This document serves as an introduction to blockchain development, particularly focusing on Ethereum and its potential to disrupt traditional industries by enabling decentralized applications. It covers the history and evolution of blockchain technology, the problems with centralization, the benefits of decentralization, and various implementation strategies. The content also discusses development environments and workflows for creating decentralized applications (dApps).

1. Ethereum for (Visionary) Dummies
Introduction to blockchain development

2. #chainskills
Who speaks French, Dutch, English?

3. #chainskills
A few weeks ago…
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#disruption

4. Objectives
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• No trading
• Curiosity
• Kickstarter

5. Agenda
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• Why?
• What?
• How?

6. #chainskills
Why?

7. Once upon a time…
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8. #chainskills
Then came the Internet
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9. Problems with centralized apps
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• Single point of failure
• Easy to corrupt
• Privacy honeypot
• Single point of control
• Performance bottleneck
• Silo effect

10. Problems with decentralization
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• How do you trust nodes?
• How do you handle nodes who come and go?
• What if communications are intercepted/corrupted?
• How do you agree on a common reality?

11. #chainskills
The Byzantine Generals' Problem
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12. The case of banks
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• Expensive security
• Transaction opacity
• Fee opacity
• Product complexity
• Monetary policy opacity
• Slow transactions with a lot of intermediaries

13. #chainskills
And in 2008…
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14. #chainskills
A few months later…
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15. But there was more…
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• Web = Network of Data = communication by replication
• But how do you transfer value?
• Ask the majors! (DRM, hydra slaying, centralized authorities…)
• The first completely decentralized application was a network of value!
• What if we could transfer other tokens of value?

16. The frenzy begins
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• Creating a new (crypto)currency becomes incredibly easy
• Some marketplaces begin trading cryptocurrencies
• Colored coins
• Sidechain
• Script

17. #chainskills
Then comes this guy…
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18. What does it bring?
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• Generalized transactions
• Turing-complete language
• A virtual machine
• A new crypto-currency with intrinsic value (Ether)
• Better performance and evolutivity

19. It's a brave new world
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• Policies are transparent
• Data is fully distributed
• History is safe
• "Cheap" access
• Anonymous access
• You can't trust the law, but you can trust the code…
• …provided it was well written

20. Disintermediation
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• What Bitcoin did for the banks, generic platforms like Ethereum can
do it for every single intermediary-based industry
• Notaries, insurance, energy, recruitment, government, administration,
transportation…
• It can even create new applications that were simply not relevant
before
• Predictions markets, liquid democracy, etc.

21. #chainskills
What?

22. Questions
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• What is a blockchain?
• What is not a blockchain?
• What a blockchain is not?

23. #chainskills
The 3-layer model
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Design goals
Instances
Implementations

24. Design goals
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• Distributed data
• Decentralized governance
• Trustless access
• Immutable history

25. Implementations
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• Bitcoin
• Litecoin, Monero, and hundreds of altcoins
• Ethereum
• Tezos, Synereo, and many others
• Each implementation has a protocol (whitepaper), one or several
codebases and at least a main instance

26. Instances (Ethereum)
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• The main chain
• Test chains: Morden, Ropsten, Kovan, Rinkeby
• Your very own private chain
• Each instance is identified by a network identifier and a genesis block

27. #chainskills
General data architecture
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#

28. Blockchain as tricameral systems
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29. Key components
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• Peer-to-peer network DB
• Node software client
• Distributed ledger
• Consensus algorithm
• Crypto-currency
• Smart contract language

30. What is NOT (really) a blockchain?
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• Permissioned blockchains (consortium)
• Internal blockchains
• They are centralized, closed, overly complex solutions to actual
problems
• They distract money and energy away from the real deal
• They are desperate attempts to fit old models into new paradigms
http://chainskills.com/2016/11/21/what-qualifies-as-a-blockchain/

31. Known limitations
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• Privacy
• Pseudonymity
• Transaction costs
• Transaction finality speed
• Transaction throughput
• Evolutivity and governance
• Data size

32. #chainskills
How?

33. Development environment
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• Mist
• Geth
• testrpc
• NodeJS
• Solidity compiler
• Truffle
• Atom with Solidity support

34. #chainskills
Architecture of a Dapp
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Geth
index.html
app.js
Some webserver (or Swarm or IPFS)
Mist or Chrome/MetaMask

35. Development workflow
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• Design your contract workflow
• Define the interface of your contract
• Code your contract
• Test your contract with unit tests using testrpc
• Deploy your contract to a private chain
• Develop the frontend
• Deploy your contract to a test chain
• Deploy your frontend to a server
• When you are sure there are no bugs, deploy to the main chain… and pray!

36. #chainskills
Who? Where? When?
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Coming in June
50% off
chainskills.com