Hello Ethereum: my first smart contract

For the past 6 months, I have been engaged in discussions around blockchain strategies and pilot developments. One of them concerns an initiative to create a blockchain for fundraising and  tracking of charitable projects www.humnchain.org. In this effort we are pulling a team together to develop the concept, the technology and a community to make such a blockchain a reality.

 Although business often tries to tie me to executive discussions, when it comes to it: I am a geek. If you scratch a little, you will find an engineer and a mathematician. It won’t therefore come as a surprise that like most techies, unless I have built it, I can't understand it. So after reading white papers and university lectures on the subject, I created a simple blockchain. This is best forgotten quickly because it only served to deepen my understanding of the challenges of a distributed ledger and mining nodes and cryptography.

I have lost my Ethereum virginity 

The next effort is perhaps more interesting: my first smart contract on Ethereum. This is a bit like “Hello World!” to Ethereum except that it actually embeds a real use case: a proof of concept for humnchain. It includes a fundraiser and project execution tracker and conditional payments.

 So what did I learn?

• Distributed contracts are a powerful concept. It allows for immutable agreements that evolve as the conditions for execution evolve;
• Smart contracts need their own UI. The business process embedded by the smart contract needs a context which depends on the parties involved;
• Data needs to be kept to a minimum and most of it has to kept off the blockchain.
• Do you really need a cryptocurrency in your business use case? It comes with plenty of issues and certainly in our case, I’m going to think hard about finding a way around them;
• Implementing a contract that supports business use case is relatively simple. The governance around it is potentially complex and some of that is part of the contract;
• Do you really need a smart contract? Do you even need a blockchain? They are enticing because they are new but in many cases they are not solving a new problem;

Most of all, I feel that I have lost my Ethereum virginity.  If you are a geek, you will understand that. If you are not, well, hire a techie to do it for you.

https://github.com/GeneticFractals/humnchain