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Full Stack Hello World Voting Ethereum Dapp Tutorial — Part 1

In the last post, we explained the high level architecture of Ethereum platform comparing it to a web application. As a developer, the best way to learn any new technology is by diving in and building toy applications. In this post, let’s build a simple ‘Hello World!’ application which is a Voting application.

The application is extremely simple, all it does is initialize a set of contestants, let anyone vote for the candidates and display the total votes received by each candidate. The goal is not to just code an application but to learn the process of compiling, deploying and interacting with it.

We have deliberately avoided using any DApp frameworks to build this application because the frameworks abstract away lot of the details and you fail to understand the internals of the system. Also, when you do use a framework, you will have more appreciation for all the heavy lifting the framework does for you!

The goal of this exercise is to:

Set up the development environment.

How Many Ethereum Are There?

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum’s total supply is not set. As of May 24, 2018, the circulating supply (ETH in existence) is 99,630,274 (Coinmarketcap).

What Is The Price Of Ethereum?

As of May 24, 2018, the price of Ethereum was $606.96.

However, Ethereum prices tend to fluctuate dramatically, and these prices swing on a daily (and hourly) basis.

It's important to note that the cryptocurrency market is very volatile - as you can see from the chart (5 year period) below:

Unfamiliar Programming Language

Ethereum uses its own programming language, Solidity.

Developers’ unfamiliarity with Solidity has led to code being written incorrectly, which led to problems like The DAO hack.

Projects similar to Ethereum have emerged addressing this issue and allow programmers to use more familiar languages like Javascript.

Scalability Issues

Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is facing problems, as it grows more popular.
The fact that games like CryptoKitties can cause network congestion is a cause for concern.

If Ethereum can’t handle many transactions, some critics are wondering how will it ever scale to meet the demands of a mainstream user base

Inflation

Transaction fees on the Ethereum platform are paid in Gas - and they can quickly inflate.

In fact, transaction fees increased by up to 70% Ethereum at peak usage.

As you can see in the chart below, transaction fees have fluctuated dramatically over the last few months.

Syncing Problems

Another technical problem with Ethereum is that sometimes the Ethereum wallet won't sync properly with the blockchain.

This means sometimes users can't see their wallet's actual balance - and the figures are can be inaccurate.

As you can imagine, that's a bit worrying for some users!

Censorship Resistant

Nothing can be censored on Ethereum because of blockchain technology.

Data is hosted on nodes across the world so censorship or changing of data wouldn’t be possible without controlling thousands of nodes.

No Downtime

Since Ethereum isn’t held on one server (centralized) and is instead hosting on thousands of nodes (decentralized), there's no downtime.

(Unless all nodes crash at the same time – which is rare).

Versatile

With the introduction of Smart Contracts, Ethereum i...