Building dapps on Ethereum – part 2: smart contracts

This is the second post in my series about building decentralised apps (dapps) on Ethereum. In this post we will cover installation and configuration of the development environment for coding, compiling and testing smart contracts. You’ll also learn how to set up two different Ethereum blockchains on your local computer, firstly with testrpc for automated testing and secondly with geth which is a full-spec client for more advanced needs. Continue reading “Building dapps on Ethereum – part 2: smart contracts” →

Brave – my new web browser

I have for the longest of times been a Firefox user. I love what Mozilla, the foundation behind Firefox, has done to bring more freedom, transparency, privacy and security to the web. But there’s a lot more work to be done because online monetization is centered around tracking user behavior by compromising on users’ privacy and security with methods like browser fingerprinting, third-party cookies and malicious online advertisements. And yet, no web browser out-of-the-box do a good job of protecting the user against these things, special plug-ins or configuration is needed which is a barrier for many people. And yet, the fundamental problem is still not solved, i.e. limited options for publishers to monetizing their content. Continue reading “Brave – my new web browser” →

Building dapps on Ethereum – part 1: overview

In this blog post series I’m going to cover how to build decentralised applications, so called “dapps”, for the Ethereum network. Specifically for Ethereum’s latest release called Homestead. We will cover topics such as the development environment, essential blockchain concepts, how to develop so called smart contracts, the user interface, automated testing, and the importance of Ethereum browsers such as Status.im. In this very first part I’m providing an overview of the bigger picture of how things relate to each other. Continue reading “Building dapps on Ethereum – part 1: overview” →

What’s the cost of using blockchains?

In the past few weeks I’ve written about that blockchains are a kind of distributed ledger, and how they can be useful. But in these posts I left with a few unanswered questions that I’ll try to answer here.

So far everything about blockchains seem wonderful. Blockchains will allow software, people and organisations to transact with each other in more transparent and democratic ways where authenticity can be verified in a decentralised manner. If more software was built like this we would no longer need to pay with freedom, privacy and surveillance. But what do we have to pay with instead? There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Continue reading “What’s the cost of using blockchains?” →

A practical example of benefits using blockchain technology

What we will discover in this blog post are some practical examples of how the social economics of any organisation can benefit with more auditable democracy and decentralised processes using blockchain technology. I’m writing this post in the context of the Iron Blogger (IB) organisation, but these concepts can of course scale to almost any type and size of organisation. Continue reading “A practical example of benefits using blockchain technology” →