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Ethereum Smart Contract Development

You're reading from  Ethereum Smart Contract Development

Product type Book
Published in Feb 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788473040
Pages 288 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Profile icon Mayukh Mukhopadhyay

Table of Contents (18) Chapters

Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
1. Blockchain Basics 2. Grokking Ethereum 3. Hello World of Smart Contracts 4. A Noob's Guide to DApps and DAO 5. Deep-Diving into Smart Contracts 6. Solidity in Depth 7. Primer on Web3.js 8. Developing a Cryptocurrency from Scratch 9. Enterprise Use Cases 10. BaaS and the Dark Web Market 11. Advanced Topics and the Road Ahead 1. Other Books You May Enjoy Index

Ethereum block, mining, and forking


Before we dive into the details of Ethereum block architecture, we need to revisit the blockchain structure of Ethereum. In Chapter 1, Blockchain Basics, we learned that an Ethereum blockchain is a Merkle tree where the leaves represent execution states of a code. For the sake of simplicity, a finer detail was suppressed. The Merkle tree of Ethereum is not a binary Merkle tree, as we saw for the bitcoin blockchain. You see, binary Merkle trees are great data structures when it comes to authenticating information that is in a list format, that is, a series of data chunks placed one after another. For such a transaction tree, it really doesn't matter how long it takes to edit the tree after it gets created. This is because the transactions remain in a form of one frozen tree which can only keep growing.

Ethereum, on the other hand, is a state tree. Here, the situation is more complex. The state in Ethereum is represented as a key-value map where the key signifies...

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