Blockchain: How Decentralized Ledgers Actually Work
Shriira Press
A comprehensive, self-contained, and balanced guide to blockchain — the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the wider world of cryptocurrencie…
Welcome to Blockchain: How Decentralized Ledgers Actually Work.
A comprehensive, self-contained, and balanced guide to blockchain — the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the wider world of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. A blockchain is, at its core, a clever combination of old ideas — cryptographic hashing, digital signatures, peer-to-peer networking, and distributed consensus — assembled to solve one hard problem: letting parties who don't trust each other agree on a shared, tamper-evident record without a central authority. This book explains how that actually works, from the math up: cryptographic foundations, the block-and-chain data structure, the network, consensus (proof of work and proof of stake), Bitcoin and Ethereum, smart contracts and tokens, scaling, and — crucially — an honest account of the risks, limitations, and criticisms. It blends intuition (the problem and the idea), concepts (the mechanisms and the math), and runnable/concrete examples (hashes, transactions, a smart contract).
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press