Summary

We started this chapter with an understanding of the Ethereum platform as a way to achieve a decentralized economy. We explored the meaning of decentralization over political, logical, and architectural axes. Ethereum was found to be centralized about the logical axis. We dived deep into the web 3.0 technological stack of Ethereum and saw how swarm stores data, how whisper communicates, and how EVM interacts with blockchain, using smart contracts and a stack-based machine code. We identified that loops are a good rule-of-thumb for a language being Turing complete. We saw how gas is the magic sauce to curb performance related problems on Ethereum and how we need ether to top up our gas limit to run smart contract codes on the blockchain. We introduced the notion of uncle hash in the Ethereum blockchain. Also, we distinguished between ETH and ETC as a community activated hard fork. Mining requires huge memory access and hence prevents ASIC miners but encourages GPU miners. Finally, we concluded by classifying various wallets and client interfaces for Ethereum, and we had a quick tour of Android-based LETH.

In Chapter 3, Hello World of Ethereum Smart Contract, put on your developer hat. It's time for some fun ways of coding your first smart contract.