Daniel Drescher

Bringing the Pieces Together

This step is the summit of this book’s intellectual journey toward an understanding of the blockchain. This step brings all these pieces and concepts together. As a result, you will gain not only an understanding of the blockchain as a whole but also see how the different concepts work together.

Planning the Blockchain

The preceding steps uncovered the relation between trust, integrity, purely distributed peer-to-peer systems, and the blockchain. As a result, you now have a good understanding of what the blockchain is, why it is needed, and what problem it solves. However, you still do not know how the blockchain works internally. This step provides a first impression of how the blockchain works by explaining the general application scenario that will guide you through the succeeding steps. It also highlights the major tasks in designing a blockchain for managing ownership and provides an overview of its major concepts.

Seeing the Big Picture

This step not only provides the big picture in which the blockchain is located, but it also highlights its location within the big picture.

Thinking in Layers and Aspects

This step lays the foundation of our learning path through the blockchain by introducing a way to organize and standardize our communication about technology. This step explains how you can analyze a software system and why it is important to consider a software system as a composition of layers. Furthermore, this step illustrates what you can gain from considering different layers in a system and how this approach helps us to understand the blockchain. Finally, this step provides a short introduction to the concept of software integrity and highlights its importance.

Seeing the Limitations

This step highlights and explains major limitations of the blockchain and why these limitations cause significant hurdles for its commercial use. This step also sketches how the limitations of the blockchain can be overcome.

Verifying and Adding Transactions

This step focuses on what happens once a node receives transaction data and how to ensure that only valid transaction data and blocks are added to the blockchain-data-structure.

Choosing a Transaction History

This step focuses on resolving conflicts among the different versions of the transaction history maintained by the individual nodes of the system.

Paying for Integrity

This step focuses on how nodes are compensated for their contribution to the integrity of the system.

Distributing the Data Store Among Peers

This step focuses on establishing a purely distributed peer-to-peer system that allows sharing of information about transactions.

Summarizing and Going Further

This step finishes this intellectual journey through the blockchain universe. After highlighting areas of further development and research, this step considers possible accomplishments of the blockchain within society. Before concluding with some comments about possible future trends in using the blockchain, this step also discusses some of its possible disadvantages.