November 2020
Beginner to intermediate
281 pages
7h 28m
English
Content preview from Mastering Blockchain
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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 7. Decentralizing Finance and the Web
The growing popularity of cryptocurrency, blockchain, and smart contracts has ushered in a number of new use cases that provide specialized functionality, from increased privacy to the creation of a stable payments system to entirely new types of blockchain-based applications. This chapter explores the exciting possibilities being revealed in the realms of decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized apps (dapps).
Redistribution of Trust
Although they are trying to innovate, banks today are still slow and expensive. Sending money across borders takes more than a day. And for those who don’t have a bank account, sending money to family or friends living in other countries is costly. With a payment layer that uses cryptocurrency, blockchain can remove intermediaries. Over time, it may also allow users to own their data instead of that data being owned by big technology companies.
Identity and the Dangers of Hacking
Why is it important for users to have ownership of their data? Large companies in the technology and finance space have not been great stewards of data. They have repeatedly been breached, hacked, and otherwise compromised. In many cases they have then attempted to downplay or conceal these breaches, though they have often been caught (and fined) later. For example:
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Yahoo! disclosed 3 billion accounts had been compromised in 2013. It didn’t release information regarding the hack until 2017 and eventually reached a settlement ...
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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.