Tag Archives: Ethereum

How To Write, Deploy, and Interact with Ethereum Smart Contracts on a Private Blockchain

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Here are the rules: if you read this post all the way through, you have to deploy a smart contract on your private Ethereum blockchain yourself. I give you all the code I used here in Github so you have no excuses not to.

But if you don’t follow the rules and you only want to read, hopefully this helps give a perspective of starting with nothing and ending with a blockchain app.

By the end, you’ll have started a local private Ethereum blockchain, connected two different nodes as peers, written and compiled a smart contract, and have a web interface that allows users to ask questions, deploy the questions on the blockchain, and then lets the users answer.

If you’re confused, run into an error, or want to say something else, go ahead an write a comment, get in contact, or say something on Twitter.

Oh, and here’s the Github repo, so go ahead and fork  it (if you don’t want to copy paste all the code here) and then if you make updates you want to share, I’ll throw this in the README.

Private Blockchain Creation

To create a single node, we need the following genesis.json, which represents the initial block on the private blockchain.

//genesis.json
{
 "alloc": {},
 "config": {
   "chainID": 72,
   "homesteadBlock": 0,
   "eip155Block": 0,
   "eip158Block": 0
 },
 "nonce": "0x0000000000000000",
 "difficulty": "0x4000",
 "mixhash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "coinbase": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "timestamp": "0x00",
 "parentHash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "extraData": "0x11bbe8db4e347b4e8c937c1c8370e4b5ed33adb3db69cbdb7a38e1e50b1b82fa",
 "gasLimit": "0xffffffff"
}

If you want a somewhat full explanation of the fields, look at this Stack Overflow answer. The big ones in our case here are difficulty being low, because we don’t want to have to wait long for blocks to be mined on our test network, and then gasLimit being high to allow the amount of work that can be done by a node in the block to be able to process every transaction.

Go ahead and open a terminal, make sure geth is installed in whatever way works for your OS, and then cd into the folder that you have your genesis.json file saved. Running run the following command will initialize the blockchain for this node.

$ geth --datadir "/Users/USERNAME/Library/PrivEth" init genesis.json

–datadir specifies where we want the all the data for the blockchain to be located. On a mac, the default is ~/Library/Ethereum. Since we have multiple nodes running, we can’t have them sharing the same data folder, so we’re going to specify. Linux and Windows machines have different default datadirs, so take a look at those to see in general where they should be located.

After running this init command with the genesis.json file we want to use, go checkout that --datadir directory. You’ll see a bunch of files, so feel free to poke around. Not necessary right now, but you’ll want to look around there eventually.

For this to be a blockchain, we need more than one node. For blockchains to become peers, we need them to have the same genesis file. So we’re going to run the same command as above, from the same directory, but this time with a different datadir.

geth --datadir "/Users/USERNAME/Library/PrivEth2" init genesis.json

With all the code here, we’re going to be working in the same directory. The code is the same, but with the command line options, we’ll be able to separate these processes by the command line arguments.

Initializing the chain for both nodes.

When running geth with a different --datadir, you’ll be running separate nodes no matter where you ran the command from. Just remember to specify the --datadir each time so it doesn’t fall back to default. Also note that I changed the names for these datadirs, so watch out if you see different names in the screenshots.

Opening the Consoles

So far, we’ve done three things. 1) Created a genesis.json file in a working directory of your choosing, 2) picked a directory to store the blockchain for one node and initialized the first block, and 3) picked a different directory to store the blockchain for the other node. Very little code and a few commands.

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How to Build Your Own Blockchain Part 4.2 — Ethereum Proof of Work Difficulty Explained

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We’re back at it in the Proof of Work difficulty spectrum, this time going through how Ethereum’s difficulty changes over time. This is part 4.2 of the part 4 series, where part 4.1 was about Bitcoin’s PoW difficulty, and the following 4.3 will be about jbc’s PoW difficulty.

TL;DR

To calculate the difficulty for the next Ethereum block, you calculate the time it took to mine the previous block, and if that time difference was greater than the goal time, then the difficulty goes down to make mining the next block quicker. If it was less than the time goal, then difficulty goes up to attempt to mine the next block quicker.

There are three parts to determining the new difficulty: offset, which determines the standard amount of change from one difficulty to the next; sign, which determines if the difficulty should go up or down; and bomb, which adds on extra difficulty depending on the block’s number.

These numbers are calculated slightly differently for the different forks, Frontier, Homestead, and Metropolis, but the overall formula for calculating the next difficulty is

target = parent.difficulty + (offset * sign) + bomb

Other Posts in This Series

Pre notes

For the following code examples, this will be the class of the block.

class Block():
  def __init__(self, number, timestamp, difficulty, uncles=None):
    self.number = number
    self.timestamp = timestamp
    self.difficulty = difficulty
    self.uncles = uncles

The data I use to show the code is correct was grabbed from Etherscan.

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How to Build Your Own Blockchain Part 4.1 — Bitcoin Proof of Work Difficulty Explained

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If you’re wondering why this is part 4.1 instead of part 4, and why I’m not talking about continuing to build the local jbc, it’s because explaining Bitcoin’s Proof of Work difficulty at a somewhat lower level takes a lot of space. So unlike what this title says, this post in part 4 is not how to build a blockchain. It’s about how an existing blockchain is built.

My main goal of the part 4 post was to have one section on the Bitcoin PoW, the next on Ethereum’s PoW, and finally talk about how jbc is going to run and validate proof or work. After writing all of part 1 to explain how Bitcoin’s PoW difficulty, it wasn’t going to fit in a single section. People, me included, tend get bored in the middle reading a long post and don’t finish.

So part 4.1 will be going through Bitcoin’s PoW difficulty calculations. Part 4.2 will be going through Ethereum’s PoW calculations. And then part 4.3 will be me deciding how I want the jbc PoW to be as well as doing time calculations to see how long the mining will take.

The sections of this post are:

  1. Calculate Target from Bits
  2. Determining if a Hash is less than the Target
  3. Calculating Difficulty
  4. How and when block difficulty is updated
  5. Full code
  6. Final Questions

TL;DR

The overall term of difficulty refers to how much work has to be done for a node to find a hash that is smaller than the target. There is one value stored in a block that talks about difficulty — bits. In order to calculate the target value that the hash, when converted to a hex value has to be less than, we use the bits field and run it through an equation that returns the target. We then use the target to calculate difficulty, where difficulty is only a number for a human to understand how difficult the proof of work is for that block.

If you read on, I go through how the blockchain determines what target number the mined block’s hash needs to be less than to be valid, and how that target is calculated.

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Calculate Target from Bits

In order to go through Bitcoin’s PoW, I need to use the values on actual blocks and explain the calculations, so a reader can verify all this code themselves. To start, I’m going to grab a random block number to work with and go through the calculations using that.

>>>import random
>>> random.randint(0, 493928)
111388

Block number 11138 it is! Back in time to March of 2011 we go.

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