Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies. Peter Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ content of each transaction is encrypted to ensure that only the intended participants can see the content.

      Fabric has a modular architecture. You can add or take away components by implementing its protocol specification. Its container technology can handle most of the mainstream languages for smart contract development.

      Investigating the Iroha project

Hyperledger’s Iroha project is built on the work completed in the Fabric project. It’s meant to complement Fabric, Sawtooth, and the other projects under Hyperledger. Hyperledger added the Iroha project because the other projects didn’t have any infrastructure projects written in C++. Not having a C++ project severely limited how many people could benefit from the work on Hyperledger and the number of developers who could contribute to the project.

      Besides, most blockchain development at this point has been at the lowest infrastructure level, and there has been little to no development work on user interaction or mobile applications. Hyperledger believes that Iroha is necessary for the popularization of blockchain technology. This project fills the gap in the market by bringing in more developers and providing libraries for mobile user interface development.

      Iroha’s iOS, Android, and JavaScript libraries provide supportive functions like digitally signing transactions. It’s handy for commercial app development, and it adds new layers of security and business models that are only possible with blockchain technology.

      Sumeragi’s consensus algorithm

      Blockchains have systems that allow them to first agree on a single version of the truth and then record that agreed-upon truth in their ledger. An agreement system is called a consensus. A consensus is complicated, and grasping the nuances of how and why a consensus acts in the way it does is far more than a business professional needs to know. (If you’re curious, though, or interested in getting into cryptocurrency mining, check out Book 6.) What does matter for you are the consequences of different consensus mechanisms and how they affect what you’re doing on that particular blockchain. Iroha’s consensus, Sumeragi, is worthy of note because it’s very different from traditional blockchains.

      Here are a few key things that make Sumeragi different:

       Sumeragi does not have a cryptocurrency.

       Nodes that start consensus are added into the system by the Fabric member services. Nodes build a reputation over time based on how they’ve interacted with the ledger. This is a permission blockchain run by known entities.

       New entries are added to the ledger in a unique way. The first node that starts consensus, called the leader, broadcasts the entry to a group of other nodes; those nodes then validate. If they don’t validate, the first node will rebroadcast after a predetermined duration of time.

Depending on your use case for blockchain, Iroha may be positive or negative. If you’re worried about censorship, Iroha may not be right for you. In this case, you’ll be better off looking at a blockchain that is censorship resistant. If you’re worried about other players on the network committing arbitrage, Iroha may also not be right — further investigation is needed. If you want to know all the players in your blockchain, Iroha may be exactly what you’re looking for.

      Developing mobile apps

      

Skip this section if you aren’t part of the app development space.

      Iroha is built for web and mobile app developers so they can access the strengths of the Hyperledger systems. The Iroha team saw that having a distributed ledger wasn’t useful if there were no applications utilizing it.

      Iroha was developed for the following encapsulated C++ components:

       Sumeragi consensus library

       Ed25519 digital signature library

       SHA-3 hashing library

       Iroha transaction serialization library

       P2P broadcast library

       API server library

       iOS library

       Android library

       JavaScript library

       Blockchain explorer/data visualization suite

      One of the major hurdles of the blockchain industry has been in making systems user-friendly. Iroha has created open-source software libraries for iOS, Android, and JavaScript and made common application programming interface (API) functions convenient to all.

      Diving into Sawtooth

      Sawtooth by Intel is another distributed ledger project in Hyperledger. It’s focused on being a highly modular platform for building new distributed ledgers for companies.

      Sawtooth does not operate with a cryptocurrency. It maintains the security of the platform by allowing businesses to create private blockchains. These businesses running private blockchains then share the burden of computational requirements with the network. In its documentation, Sawtooth states that this type of setup will ensure universal agreement on the state of the shared ledger.

Sawtooth has taken the basic model of blockchains and turned it on its head. Most blockchains have three elements:

       A shared record of the current state of the blockchain

       A way of inputting new data

       A way of agreeing on that data

      Sawtooth merges the first two into a signal process it calls a transaction family. This model is best in use cases where all the participating parties have a mutual benefit to having a correct record.

      Intel has allowed its software to be flexible enough to accommodate custom transaction families that reflect the unique requirements of each business. It also built three templates for building digital assets.

       EndPointRegistry: A place to record items in a blockchain

       IntegerKey: A shared ledger that is used for supply chain management

       MarketPlace: A blockchain trading platform for buying, selling, and trading digital assets

      Exploring the consensus algorithm: Proof of Elapsed Time

      The consensus algorithm for Sawtooth is called proof of elapsed time (PoET). It was built to run in a secure area of the main processor of your computer, called a trusted execution environment (TEE). PoET leverages the security of the TEE to prove that time has passed by time-stamping transactions.

      Other consensus algorithms have some kind of time-stamping element as well. The way they ensure that the records have not been changed is through publicly publishing their blockchains as proof that they have not been СКАЧАТЬ