You're reading from Blockchain Quick Reference

Product typeBook

Published inAug 2018

Reading LevelIntermediate

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781788995788

Edition1st Edition

Languages

Solidity

Tools

Ethereum

Concepts

Blockchain

Authors (4):

Mariko Amekodommo

Brenn Hill

Samanyu Chopra

Paul Valencourt

View More author details

Alternate Blockchains

In the previous chapters, we learned about blockchain, its structure, components, mechanism and the biggest use case of blockchain, Bitcoins. In the last chapter, we discussed cryptocurrency wallets, and their role and usage with a blockchain. Most of our discussion surrounds Bitcoins and other cryptocurrency.

The success of Bitcoin brought a lot of attention to the technology and the underlying blockchain ledger system, and the community started creating alternate cryptocurrency based on blockchain, making slight modifications to the parameters of Bitcoin, each time trying to improve in one way or another. Subsequently, various organizations started creating alternatives to blockchain by making slight modifications or changes but keeping the core definition of blockchain, that being a public ledger, intact. Some of the projects trying to create alternative...

Various uses of blockchain

Distributed ledger technology is said to be the biggest revolution in computers after the internet; blockchain is and will be revolutionizing and impacting on each individual in years to come.

Blockchain is used in currency-related applications such as Bitcoins and Altcoins, but, apart from that, there are various other use cases of blockchain in other industries that entail completely different monetary usage. The following diagram depicts some of the industries where blockchain is being used:

Government

Various governments across the globe are using blockchain to store public records or any other information across various government sectors, such as healthcare, identity management, taxation,...

Ripple

Ripple acts as a real-time gross settlement and remittance network built by Ripple company, and founded in 2012. It allows payments between parties in seconds. It operates with its own coin, known as Ripple (XRP), and also supports non-XRP payments. Ripple has proposed a new decentralized global network of banks and payment providers, known as RippleNet. This network uses Ripple's transaction settlement technology at its core. RippleNet is proposed to be independent of banks and payment providers, setting a standardized network for real-time payment settlement.

Ripple networks consist of various nodes that perform each of their own defined tasks. The first nodes that facilitate the system are called user nodes. The user nodes use Ripple for payment and transactions, such as to make and receive payments. The second type of node in Ripple is the validator node. These...

Stellar

The Stellar network is for the exchange of any currency, including custom tokens. Stellar has a consensus system that is more commonly known as the Stellar consensus protocol (SCP), which is based on the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). SCP is different from PoW and PoS with its prime focus to offer lower latency for faster transactions.

It has four main properties:

Decentralized property: It allows participation by anyone without any central party
Low latency: It addresses the much-desired requirement of fast transaction processing
Flexible trust: It allows users to choose which parties they trust for a specific purpose
Asymptotic security: It makes use of digital signatures and hash functions for providing the required level of security on the network

The Stellar network maintains a distributed ledger that saves every transaction and is replicated on each Stellar...

Tendermint

Tendermint provides a secure and consistent state machine replication functionality. Its main task is to develop a secure and high-performance, easily replicable state machine. It is Byzantine Fault Tolerant, that is, even if one in three of the machines fail, Tendermint will keep on working.

The two prime components of Tendermint are as follows:

The Tendermint Core: The Tendermint Core enables secure replication of transactions on each node present in the network. It is a consensus engine.
The Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP): TMSP is an application interface protocol that allows interfacing with any programming language and helps to process transactions.

The Tendermint consensus algorithm is a round-based mechanism where validator nodes initiate new blocks in each round being done. A locking mechanism is used to ensure protection against a scenario when two different...

Monax

Monax is a blockchain and a smart contract technology that was founded in 2014. It started its journey as Eris Industries, but changed its name to Monax in October of 2016.

Monax has a lot to offer. Some of these include various frameworks, SDKs, and tools that allow accelerated development of blockchains and their deployment for businesses. The idea behind the Monax application platform is to enable development of ecosystem applications that use blockchains in their backend. It also allows integration with multiple blockchains and enables various third-party systems to interact with other blockchain systems, and offers a high level of compatibility. This platform makes use of smart contracts written in solidity language. It can interact with blockchains such as Ethereum or Bitcoin. All commands are standardized for different blockchains, and the same commands can be used...

Summary

In this chapter, we were introduced to alternative blockchains. We discussed the various use cases of blockchains other than cryptocurrency. Some of these included government, healthcare, medical research, supply chains, copyright, fine art, shipping, energy, and so on. As well as this, we discussed Ripple, which is a new blockchain used for fast payments and offers various modifications and improvements compared to the Bitcoin blockchain. After that, we discussed the Stellar payment protocol and its prime properties, which help to accelerate payments in Stellar. Tendermint is another blockchain software, which was discussed and brought to our attention.

In the next chapter, we will discuss, in detail, Hyperledger and some of the prominent projects based on the Hyperledger protocol. We will also discuss detailing and other parameters of the Hyperledger protocol.

...

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Authors (4)

Mariko Amekodommo

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