Название: Blockchain Platforms: A Look at the Underbelly of Distributed Platforms
Автор: Stijn Van Hijfte
Издательство: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Год: 2020
Страниц: 259
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

This book introduces all the technical features that make up blockchain technology today.

It starts with a thorough explanation of all technological concepts necessary to understand any discussions related to distributed ledgers and a short history of earlier implementations. It then discusses in detail how the Bitcoin network looks and what changes are coming in the near future, together with a range of altcoins that were created on the same base code. To get an even better idea, the book shortly explores how Bitcoin might be forked before going into detail on the Ethereum network and cryptocurrencies running on top of the network, smart contracts, and more.

The book introduces the Hyperledger foundation and the tools offered to create private blockchain solutions. For those willing, it investigates directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and several of its implementations, which could solve several of the problems other blockchain networks are still dealing with to this day. In Chapter 4, readers can find an overview of blockchain networks that can be used to build solutions of their own and the tools that can help them in the process.

When people talk about Hyperledger they talk about a whole arrange of possible implementations as the Hyperledger project is part of the Linux foundation and hosts a lot of different blockchain solutions. We will go in-depth for all of these but I will share with you here a short overview of the (current) frameworks that are being supported by the overall project.

Hyperledger Fabric is a private implementation that wants to help address such network requirements as identifiable participants, permissioned network that only has identified participants, high transaction throughput, low latency, and privacy of the actual transaction data. Opposite to most other blockchain or distributed ledger implementations, this platform does not require any native token to power contract execution. On top of the pluggable services, the smart contracts also run in separate container environments for isolation and they can be written in standard programming languages such as Golang and node.js.