithms
  • Learn key concepts of Ethereum and Solidity programming
  • Practical guide to get started with build efficient Blockchain applications with Ethereum and Hyperledger

Description

Blockchain is a technology that powers the development of decentralized applications.This technology allows the construction of a network with no single control that enables participants to make contributions to and receive benefits from the network directly. This book will give you a thorough overview of blockchain and explain how a blockchain works.You will begin by going through various blockchain consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash functions. You will then learn the fundamentals of programming in Solidity – the defacto language for developing decentralize, applications in Ethereum. After that, you will set up an Ethereum development environment and develop, package, build, and test campaign-decentralized applications.The book also shows you how to set up Hyperledger composer tools, analyze business scenarios, design business models, and write a chain code. Finally, you will get a glimpse of how blockchain is actually used in different real-world domains. By the end of this guide, you will be comfortable working with basic blockchain frameworks, and develop secure, decentralized applications in a hassle-free manner.

Who is this book for?

The book is for developers, analysts, or anyone looking to learn about Blockchain in a quick and easy manner.

What you will learn

  • Understand how blockchain hashing works
  • Write and test a smart contract using Solidity
  • Develop and test a decentralized application
  • Build and test your application using Hyperledger Fabric
  • Implement business network using Hyperledger Composer
  • Test and interact with business network applications
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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Dec 27, 2018
Length: 222 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781789807974
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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
Introduction to Blockchain Technology Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ethereum Fundamentals Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Overview of Solidity Programming Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building an Ethereum Blockchain Application Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Exploring an Enterprise Blockchain Application Using Hyperledger Fabric Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Implementing Business Networks Using Hyperledger Composer Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Blockchain Use Cases Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 33.3%
1 star 0%
Kelly Y. Jun 03, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
There are so many blogs and books about blockchain nowadays. But this is the book filling the gap between gaining basic understanding of blockchain technology and being able to develop blockchain applications. The authors have a deep understanding of developing smart contacts and Dapps and provided hands on examples. Their insights and experiences make this book easy to read and follow. Strongly recommend this book!!!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
A light in Pennsylvania Jul 19, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Great first book for Blockchain, not only explained basic concept, interesting history, but also provided hands on demos for programmers.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Nov 05, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
Not easy to start building Blockchain after following this book. Very theoretical.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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