This chapter will serve as a warm-up session about blockchain before we dive into Ethereum and smart contract development. To really appreciate blockchain, we must understand the two pillars on which blockchain, as a technology, is firmly grounded: distributed systems and cryptography. Once we have tackled these two core concepts, we will try to understand blockchain from two different perspectives: one as a software developer and another as a trader of financial instruments. Then, we'll probe into the internal logical architecture of a block in blockchain, focusing on the bitcoin block structure and get a gentle introduction to the mining and forking process.
We conclude the chapter by discussing the evolution of blockchain ...
