I'm Learning Hedera Hashgraph

I started this leg of my journey by going over the Hedera Consensus Service white paper. After going through it a couple of times, I decided I needed more information. Though informative, the information is a bit too brief for my purposes. I’m looking at this from a developer’s utility viewpoint, and while there is interesting content in the white paper, and the basic facts about the HCS are present, there’s not enough solid “here’s how” or even “here’s why” content to get me going. I ended up finding a better resource. Before I write about that, though, I think it prudent to go over briefly what I found in the white paper. What is the HCS? The HCS provides the timestamping and ordering of all events on Hedera. Using the hashgraph consensus algorithm, it guarantees fast, inexpensive, secure and disinterested consensus. There is (at this writing) a main network of 27 decentralized nodes that actively participate in the consensus (the mainnet). Augmenting ma

  The Hedera Token Service I continue this series with a brief examination of the Hedera Token Service (HTS). As I noted in my documentation overview , my base source of truth on HTS is the Hedera Tokenization Whitepaper . The whitepaper lays out the objectives and strategy for token management in the Hedera ecosystem. It establishes a few definitions, and discusses how tokens are deployed on Hedera. It then describes the Hedera Consensus Service's role in token management. The benefits of both the HTS and HCS are touched upon, and examples are provided. Let’s look into it it more detail. Four Key Concepts The whitepaper reviews four key concepts: tokens, token contracts, token state, and token accounts. Let's look at all four of these briefly. Tokens I couldn't be brief about tokens, since e verything revolves around tokens and token management. So I went into tokens in depth in my previous posting . That surely won't be the end of the story on tokens; w

Before I Begin, a Quick Word When you approach new technology as a tech writer, you take it for granted that you’re going to get some things wrong at the beginning. There will be great gaps in your understanding that you hope to fill along the way. Depending on your ultimate purpose -- a user guide, a cookbook article, a tutorial, or whatever -- some areas of the technology will always be uncertain to you. That’s not a problem, as you often don’t need perfect and complete knowledge to achieve your purpose. Add to this the fact that technology evolves. As a tech writer of new technology, I know that today’s truths may be tomorrow’s falsehoods. Ask any tech writer about the frustration of having to unravel several months’ worth of work to bring draft docs back into usefulness due to a new discovery or last minute development by the engineering teams. So as I begin this series of posts where I dig deeper into Hedera, I accept the fact that I may be making errant assumptions early on. Ov