Many things have happened in recent weeks in the Ethereum ecosystem, as long as it could be difficult for an occasional observer to understand where we are and what is available there. So I would like to use my first message here to give you an overview of the tools we have built and how you can use them to build interesting things right away.
But first a short introduction: I am Alex Van de Sande and I am the main designer of the Ethereum Foundation. At Devconone, I gave a conference entitled “The blockchain against the average user” Where I have entered more details on the challenges to bring the Ethereum ecosystem to the aforementioned “average user”, one of which is the difficulty of defining what this term even means. When personal computers have been introduced, they were announced as being “To the rest of us”But the public “remains of us” that they targeted very narrow audience Interested in word processing, calculation sheets and office editing. Today, these would be considered among high level geeks, just below the type of people who are still fighting on the Meritis de Vim against Emacs. I really believe that one day, your grandmother / grandfather playing candy will use the blockchain, just like today, he uses databases and HTTPS connections without realizing it (perhaps when they convert the blue diamonds won on a cow game in another game by another editor). But at the moment, what I am working on is to bring it to this next level of users, those who can download a series of offices and understand how to use a spreadsheet but do not feel comfortable around the command lines.
So, if you consider yourself in this group, then we will guide you in certain basic activities that you can do in a few minutes in Ethereum: Build your own cryptocurrency, building your own democracy and creating a central bank in the blockchain. We jumped the tutorial “Hello World” this time, but you will be fine.
Download the Ethereum wallet
Download the latest wallet version
But enough to speak, dirty our hands with Ethereum! I could be biased, but I would say that the best place to start is the Wallet Ethereum, a multi-platform application that will allow you to send currencies based on ether and Ethereum, to create and execute contracts.
The first thing you need to do is create an Ethereum account. Everything you need is a strong password and you will get it. To do everything you need to put in an ether: but don’t worry, you don’t need much. Most of the contracts here will cost less than a tenth of an American penny. If you test it, we recommend that you go to the testnet: go to the menu Develop> Network> Testnet (Morden) then on Develop> start mine. After a few minutes, you will probably have enough ether to test anything, so you can turn it off and record your IT resources.
The portfolio only authorizes the basic mining on the testnet, but if you want to try your luck on the real net, you need a more advanced tool. It was once a heavy process, but now there are better easier tools: and we have new tools that will facilitate this process.
The allethone minor is a simple tool with two buttons: press one to start mine in your GPU and press the other to drop your rewards in a wallet. Download it from the Turbo suiteA set of electric tools created by the C ++ team to develop Ethereum applications.
If you want to create smart contracts on the live network and you cannot extract, you will need a few ethers. You can get a friend or exchange for bitcoins to a cryptoxchange. If you are a fan of Bitcoin, we suggest that you keep an eye on the Btcrelay project, A side chain testing fraud This will soon be launched and will allow rapid exchanges between Ether and Bitcoin without third party.
Create a token
The first contract we are going to create is a token. The tokens of the Ethereum ecosystem can represent any well -capable exchangeable: coins, loyalty points, golden certificates, ous, in play elements, etc. Since all tokens implement certain basic features in a standard way, this also means that your token will be instantly compatible with the Ethereum portfolio and any other customer or contract that uses the same standards.
Access the Contracts page, then click “Deploy a new contract”.
Now get the token code From there and glue it in the “source field of solidity”. If the code is compiled without any error, you should see a drop -down list “choose a contract” on the left. Get it and select the “MyTOKEN” contract. In the right column, you will see all the settings you need to customize your own token. You can modify them as you wish, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we recommend that you choose these settings: 10,000 as a supply, any name you want, “%” for a symbol and 2 decimals. Your application should look like this:
Scroll until the end of the page and you will see an estimate of the cost of calculating this contract and you can select costs on the amount of ether that you are ready to pay for this. Any excess of ether that you do not spend will be returned to you You can therefore leave the default settings if you wish. Press “Deployment”, type the password from your account and wait a few seconds for your transaction to be recovered.
You will be redirected to the first page where you can see your transaction awaiting confirmations. Click on the name named “etherbase” (your main account) and after no more than a minute, you should see that your account will show that you have 100% of the actions you have just created. To send some friends: select “Send”, then choose the motto you want to send (Ether or your newly created share), stick the address of your friend on the “TO” field and press “Send”.
If you send him to a friend, they will not see anything in their wallet. Indeed, the wallet only follows the tokens it knows, and you should add them manually. Now go to the “Contracts” tab and you should see a link for your newly created contract. Click on it to go to your page. As this is a very simple contract page, there is not much to do here, simply click on “Copy the address” and glue the address of the contract on a text editor, you will need it shortly.
To add a token to look at, go to the contracts page, then click on “Look at the token”. A contextual window will appear and you just have to stick the address of the contract. The name of token, the symbol and the decimal number must be filled automatically, but if this is not the case, you can put whatever you want (this will only affect the way it is displayed on your wallet). Once you have done this, you will automatically see any balance that you have of this token and you can send it to someone else.
And now you have your own crypto token! Tokens by themselves can be useful as Value exchange on local communitiesmeans of Keep a trace of the hours worked or other loyalty programs. But can we make sure that a currency has an intrinsic value by making it useful? Tomorrow, we will show how tokens can be used as a voting system in order to make collective decisions on the use of funds by Creation of a Democratic autonomous organization.
