Wattenhofer R. The science of the blockchain

Inverted Forest Publishing, 2016. — 123 p.FinTech developers and managers understand that the blockchain has the potential to disrupt the financial world. The blockchain allows the participants of a distributed system to agree on a common view of the system, to track changes in the system, in a reliable way. In the distributed systems community, agreement techniques have been known long before cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (where the term blockchain is borrowed) emerged. Various concepts and protocols exist, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. This book introduces the basic techniques when building fault-tolerant distributed systems, in a scientific way. We will present different protocols and algorithms that allow for fault-tolerant operation, and we will discuss practical systems that implement these techniques.