Mayukh Mukhopadhyay - Ethereum Smart Contract Development

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First published: February 2018

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Mayukh Mukhopadhyay started his career as a BI developer. After the 2008-09 financial crisis, he was at Tata Consultancy Services for one of their Fortune 500 clients in the telecom sector. Holding a master's in software engineering from Jadavpur University, he is presently working as a data insight developer, where he focuses on applying data science and machine learning to raw telecom equipment logs to generate business insights. He has a varied list of academic interests, ranging from audio signal processing, structural bioinformatics, and bio-inspired algorithms to consciousness engineering. Apart from being an Oracle Certified Specialist, he is a Certified Bitcoin Professional, recognized by C4 (Crypto Currency Certification Consortium). He tries to apply blockchain as a technology to different business domains.

To my guide @JUDr Parama Bhaumik your lectures on distributed systems were my main inspiration while writing this book.

To my professional network connections Ivan Liljeqvist, Dug Campbell, Mahesh Murthy, Kaushik Sathupadi, Ravinder Deol, Narayan Prusty, and Thomas Wiesnerthanks for your blogs and vlogs. This book is as much your creation as it is mine.

Daniel Kraft studied applied mathematics and theoretical physics in Graz, Austria, where he obtained his PhD from the University of Graz in 2015. After that, he started as a software engineer in Zurich, Switzerland. He has been very interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since 2011 and involved in Bitcoin development since 2013. Since 2014, he has been the main developer for Namecoin and Huntercoin, and has successfully reimplemented both on top of the modern Bitcoin Core code base. Wherever possible, Daniel also contributed improvements to the upstream Bitcoin Core. He has published multiple research articles in peer-reviewed journals, two of them directly related to cryptocurrency.

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If you are reading this line, I want to congratulate you because you have already overcome the most difficult hurdle in the pursuit of the understanding blockchain, and specifically, Ethereum smart contracts. This hurdle is the overwhelming hype surrounding this promising yet premature technology and trying to know what is really going on under the hood.

I am a software developer, and through my book, which you are viewing in your electronic device or physically holding in your hand, we will together embark on a fascinating journey through this enigmatic and revolutionary technology.

The chapters in this book have been arranged in an incremental fashion. We start with a gentle introduction to blockchain using the familiar bitcoin, and quickly dive into the world of Ethereum and the major players in its ecosystem.

Then we proceed to do some hands-on coding of a typical "Hello World" smart contract. We then take on the subject of decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized applications, and smart contract optimization. We also analyze two famous multi-million-dollar hacks that recently occurred in the Ethereum community, along with the preventive measures employed to avoid them in future.

We then move on to the intricacies of the solidity programming language and web3.js library.

The final chapters mainly deal with the development of standardized tokens, the concept of initial coin offering, potential enterprise use cases of smart contracts, designing a decentralized micro-blogging platform, and surfing the dark web marketplace.