The underlying technologies of the blockchain, are available in open source, giving aspiring developers the chance to implement their private blockchain. This can provide you with the opportunity to learn through practice, the concepts that are behind such an environment, including mining, or the execution of a smart contract. Here are the five steps for implementing a blockchain project on your workstation.
Step #1 – Select the Platform
Due to the responsiveness and dynamism of its members, the Ethereum blockchain network is the best one to consider. With the wealth of its documentation, the blockchain promises that the objects will become fully autonomous and belong to themselves. With this, they can execute code.
Step #2 – Initialize the Blockchain
All you need to do to initialize the blockchain is to create the first block manually. The block must contain all of the characteristics of the chain, and then be shared with all the nodes of the network. To define this first block, a file must be created in JSON format. After the JSON file has been completed, it is up to the client platform to create the folder that contains the blockchain and to initialize it.
Step #3 – Choose the Correct Consensus Protocol
The consensus protocol consists of asking the resolution of a mathematical problem that requires a large amount of calculation. When a miner manages to find a solution, it must be something that is easily verifiable by everyone. The first person to see the solution wins the right to write the next block in the chain. The difficulty of the problem is changed in real time according to the total power of the entire network, resulting in the blocks being written at regular intervals. This makes hacking attempts extremely difficult and protects blockchain as the whole against spam attempts to overload the network.
Step #4 – Execute Your First Smart Contract
Growing a blockchain is only of interest if you can run a smart contract with it. The smart contract should self-execute from a predefined threshold that can be an amount, a date, or any duly authenticated event. Ethereum’s success is based on this concept.
Step #5 – Debug and Scale
Unlike a program that is run by a computer, a block is run on a set of nodes. Each network termination, or node, must result in a treatment equivalent to the previous ones. The process makes debugging the application complex. To fix the issue, you have to create a new block and wait for the chain to propagate the changes.
The uses for blockchain technology are endless, with more companies moving to proof of concept to concrete achievements. Following these five steps will have you well on your way to creating your own blockchain project.
