January 2023
Intermediate to advanced
224 pages
7h 14m
English
Content preview from Catching Up to Crypto
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
CHAPTER 5A Short Course in Blockchain: Hashing, Mining, and Forking
In this chapter I'm going to give you a primer on the core technology that powers crypto: the blockchain. It's important to say up front that crypto is based on code and math; that's what makes it special. And the nitty‐gritty of crypto, the blockchain, is university‐level math that's difficult to grasp. In fact, this chapter is hardly going to scratch the surface of the nuts and bolts of blockchain. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, that's okay – just hang on. If at the end of this chapter you want to learn more you should pursue that curiosity; good blockchain developers are few and far between.
Blockchain 101
“Blockchain” is a confusing term that conjures up mental images that make it harder to conceptualize. You can thank David Chaum for the name. Suffice to say that a blockchain is a database in the same way money is. It's a way to organize information that's easy to sort through. But the beauty of blockchain isn't that it's a new method of storing information (which it is); the beauty is in how the information is put on to this chain of spreadsheets and is shared and distributed across thousands of computers. So let's break down the core elements of blockchain.
Blocks and Chains
The “block” in the blockchain is a spreadsheet with some special instructions and a bunch of transactions. Every blockchain starts with one block – the “genesis” block. After a certain amount of time, the programming of the ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.