Creating a Testnet Using Geth

With Frontier (finally) launched more and more people are flocking to the development of the Ethereum Distributed Apps or “DAPPs” as we like to call them.

While it’s completly feasible to develop your apps against the Frontier network it is probably safer, and lighter on your wallet, to develop them on your own private network.

Let’s see how we can create our own network to develop on using Geth and a custom genesis file.

Ethereum and the Human Element

tl;dr Don’t be a dick.

There is something I wanted to get of my mind for the past months. I’ve been having trouble finding the exact words to explain how I feel but I will give it a go anyway. Be warned; rant incoming.

Creating Your Own Ethereum Apps Using Eth-go

Edit in 2015: I’m keeping this up for historical reasons. Although most of the concepts are the same this tutorial won’t work anymore with recent Ethereum versions.

The modular nature of Go and the Ethereum Go implementation, eth-go, make it very easy to build your own Ethereum based applications.

This post will show you the minimal steps required to build your own Ethereum based application.

Ethereum ÐApps for Web Developers - Writing Your Own Currency

Edit in 2015: I’m keeping this up for historical reasons. Although most of the concepts are the same this tutorial won’t work anymore with recent Ethereum versions.

We are currently working hard on Ethereum’s fifth proof-of-concept release. This release is centered around extendablity and adds important features like a public Javascript (or Go) and JSON-RPC APIs.

With these additions it becomes easier for people familiar with web development technologies to start writing distributed applications (ÐApps) on top of Ethereum.

This post will walk you through the process of building a small ÐApp: your very own alt-coin build on top of Ethereum. Everybody who knows his way around Javascript & HTML / CSS and who has read (or at least glanced at) the Ethereum whitepaper should be able to successfuly complete this tutorial. I won’t be using any external Javascript libraries in this tutorial to keep things easy to understand but please note that you can use jQuery, Angular and any other extension and it will work just fine.

At the end of this tutorial you will have an app that looks something like this.

Let’s get started!

Ethereum Building Blocks - Part 1: RLP

In this series of blog posts I will try to write more about the parts that, when combined, make up the new cryptocurrency for social contracts Ethereum.

I write these posts mostly for myself to make sure I really understand the content but I reckon it might also be helpful as an introduction to anybody who wants to get involved with the development.

In this first installment I will be focussing on the serialization format used in Ethereum: Recursive Length Prefix (RLP).

Please note that I will be using ruby and the ruby-rlp gem as a reference in the code examples although the encoding part should be the same regardless of language.

Account Management Using OneName

How many website accounts have you created over the last few years? Take a moment and really think about it.

If you are anything like me this number is probably somewhere past 100. In recent years signing up got a little better since services like OAuth gave us the tools to at least re-use some of the wasted seconds signing up for a service and use this account for the next service we want to register to. The problem with this solution though is that your account and thus identify is still managed by a centralised entity.

Blockchain Powered Democracy

I’m an avid reader of science-fiction novels. The great thing about science-fiction is that it’s all fiction, up to the point that time catches up and the fiction part is left behind in favor of the science part.

Alastair Reynolds’s excellent book The Prefect describes a post-human community where democracy is being performed in it’s optimal, or at least most democratic, way. He describes that all humans are connected to a network that runs thousands of polls every day and which every participant of the network can vote on. Decisions for the community are based on the voting results for each poll.

Although being hooked up to a giant computer that feeds me polls all day long doesn’t seem that realistic, having a open and transparent way to register votes is something our current society could probably benefit from as well. Let’s explore how far our current technology can take us to achieving this democratic dream (hell?).