Pass Blockchain CBSA Exam in First Attempt Easily

Introduction

1. What is a Certified Blockchain Solutions Architect (CBSA)?

What is a CVSA? Well, CVSA is a certified Blockchain Solutions Architect. Now, the Certified Blockchain Solutions Architect Exam is an elite way for you to demonstrate your knowledge and skills in blockchain. Now, this exam was really meant for the presales arena. This is primarily intended for IT professionals who are not necessarily involved in blockchain implementation. This is not a developer exam. So it's actually pretty passable for most folks who are at least technically in nature.You don't have to be a developer or a coder to pass this blockchain exam. So once you pass, you'll become a member of Blockchain Leaders. When it comes to the CVSA, it is professionally delivered by a Pearson testing center. Once you pass the exam, you will then be knowledgeable from a pre-sales perspective about blockchain technology. Now, this exam is going to really provide insight into whether or not you can architect blockchain solutions, that you can effectively work with other blockchain engineers and technical leaders, and that you're able to choose appropriate blockchain systems. For example, do you choose Hyperledger or do you choose Quarter? Do you choose Ethereum? What is the best option for your use case in order to work effectively in public and permission blockchains? The goal of the exam is just to make sure that you know the basics of blockchain and that you have a good idea of which direction to go with specifying. Do I go with a theorem or should I go for my customer with Hyperledger? Again, it's not meant to be a developer exam. I encourage everyone who isn't a developer to take it, because it's very possible with some basic study. With that said, I really hope you become a CVSA. I'm here to get you started. Let's go ahead and continue and start talking about the content more throughout the course. Bye.

2. CBSA Exam Questions

Let's talk about the exam questions. Now, the exam questions for the CVSA exam are going to be 70 questions and are multiple choice. You'll get 90 minutes to pass the exam, which is actually more than enough because the multiple choice questions are pretty straightforward. Some of them may be a little challenging forfolks, but overall they're actually very good questions. The cost for the exam is $300 in US. That is. I'm not sure as far as cost overseas if that's exactly the same amount or not, but from what I've read, it looks like it's about $300 overseas. However, the discount code I'm going to provide you is good for any exam from Blockchain Training Alliance and any study guide, as well as any other course as well. So the discount code is going to be provided at the end of the course and will also be on my Blockchain Exports website as well. The exam is proctored and not open book.When you go to the Proctor Center, you'll need to bring your ID. You'll have to sit down at a computer terminal and take the exam. No open books, no internet access, no smartphones Again, you'll have all the materials for success by the end of the course. Let's go ahead and move on and get into the objectives.

3. Exam Tested Objectives

Let's go ahead and talk about the exam objectives. One of the things the BTA did was clearly define the objectives so that you have an idea of what you're going to be preparing for and what you'll take on this exam. Let's go ahead and cover these objectives. The first is the difference between proof of stake, proof of work, and other proof systems and why these consensus methods exist. That will be the first set of objectives. Then we'll move on and talk about cryptocurrency and why we generally want to have cryptocurrency—or maybe why we don't need it. For example, in a permission blockchain, we'll talk about the difference between public, private, and permission blockchains. We'll then move on and talk about how blocks are written to the blockchain as well. We'll talk about cryptography. Cryptography is actually very critical to cryptocurrency and blockchain, of course. It's one of the three main areas we're going to focus on to get you ready for the CBSA exam. As far as parts of a blockchain we'll need to discuss, we'll talk about common use cases for public blockchains and then move on and talk about common use cases for private and permissioned blockchains. We're going to talk about what you would need to launch your own blockchain as well as the problems and considerations involved in working with public blockchains. When we talk about public blockchains, we're going to mainly focus on Ethereum. However, we will talk about Bitcoin, for example, briefly as well. The course is really focused on ethereum and hyper ledger, and those are really the two blockchains you'll be tested on with a couple of questions, mainly on bitcoin, and I'll focus on those areas deeply as well. Now, we'll talk about the technology behind common blockchains; for example, we'll talk about Ethereum, Hyperledger, and Bitcoin. One of the things, though, about Bitcoin is that even though we're not going to focus on it from an enterprise perspective, we have to keep on comparing it to it because Bitcoin was the original blockchain, satoshiNakamoto We definitely want to know that name and why Bitcoin is so important. Talk about mining and when it is needed and when it is not. We'll get into Byzantine fault tolerance and talk about the Byzantine generals problem as well. We're going to talk about consensus, and we'll get into hashing and go through some demonstrations of how hashing works as well. We'll proceed on and talk about addresses, public keys, and private keys. We'll need to know the public key infrastructure, and one of the things we want to get into is certificates as well. We'll then get into what a smart contract is and why a smart contract is important. We'll talk about security in general, and now we'll talk about wallet security, such as the types of wallets we'll need to keep track of. We'll talk about the history of blockchain, and then we'll talk about programming languages. Now this is the extent, really, of programming and development, which are really two line items. However, there are sections on that, but I'm going to cover, for example, areas you're going to want to know, such as solidity and go. Lane, you don't need to know how to programme the code. It's just more about identifying. Aetherium uses Solidity, and Hyperledger uses Golang. But you could develop smart contracts, for example, in Hyperledger with JavaScript as well. So we'll talk about the testing and deployment practises of blockchain-based applications, and we'll get into, for example, what MetaMask is around Ethereum and Hyperledger composer for Hyperledger. Now we're ready to dive into the crash course. We're ready to help get you certified. I'm so excited that you're on this journey. Let's go ahead and jump in and get started.

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Blockchain 101

1. Blockchain Terminology

Let's go ahead and cover some blockchain terminology. A lot of this terminology will be used repeatedly throughout the course and on the CBSA exam. The first is a block. Think of a block as an ordered set of transactions. In other words, if you have twelve transactions, those transactions are going to be essentially linked to a block. Essentially, that's on a channel. Now, when we talk about a channel, this is more or less in the hyperledger world, but you could also think of it as a blockchain and other blockchains. For example, like the Aetherium block, this is again an ordered set of transactions. In other words, you have, for example, a miner who might be mining a bunch of transactions, and those transactions have to be placed in an order. And this is part of the general blockchain consensus that's going to figure this out generally.But part of that is to create a chain. And so when we have a bunch of blocks that are in order, we call that a blockchain. For example, you have block one, block two, and block three, and they're going to be cryptographically linked. Essentially you have the hash and then youhave the hash of the previous hash. We have a couple hashing demos in the course. So you'll see exactly how this works when we get into the demo part. Chain Code: Now that chain code is essentially in the world of IBM and Hyperledger, blockchains Basically, we have what is called a smart contract. Basically a smart contract is chain code. In Hyperledger, we have what's called a channel. A channel is a private blockchain overlay. I like to talk about. A channel is more like a VPN tunnel, where that tunnel has its own log and has its own point-to-point connectivity. That's sort of similar to what a channel is in the blockchain world: an endorsement. This is essentially the process where peer nodes are going to execute the chain code and return a proposal response to the application. In other words, that transaction has to be basically acknowledged as good. And then a membership service provider is what's going to provide the membership services on a hyperledger fabric blockchain. and then we have participants. So a participant in any blockchain could be any of a number of entities that are out there. But think of a participant as someone who can interact with the blockchain services. And then we have what's called the "world state," another term that's used in essentially Hyperledger but also in other blockchains like Ethereum. The "world state" is basically the current state of the blockchain. So just learn these terms. There's going to be some more terms we're going to cover. But I just wanted to cover some of the basic ones we're going to run into over and over again throughout the course.

2. Blockchain Components

Let's talk about key components of a blockchain. Now we know that blockchain is really not one technology, but more of a blend of numerous technologies. Mainly, we have cryptography, a peer-to-peer network, shared ledger, consensus algorithms, validity rules, and a virtual machine. Now, when we consider these key components, we know that cryptography, for example, is going to typically use PKI or some kind of public key combination like a private key and public key PKI peer-to-peer network is going to use a peer-to-peer network protocol that may use IPFS storage, for example; it all depends on the blockchain. a shared digital ledger. For example. In Aetherium, that ledger is shared. But in the world of hyperledger, that ledger is not shared, and its algorithms are not transparent consensus algorithms.So for example, we may have proof of work, proof of stake hashgraph, or whatever we're using. Now, with validity rules, we have to have a way to validate transactions. In other words, in hyperledger, for example, we needto validate that the transaction is valid, that themember has a membership certificate and a transaction certificateto be able to make a transaction. For example, there's also an EOV processthat it goes through, for example. And then we're going to need a virtual machine or container service to be able to run these services for the blockchain. Some of the key components, for example, are the cryptography we need for transactions to essentially record, encrypt, and secure the transactions between tiers and a blockchain. And therefore, because of cryptography, we don't need to have a centralised authority. So this rules out some of the intermediaries. Now, when it comes to peer-to-peer networks, we have to have the ability to put together our networks and communicate between the peers. We don't want to have, for example, client serverapproach where we need to go back to aserver to get a request or fulfil a request. Once again, that's a peer-to-peer network. The workloads are shared, for example, too, on apeer to peer blockchain, typically that ledger is goingto be distributed between all the nodes. This distributed ledger, for example, is a data structure. It is shared among each of the nodes. In Aetherium, for example, each node will typically have a complete copy of the blockchain. When it comes to consensus, one of the things to pay attention to is that consensus methods in general are very different. However, the goal is to reach an agreement. That's really the main thing for the consensus algorithm: to help the nodes reach an agreement, and as part of that agreement, the consensus helps reach what is called a "world state." Some of the other components, such as validity rules, require us to be able to identify how the users and the transactions will be validated. For example, Hyperledger and Ethereum are very different, and we'll talk about those blockchains throughout the course. Virtual machines. Now in the case of Ethereum and Bitcoin they use VMs. Ethereum uses the Ethereum virtual machine, a fully automated machine. We'll talk a lot more about Ethereum Evans as well, in the Ethereum part of the course. Well, let's go ahead and move on. Now, since we have a good grasp of the major components, we're going to be talking about each of these components in different ways throughout the course. Now remember, Ethereum and Hyperledger are very different, so we need to understand that these two blockchains have a different mission and therefore handle things very differently. However, from a permissionless standpoint, the exam will cover Ethereum and, to a lesser extent, Bitcoin. And then, if we're talking about permissioned blockchains, we're going to focus solely on hyperledger fabric. Let's go ahead and move on.

3. Objective - The difference between proof of work, proof of stake, and other....

Let's talk about the difference between proof of work, proof of stake, and other proof systems and why they exist. The first thing to understand is that "proof of work," "proof of stake," "POS," "hash," "graph," and so on are all types of blockchain consensus. We first need to understand what consensus is. Consensus is a dynamic way of reaching an agreement in a group. Basically, the nodes have to agree on the fact that this transaction is valid or not. And in most blockchains, it has to have full consensus, meaning that every node needs to agree. When it comes to reaching an agreement, the main thing that the agreement should provide is these two areas of concern. The first is safety, and the second is liveliness. Now, safety is going to essentially guarantee that each node has the same input and will result in the same output. Consistency is really important here. Liveliness means availability. In other words, it's hard to makea transaction when the nodes aren't available. So we need to have both of those areas covered. From a consensus point of view on the exam, you can expect a question that's going to talk about one of these specific consensus requirements. I'll leave it up to you to memorise these. I can't tell you which one, but you'll see it again.

Okay, let's talk about mining. Now, we'll revisit mining a few times throughout the course. But for this specific objective, I just want to talk briefly about what mining is and why it's important. And then we're going to get into proof of work and how that utilises mining. Now, Bitcoin mining is essentially adding transactions to the ledger. Essentially, the blockchain does what it servesthe transaction history as part of itstransparency that it also provides as well. But basically, the past transactions are called a "blockchain," and that blockchain provides transparency. The blockchain also serves to confirm that the transactions are completed. The nodes are going to be able to distinguish between a good transaction and a not-so-good transaction. Now, in the world of mining, especially Bitcoin mining, it is called mining because it resembles hard work. In other words, these bitcoin miners are mining using very expensive GPUs and ASICs, in the sense that they have to provide a lot of resources to be able to mine that bitcoin and get rewarded. It's not that simple. It's very competitive. Whether it's ethereum, litecoin, or bitcoin, for example, it's very competitive, and therefore proof of work is very intensive in the resources that it uses. So how does mining really work? Well, generally a reward is going to be given when a block is discovered. That is when the miner discovers an output that corresponds to what is required to complete the transaction. The bounty is 25 bitcoins right nowand it'll get halved after so manyblocks, which right now is 210,000 blocks. The miner also can get awarded fees as well. So when you send a bitcoin, it might bea half a percent or a percent, depending onthe time, what you agree to and the timeof day and the exchange you're using, et cetera. But those fees can vary, and the fee is an incentive for the miner to include your transaction in the block that is going to be mined. So let's talk about these different algorithms. Now when it comes to proof of work, proof of stake, DPOs, and BFTS, these are going to be referenced quite a bit throughout the exams. We're going to cover these.

There are also more algorithms, but we don't really talk a whole lot about those. and the reason is because they're not going to be on the exam. So you don't have to worry about proof of activity or anything like that. Now, proof of work, thisis the first blockchain consensus. This was released by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 in his white paper, and in 2009 when the bitcoin blockchain went live, basically you had to have nodes to be able to create blocks. Proof of work works on asystem of the longest chain wins. In other words, it's like a marathon. In other words, whoever does the most work and gets the most done will win the race to get rewarded. However, the downside to proof of work is that it's very costly. It takes significant compute resources to beable to process and compete on abitcoinblockchain is environmentally unfriendly because thepower requirements is very expensive. Some of the blockchains that are using proof-of-work right now are Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. The proof of stake is now different. In other words, the blocks are not created by miners; instead, the blocks are not mined; they're minted. And therefore, it's sort of similar to you going to a horse race and saying, "I think this horse is going to win." And instead of a horse, it's a block. And, in essence, you're going to bet money; you're going to stake that this block will win. This is essentially similar to how it works, and the proof of stake is a little bit different. It is cheaper to, of course, run these nodes. It doesn't use a lot of electricity compared to proof of work.

Pure Coin is a good example of this. Aetherium will eventually transition to a form of proof of stake as well. At the time of writing, that still has not occurred, but probably by about 2020 it'll be ready to go. Now we have delegated proof of stake. So-called DPOS, as it's known, is where miners collaborate to make blocks instead of competing. In other words, this is a team effort, whereas proof of work and proof of stake are more competitive. Again, it's sort of like running individually versus playing softball. This is again a little bit different, a different type of sport. Now. D-POS is fast. It's a very fast blockchain consensus. It's cheap as well from a transaction standpoint. On the exam, some common blockchains that use it are Steam and EOS. What I'd like you to remember are the benefits of most of these consensuses we're going to talk about. The benefits are usually what you'll be tested on when it comes to BFT, otherwise known as by-and-fault tolerance. This is a classic problem in distributed computing, where you generally have a bunch of nodes that are just not able to reach consensus. To solve that problem, we need to have a way to manage consensus, a way to get these notes to work together. And that was solved with something called Byzantine fault tolerance. This is where you have pre-selected nodes rather than generals, which we call nodes. But again, the correlation is similar. In the Byzantine generals problem, we basically have an issue where you might have 6810 generals surrounding a city or castle. And the question is, how do all of those generals communicate and agree on a time to attack the city or the castle? Now, this was especially hard back in the days when there was no communication, such as electronic-based communications. As a result, the Byzantine general problem arose. It is efficient as far as this algorithm. It has high throughput, but it's highly centralised as well.

Hyperledger, Ripple, and Stellar use a form of BFT. Then we have what's called a Dag. A DAG is really not a blockchain in the truest sense of the word, but it's referenced that way. And you'll likely see this again on the exam, on one question. So I wanted to cover it. DAGS are basically a form of consensus that doesn't use a blockchain data structure. And this is all asynchronous, whereas typically a blockchain is a synchronous event. Think of this as an approach to parallelizing your transactions. It's very fast, no question about it. IOTA and Hashgraph are two examples of blockchain services that use it. Then we have poets. Poetry is a little different. One thing to note about POET, which is known as proof of lapse time, is that it's a proprietary consensus. It's managed by intel and intel.You have to have their specific processing units to be able to use this consensus algorithm. So just be aware. Now, Poet is actually utilized, for example, in the Hyperledger Framework, and that's used specifically in the HyperledgerSawtooth.

It can be found in saw tooth, for example. It is pluggable, and it does provide scalability and good fault tolerance, and it's very efficient overall. But it is a proprietary-based algorithm because you need to have an Intel platform to use it. And here's a chart to sum up the pros and cons of the exam. I'm going to recommend that you take a look at the top four or five and memorise as much as you can. Once again, you'll want to know the cons. Proof of work is slow, whereas proof of stake is very energy efficient. So if you get a question asking what consensus is very efficient environmentally, it would not be proof of work; it would be proof of stake. Now, Poet uses what's called specialised hardware. It's by intel. Now, delegated proof of stake is centralised, but it's fast and efficient. And again, take a look at this chart. This should help you out quite a bit. And then there are some practise questions. Now, I'm going to go ahead and leave it up to you to answer the practise questions. The answers are highlighted, thePDF that you downloaded. So you go back and reference the practise questions that are available. Let's go ahead and move on to the next module.

4. Cryptocurrency Needed or not?

Let's go ahead and talk about why cryptocurrency is needed on certain blockchains. Really good question. Well, first of all, we want to understand what a cryptocurrency is. Digital currency is secured using cryptography. Generally, they're mined, they're reminted, and they're not printed. Examples, of course, would be BitCoin, Manero, LiteCoin, etc. Now, for the exam, we're going to focus on bitcoin, which is actually a cryptocurrency, and ether, which is actually a token. And again, there's a lot of confusion out there over Ether being a cryptocurrency. It's traded like one. However, it's really a token, and that was the original purpose of Ether. Now we have an initial coin offering. This is an event where a new cryptocurrency is introduced and tokens are sold before the cryptocurrency is released to the general public, similar to an IPO. When we compare digital currencies, for example, we want to know what they are first of all and why they're important. But also, when we compare it to a blockchain, it's actually very different. In other words, a blockchain is something we want to think of as a platform. It's really what's enabling the cryptocurrency. So Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency; it's on the Bitcoin protocol, which is the blockchain; and it has its own VMs and nodes, I should say. But with that said, for example, Hyperledger does not have a cryptocurrency, but it is a platform.

When it comes to crypto, for example, we want to think of a blockchain down the bottom, and the blockchain is going to be where the nodes are running, where the consensus is running, and then we're going to have a protocol that is going to be generally part of consensus as well. And again, depending on the blockchain, like in Aetherium, we're going to need to have our EVMs running on the blockchain. And that protocol is the Ethereumblockchain protocol. And then, for example, we have a token, which would be Ether. That ether is what's actually being paid to utilise the resources on the Ethereumblockchain, for example. So what is the difference? Think of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that uses a peer-to-peer platform that is a blockchain. So for example, Theorem is a platform, and Ether is a cryptocurrency. Now, one of the things on the exam is: don't get confused between Ethereum and Ether. They're really two different things, and when it comes to what the difference is, I like to just compare a blockchain to a train track. In other words, we have tracks, and those tracks are going to do what they're going to do—let the train ride on them. So, like the Ethereumblockchain, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency token. Again, the cryptos are trained on the track. These are the applications that are being enabled, and that's the key here. Now, another thing to think about here is: is the blockchain permissioned or is it permissionless? So generally, permissionless systems such as Bitcoin or Ethereum all have a token. of cryptocurrency that is used to pay for the resources on the blockchain.

So we have to have some way to pay for those resources. Now, if it's an enterprise, that enterprise is going to be forking over all the resources and therefore doesn't need a cryptocurrency because it's not sharing those resources. Now, the consortium could be a little different, but it would still function as a private blockchain. But for example, an enterprise blockchain could perform what's called an "off chain" to a payment gateway if it wanted to. So, essentially, blockchain serves a purpose by acting as a technological platform for cryptocurrencies. Basically, you could still have a blockchain and no cryptocurrency, but you really can't have a cryptocurrency without a blockchain. Again, in general, blockchains that are cryptocurrencies are essentially tokens that are used within the network to send value and pay for transactions. For example, in the world of Ethereum, we have Ether blockchains that are private and generally don't need a cryptocurrency. So the main objective here is to understand if the blockchain is private, in which case the need for cryptocurrency is probably diminished. not always the case. There are companies that, for example, are using Aetherium and the Ethereum platform to build their own cryptocurrency on top of it. But with that said, it's really up in the air in most cases. But generally, if you have a blockchain and it's private, it's an enterprise blockchain. You'll almost certainly be utilisingblockchain, such as Hyper Ledger Fabric or R3 Quarter. You don't need cryptocurrencies. The enterprise is going to control everything, and therefore permissionless is not going to be in the vocabulary. There are a few practise questions here. Bitcoin's blockchain is a blank slate. Remember, we talked about which one is the enabler and which one is enabled. The answers are in the documentation. I'll just let you practise and figure it out. Here's another one as well. Let's go ahead and move on.

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