Bitcoin and Blockchain: History and Current Applications

Bitcoin and Blockchain: History and Current Applications is a useful reference for students, business schools, research scholars, practitioners, and business analytics professionals.

Introduction:

Globally, the industries provide employment to about 500 million people from the main business sectors which include service, retail, manufacturing, business, health care, local and central government, finance sector, etc. All of these sectors are made either automatic or semiautomatic by sophisticated business processes forming an integral part of the digital economy. In this revolution, the Internet plays a vital role in core business, and financial aspects of the digital economy are still centralized, with the help of centralized agencies such as banks and tax agencies, to authenticate and settle payments and transactions. These centralized services often are manual, difficult to automate, and represent a bottleneck to facilitating a frictionless digital economy. The blockchain technology, a distributed, decentralized, and public ledger, addresses these issues by maintaining records of all transactions on a blockchain network that promises a smart world of automation of complex services and manufacturing processes.

A blockchain network is a peer-to-peer network and does not require a central authority or trusted intermediaries to authenticate or settle the transactions. The first generation of blockchain network was coined by Satoshi Nakamoto in his 2008 white paper where the primary application of the blockchain network was the use of electronic cash or cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. The second-generation blockchain network called Ethereum was introduced in 2013. Ethereum allows a single programmable blockchain network to be used for developing different types of applications where each application takes the form of a smart contract which is implemented in a high-level language and deployed on the blockchain network.

There are very few books that can serve as a foundational text book for colleges and universities looking to create new educational programs in the areas of blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. The existing books are focused on the business side of blockchain and case study–based evaluation of applications. We have edited this book to meet the need at colleges and universities. This book can serve as a textbook for senior  and graduate-level courses on the domains such as business analytics, finance, Internet of Things, computer science, mathematics, and business schools. This book is also dedicated to novice programmers and solution architects who want to build powerful, robust, optimized smart contracts using solidity, and hyperledger fabrics from scratch.

Contents:

• Bitcoin: A P2P Digital Currency
• Exploring the Bitcoin Network
• lockchain Technology: The Trust-Free Systems
• Consensus and Mining in a Nutshell
• Blockchain: Introduction to the Technology behind Shared Information
• Growth of Financial Transaction toward Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology
• A Brief Overview of Blockchain Algorithm and Its Impact upon Cloud-Connected Environment
• Solidity Essentials
• Installing Frameworks, Deploying, and Testing Smart Contracts in Ethereum Platform
• Blockchain in Healthcare Sector
• Blockchain Theories and Its Applications
• Building Permissioned Blockchain Networks Using Hyperledger Fabric
• Fraud-Resistant Crowdfunding System Using Ethereum Blockchain

Bitcoin and Blockchain: History and Current Applications By Valentina Emilia Balas, Ahmed A. Elngar, Sandeep Kumar Panda, Mohammed Kayed pdf