Working with Ethereum


While working on Blockchain platform, we implicitly go down the road to Ethereum without even knowing. It has become a vast platform for blockchain enthusiasts who wish to do some work in blockchain as it is an open source platform.
Ethereum is an open-source decentralized shared blockchain platform for building completely synchronous and secure Distributed-applications as well as cryptocurrencies.  Ethereum is considered to be one of the pioneer platforms in distributed ledger and blockchain technology. Ethereum provides a decentralized Turing-complete virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using the global network of peers. Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Ether (ETH) is a cryptocurrency developed by Ethereum Foundation whose price as of today is $847 and total numbers of coins present are about 98 Million.

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum:

Parameters
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Launch year
2009
2013
Current price
$11250
$847
Founder
Satoshi Nakamoto (unknown)
Vitalik Buterin and team
Average block time
(time required to mine a block)
10 Minutes
15 Seconds
Total coin supply
21 Million
98 Million
Mining hardware required
Specialized, like ASIC
GPUs
Market share
No.1 ($185,253,851,538)
No. 2 ($92,672,985,389)
Function
Digital currency
Smart contract platform
Turing completeness
No
Yes

The Ethereum network runs on a blockchain secured by miners executing a Proof of Work consensus algorithm, with plans to move to a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm soon.
Ethereum is providing the developers three types of networks – Main net, Test net and Private net. So, the developers can easily test their applications on either of the networks they wish to.

Main net

The Main net is the actual Ethereum global network where all the “real-valued” things happen. And by real-valued I mean all the Ethers are real, and can be converted to any other cryptocurrency other the fiat money. The miners are also most active and are great in number.

Test net

As the name suggests, the test net is the actual ethereum global network, only the difference is that, all the ethers and the cryptocurrencies aren’t real. They don’t have any real value and so cannot be traded against any real cryptocurrencies or fiat money.

Private net


As it says, this network is completely a private network which is only on your personal machine and is NOT connected to outer Ethereum network in any way. This is the best network for you if you have just started playing around with Ethereum. You do not need to have any real ether or request them from any faucet as you are the sole miner of your own private net.

So, let’s discuss on how we can create our own cryptocurrency on top of Ethereum platform by using Test net. The Test net we are going to use is Rinkeby.

But first, in order to create a cryptocurrency, you need to have some ether in your account. So, let’s see how we can get some Test net ethers.


How to get some Ether for your Rinkeby Test net:

  • Go to your Google+, Tweeter or Facebook account and make a public post/tweet with your Ethereum account address pasted into the contents (surrounding text doesn’t matter).
  • Copy-paste the post/tweet URL into the provided input box and get your ether.
Or, alternatively you can just paste your Rinkeby-address in the comments and I can send some ether directly to you!

So, now that you have some ethers, let’s go towards creating our first ever cryptocurrency and have some basic transactions into it. First, we need to follow below procedure for that,


How to connect to Ethereum Rinkeby Test net:

  • Download MyEtherWallet from here
  • Download geth from here
  • Go to folder where you want to start your blockchain
  • Start command prompt there
  • Start another command prompt there
  • Start MyEtherWallet (ensure that it opens in rinkeby test net)
  • Create account and start creating, sending and receiving cryptocurrencies
Type command: geth --rinkeby --fast--cache=1024
Type command: geth --datadir=/.rinkeby attach

So, now that you have your geth and MyEtherWallet running, let’s go to the main part.

Creating the cryptocurrency:

  • Go to the contracts
  • If you see below, there is a code section-‘Solidity contract source code’
  • Paste your solidity smart contract code here. (you can get a basic one from here)
  • Then under ‘select contract to deploy’, you can see your contract if you don’t have any errors.
  • Select the initial supply, token name, Token symbol and decimal units.
  • Select the fee for the transaction. (You can leave it as it is) And deploy it.
  • You will be asked for your account password in order to send this transaction to get mined. You can also see how much gas is used there and the other details.
  • Then under your account if you scroll down, you can see that your contract transaction is getting mined (approved). Once it gets at least 1 confirmation, you can see your tokens under your account!

How to send the tokens you have created to someone:


  • Copy the address to whom you want to send the tokens (Note: it must be a ‘Test net’ address only)
  • Go to your account and click the send button next to the tokens
  • Paste the receiver’s address in the input box
  • Type the number of tokens you want to send.
  • Select the transaction fees (or leave it as it is)
  • Click ‘Send’ and then enter your account password.
  •  Once you get a confirmation, the tokens can be seen in the receiver’s account.
Alternatively, you can also see the video that I have made about the creating and sending the ERC20 tokens by using Private net here.
If you want to see how we can deploy our tokens on the Main net or the Private net, you can see my other blogs.


So, this is how you can easily create your tokens and also send them to your friends and acquaintances or you can use them as your ‘private exchange-tokens’ as well!



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