Blockchain technology was born with the invention of Bitcoin—a new form of peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic cash—back in 2008. The Bitcoin white paper was released on October 31, 2008 and the first release of Bitcoin came on January 3, 2009. The blockchain space is still a toddler in terms of adoption and the tools available. It has some unique properties that did not exist before in any of the previous systems or software applications. The most important property of blockchain is establishing trust between two or multiple parties without needing any intermediaries, which opens a new era in programming.
Ethereum is one of the implementations of blockchain. Ethereum is an open source, public, and distributed computing platform. On Ethereum, developers can deploy smart contracts written in the Solidity language and build a decentralized application—also called dApp, Ðapp, Dapp, or DApp.
Smart contracts are small programs where developers can define the rules of the trust that they intended to code. One of the mind-boggling properties of smart contracts is immutability—once they are deployed on the blockchain, their code cannot be changed. This immutable property makes it very hard to program smart contracts and predict errors/bugs beforehand.
In this chapter, we will learn more about blockchain technology, and when and where blockchains should be used. We will also introduce Ethereum and smart contracts.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Introduction to blockchain
- Properties of a blockchain
- What is Ethereum?
- Introduction to smart contracts
- Why smart contracts are different from traditional software programs