The Undocumented Internals of the Bitcoin, Ethereum and Blockchains

  • 17h 15m
  • Vijay Mukhi
  • BPB Publications
  • 2018

In the year 2017, Bitcoin touched a market capitalization of over 100 billion dollars. In the year 2014, one Bitcoin could buy about 500 dollars, just three years later one Bitcoin buys 16,000 dollars. The Initial Coin Offering or an ICO is becoming the preferred method of raising money. Many countries like Dubai have announced their own crypto-currency called emCash.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain are the most difficult technologies to understand. That's why most people including technology folks cannot understand the future direction of these technologies. The only way to understand anything complex is by going back to the basics. This is what we do in this book. We explain every byte of the Bitcoin blockchain that is downloaded on your computer. Only by going back to your roots can you understand anything complex.

Most of the code in this book is written in Python as today it is the easiest language to use. The Bitcoin Source is written only in C++. Most of the important Bitcoin data structures are only documented in code, a bare knowledge of reading and not writing C++ will help. Finally, the official client for Ethereum is written in the programming language Go.

This book is written for a programmer. We use code and not words to describe a Blockchain is. We believe that all kinds of people including non-technology folks will need some programming to grasp the basic concepts of the Blockchain. There is no other way to understand this technology.

Finally, we end with the biggest use of Smart Contracts which is raising money using an ICO. Our primary focus is on Bitcoin and Blockchain and not on Ethereum and Smart Contracts which comprises only 4 chapters.

International Currency transfers are very expensive today. The the advent of the Lighting Network and side chains, the Bitcoin blockchain can scale to a level where it can handle transactions faster than any credit card transaction. You cannot use Bitcoins to buy coffee today.

One of the recent bigger innovations of Blockchain technology is the Initial Coin Offering or an ICO. This will enable millions of people to invest in companies using Blockchain technology. Vijay Mukhi’ s work will help us understand the technologies under the hood that makes it happen

In this Book

  • Foreword
  • Introduction
  • Basics of the Bitcoin Block Header
  • Transactions - Basics
  • Computing the Merkle Hash
  • Bitcoin Addresses
  • Vanity Bitcoin Addresses
  • Difficulty and Nonce
  • Storing Bitcoin Transactions Using SQL
  • Transactions - Inputs and Outputs
  • Hiding Data in the Blockchain
  • Signing Transactions
  • Roll Your Own Transaction
  • Client and Server
  • Notaries and OP_RETURN
  • Pay to Script Hash or Multi-Sig Bitcoin Addresses
  • Basic Networking
  • More Networking
  • Hashes SHA0 and SHA1
  • Hashes - Sha-256 and RipeMD-160
  • ECC with Sage - Part 1
  • ECC with Sage - Part 2
  • Sending Our Own Transaction
  • Sending One Transaction without Using Library Functions
  • Index Folder
  • UTXO Dataset
  • Wallets
  • Rev/Undo Files
  • peers.dat and banlist.dat
  • Miners, Blocks and More
  • fee_estimates.dat
  • Building the Bitcoin Source Code
  • Testing Bitcoin for Bugs
  • Ethereum Solidity
  • Ethereum Leveldb Keys and GOLANG
  • Ethereum Unravelling the State Machine
  • Bitcoin Cash vs Segwit vs Segwit2x
  • Bitcoin Core 0.15, UTXO and More
  • Transactions and Blocks - Error Checks
  • ICO and Smart Contract Security
  • What is a Bitcoin and a Blockchain
  • AI and Blockchain – Never the Twain Shall Meet
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