Three notes from September 2018: a conceptual and motivational overview of blockchain, a private Ethereum chain deployed on a custom Kubernetes cluster, and learning how that chain behaves by reading its metrics through Ethstats.

I wrote these while the book had a blockchain chapter in it. The chapter is cut from the 2026 rebuild. What Happened to the Blockchain Chapter covers the reasoning and where tamper-evidence actually belongs now, which turns out to be a much smaller and much more useful place than where it was being put in 2018.

The deployment notes still run. Treat them as a way to get a private chain up on a cluster, not as an argument that you should.