Ethereum Smart Contract Development

Summary

This chapter introduced us to the important challenges and limitations of distributed systems, such as the Byzantine Generals' Problem and the CAP theorem. Then, we moved on to understand the one-way hash function and generating a hash chain and a Merkle tree. We realized how a blockchain is a giant Merkle tree and that the subtle difference between a bitcoin and an Ethereum blockchain lies in representing the leaf nodes of such a tree as a transaction or a state of execution, respectively. We took a deep dive into the bitcoin block structure to demystify mining as an incentivized brute force attack. Forking, on the other hand, signified a change of protocol on blockchain. Lastly, we identified the three types of blockchain generation ...