Ethereum Smart Contract Development

Understanding distributed systems

To understand a distributed system, we need to first distinguish it from traditional centralized systems. Traditional centralized systems consist of two main components: the client and the server. In the simplest setup, the client is the one who makes a request for getting a job done, and a server is the one who gets it done. This was how web 1.0 operated; the one we started calling the World Wide Web. For example, you placed a search request on Google search engine, and it gave you back a set of web links and summarized results.

Now, if two clients want to communicate between each other, they have to place request via the server, which serves as the middleman. A second example might be, for instance, if ...