Abstract

Due to the exponential growth of the blockchain community and increasing demand for the answers to questions such as "What is blockchain?" and "What are distributed ledger technologies?" I have decided it is time to write my own overview of this space and provide some of the answers.

The purpose of this documentation is to give the reader knowledge of what some of the biggest problems are facing us as a society today, and more importantly what the possible solutions are to those problems. We will look into centralized, decentralized and distributed systems. We will also give some explainers on the following: distributed ledger technologies (DLT), blockchain, Tangle, as well as how these technologies differ from one another. Subsequently, we will dive deeper into one of the most popular DLT projects - IOTA. We will take a closer look at all of its properties, what it brings to the table and how it manages to achieve all of this. We will also take a peek at how it differs from anything that we know of today and what it enables. This part of the documentation is meant for absolute beginners and it requires no prior knowledge.

After, we will move into a more technical analysis meant for C# and .NET developers, where we will show some basic examples on how to incorporate and use IOTA within these technologies.

Finally, we will conclude with a list of resources for further reading and exploring. Let's begin, shall we?