What this book covers
Chapter 1, Say Hello to Blockchain, serves as a general introduction, and explains the general concepts on which blockchain technology is based.
Chapter 2, Building a Bitcoin Payment System, introduces the specifics of Bitcoin by first building a customer-friendly payment system, before moving on to looking in more detail at the use of smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Chapter 3, Building Your Own Cryptocurrency, builds on the general understanding of Bitcoin learned in the previous chapter to then create a new currency based on the Bitcoin code base.
Chapter 4, Peer-to-Peer Auction in Ethereum, introduces the basic features, concepts, and tools of Ethereum that are required to build a decentralized application. This chapter introduces the Solidity smart contract language that is used extensively in later chapters.
Chapter 5, Tontine Game with Truffle and Drizzle, builds on the previous Ethereum chapter to create a more complex decentralized application, leveraging more advanced features of Solidity, together with the Truffle development environment.
Chapter 6, Blockchain-Based Futures System, continues to build on the previous two Ethereum chapters, this time focusing on how smart contracts can interact with the outside world using oracles and third-party APIs.
Chapter 7, Blockchains in Business, introduces the idea of private enterprise blockchains and their use cases, before detailing how to implement a private network using an enterprise-focused fork of Ethereum called Quorum.
Chapter 8, Creating an ICO, continues the theme of using the Ethereum blockchain for business by describing, in detail, how to create and run an initial coin offering, also known as a token sale.
Chapter 9, Distributed Storage – IPFS and Swarm, builds on the previous Ethereum chapters to explore how to incorporate decentralized file storage in a decentralized application.
Chapter 10, Supply Chain on Hyperledger, introduces the third blockchain network of the book: Hyperledger. This chapter introduces the main concepts and basic features of Hyperledger, and how it differs from Bitcoin and Ethereum, before describing a practical implementation of how Hyperledger can be used to run a supply chain.
Chapter 11, Letter of Credit (LC) Hyperledger, builds on the basics from the previous chapter to implement a letter of credit issued between two banks and two transacting customers.