How Solidity Made Me Learn More About Ethereum Blockchain
February 2018, I remember the first time I discovered that anyone could write smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain was on a youtube channel of a Chilean called Nicolas Palacios. It was the only channel in Spanish that was available at that time so I realized that this was an incredible time to learn this skill. But first, let’s define some previous concepts to continue with my experience ok?
Disclaimer: This is NOT a step-by-step guide where I teach you how to code in solidity. I’m just writing my experience when I discovered this platform when I started to interact with the Ethereum blockchain in a deeper way. On the other hand, I didn’t even finish learning solidity, so I just wanted to let you know that coding is not difficult as speaking Chinese.
Apart from that, I also want you to understand why it is so important to learn this programming language for your future.
Main Ethereum Blockchain’s Concepts
- Ether: This is Ethereum’s cryptocurrency.
- Smart contracts: Ethereum allows the development and deployment of these.
- Ethereum Virtual Machine: Ethereum provides the underlying technology — the architecture and the software — that understands smart contracts and allows you to interact with them.
- Decentralized applications (Dapps): Ethereum allows you to create consolidated applications, called decentralized applications. A decentralized application is called a Dapp (also spelled DAPP, App, or DApp) for short.
- Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs): Ethereum allows you to create these for democratic decision-making.
- Tokens: This is how assets are represented in the ethereum blockchains. For example, anyone can create a token inside the ethereum blockchain that could digitally represent an apple to a stock. The most common token is the ERC-20 token
If you’d like to know more concepts about the ethereum blockchain, here’s a very good video:
The Best Way to Start Experimenting with Ethereum is with Solidity and Remix
Keep in mind that when I started discovering the world of ethereum, the amount of good content on the subject was easily 1% of what it is today. So it was very difficult to learn for free a skill as specialized as this one that was only 2 years old.
Yes, learning a programming language is not assimilated in a few days and I was aware that my real intention in interacting with this programming language was to learn as much as possible about the Ethereum Network in a more direct way, I was not satisfied with just reading blogs and watching youtube videos.
To this day, the Solidity programming language is the most widely used language for building smart contracts inside Ethereum blockchain, which is inspired by several languages such as JavaScript, C, among others. At that time I started using it on the Remix platform, which is a free platform where you can deploy ethereum’s smart contracts in different test networks. Also, Remix’s interface was much less user-friendly than it is today.
Three Things I Learned from Coding Solidity in Remix about Ethereum.
1.You can start learning 100% Free: You just need to enter Remix, which has a similar interface to Visual Studio Code nowadays and starts building smart contracts. Here is a screenshot of it.
Point 1: This is the main menu of Remix, where you can explore files, compile, deploy, and manage internal plugins.
Point 2: This is the part where all the details of each menu show. In this case, you can see the File Explorer’s features: Create files, create folders, organizing files and folders, etc.
Point 3: In this part, you’ll be able to see some recommendations. In this case, there’s a fast guide of how anyone can migrate their old files to the new Remix version.
Point 4: Solidity has four social platforms (Twitter, Medium, Gitter, Github) where they publish news and how the platform is evolving. You can also interact with its community.
Point 5: This part is very important for developers because there are many plugins that complement its usage.
As coding solidity in Remix is 100% free to practice (Guide), you can also learn more concepts in youtube channels, Medium blogposts, Gitter chats, Reddit chats, etc.
2. It’s immutable: When you compile a smart contract (convert solidity’s code into machine code to be executed) and then start deploying transactions (make the smart contract available in the ethereum blockchain) in MetaMask.
What you are really doing is registering your smart contract within a testnet (test version of the ethereum blockchain) or within the real ethereum blockchain. In either case, the registration can never be deleted.
It does not matter if any person, company, or government wants to delete the content of your smart contract. It is impossible to do so, which gives you the option to work with true freedom no matter what happens in the world.
Here is a very good video that explains this feature:
3. It’s very expensive to use in the real world: For example, if your smart contract is a database where you have to enter client’s names, every name is an input which implies that every time you want to enter the name of every client, you need to make a transaction inside the smart contract.
In order to do that, you need to sync your MetaMask’s Chrome extension to Remix and spend gas if you do it in the real Ethereum Network. Gas is the fee that the Ethereum blockchain needs to successfully register information in the blockchain.
The quantity of gas spent in a transaction is variable. It depends on the value of ETH (Ethereum blockchain’s cryptocurrency). You can see it at the top of ETH Gas Station’s website:
Gas prices are represented in Gwei and you have three options to pay it.
- Trader: This is the fastest way to get your transaction to be confirmed in the Ethereum blockchain. It normally takes 2 min max. In this case, this option worth 96 Gwei, but it changes every day.
- Fast: This is the standard alternative. It can take 5 min max to get confirmed transactions. In this case, you have to pay 95 Gwei.
- Standard: This is the slowest alternative to confirm a transaction. In this case, you only have to pay 78 Gwei. Nevertheless, I DO NOT recommend you this alternative because you can end up having a very uncomfortable moment confirming a transaction. It can take hours and even days to confirm it.
I highly recommend to chose the “trader” version. But all these “gas decisions” are made when you perfectly know how to code in Solidity and you start making real smart contracts. Don’t worry about that now.
If You Learn How to Code in Solidity now, Your Future Will Thank You
Since 2020, Linkedin has ranked “blockchain” as the first position of the Top 10 skills to learn. Yes, “blockchain” is a general term that only tells us that every related activity to blockchain technology has started to be needed in companies that are starting to apply this technology in their processes.
Developers, analysts, business managers, copywriters, etc. There are many different jobs, specialized in the blockchain industry, that new blockchain companies will need.
Three reasons why learning to code Solidity is so attractive
- Better salaries: Because the talent is so little and the pay provided is 10–20% more than those offered in normal jobs in both the technical and non-technical sectors.
2. Work Remotely: Remote employment are on the increase and the notion of an office is fast being shifted from people and flexibility is being opted for. This is another field in which crypto firms exceed their traditional rivals.
3. Be Paid in Crypto: In my opinion, this feature is what makes this sector unique since those who already work in a company focused on this industry are usually paid in cryptocurrencies. Which they then have to exchange into fiat money on some exchange according to their needs.
I hope that after reading this article, I have awakened your curiosity to, at least, enter this wonderful world, which you will only benefit from if you decide to enter as soon as possible. If you have any doubt, do not hesitate to post it in the comments.
