前言：区块链和数字货币几乎成为近几周最火的话题，不管是在硅谷还是中国的互联网圈中，区块链技术将孕育哪些创新模式，将最新进入哪几个垂直行业领域，区块链的发展距离成熟商用还需要精力哪些阶段，在这波浪潮中的“你”，有哪些机会可以抓住，这都值得我们去思考.
Enjoy！
本文转载自Y Comninator官网博客
Building for the Blockchain
Introduction
If you’re here, we assume that you’re a developer/hacker who’s intrigued by the blockchain. You’re convinced that you understand how it works and now you’re itching to figure out what the blockchain means for you and your developer skill set.
Our goal in this post is to:
1. Explain how blockchain development differs from existing development paradigms
2. Provide context for the opportunities and challenges in this space
3. Point you to resources that will give you the foundation to start developing in this new paradigm
Paradigm Shifts for Developers
Alternatively, the distribution of value in the blockchain paradigm can be described with fat protocols and a thin application layer. This paradigm shift is possible due to the innovation of cryptographic tokens, which are described well by Albert Wenger of USV:
“Historically the only way to make money from a protocol was to create software that implemented it and then try to sell this software (or more recently to host it)… With [cryptographic] tokens, however, the creators of a protocol can ‘monetize’ it directly and will in fact benefit more as others build businesses on top of that protocol.”
Ethereum
While Bitcoin was originally intended to serve as a new medium for financial store of value, Ethereum was invented to serve as a Turing complete developer environment. In Ethereum, developers write smart contracts in the Solidity programming language, and those smart contracts are run in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Here, we observe an opportunity for developers to fork and implement their own blockchains to serve different purposes. To do so, however, would require rekindling developer support and network effects that existing blockchain technologies had previously achieved. Today, building on top of existing networks like Ethereum allows developers to become stakeholders in not only their own applications, but also the underlying protocol.
Dapps, App Coins, and Smart Contracts
As the functionality of the dapp becomes more sought after, the fixed number of app coins increase in value as a function of supply and demand. In other words, if it turns out that the Chuck-E-Cheese experience is truly remarkable and highly-demanded, the fixed supply of tokens become more valuable. This is the underlying principle that informs all ICOs (initial coin offerings), in which dapp developers solicit investment by offering app coins in return for capital to fund their projects.
Early Opportunities
With the innovation of the blockchain, many have identified the opportunity to build a new, decentralized web stack that does not depend on centralized government or corporate entities. The traditional web stack is composed of building blocks like TCP/IP, DNS, databases, web servers, authentication systems and CDNs, and we are in the midst of replicating these components by using platforms like Ethereum as the base layer.
Challenges of Immutability
Developers, especially those accustomed to the fast pace of the startup world, are forced to consider tradeoffs between speed and security. As Ben Yu of Stream describes, “You have to move extremely fast, because the space is going enormously fast, but you can’t move fast and break things, which is the traditional philosophy for development being done now. If you break things, you lose hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Building on the blockchain requires a different level of planning. Developers can no longer apply hot-fixes or overnight patches, because they no longer have centralized control over entire systems. Instead, introducing system changes often involves hard forking entire protocols, or in some cases, providing separate sources for protocol parameters that aren’t tied directly into the blockchain.
Ethereum’s Limitations
Moreover, Ethereum’s specification prevents real-time computations. Processing of block transactions takes upwards of 15 seconds (which is lightning fast compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes). As a result, developers need to write asynchronous code with front-end frameworks that can update states accordingly (like React).
Getting Started
In general, it can certainly feel overwhelming getting into this space. It’s an interdisciplinary field, spanning domains of economics, game theory, finance, computer science, math, cryptography, and more. However, that also means that there’s a lot of surface area to contribute.
Brandon of 0x recommends diving into areas where you have some interest or experience instead of trying to learn everything at once: “If you’ve done JS development beforehand, there are a lot of JS libraries that you can contribute to. While you will definitely need to know [how everything fits together] eventually, you don’t need to feel like you need to take an entire course initially.”
In the spirit of decentralization, most of the code for projects on the blockchain are also available through open-source. There are a number of good resources to get your hands dirty:
In addition, the developer communities are remarkably receptive and helpful. Check out:
If you learn primarily by coding up your own projects, here are some ideas to get started:
Build your own wallet. It can be a be a web, mobile app or desktop app.
Create your own ERC-20 token and deploy it on the test net.
Modify crypto kitties (dogs, tanks, zombies…) and deploy it on the test net.
Looking Forward
In its current state, yes, blockchain development is messy. No, there aren’t clean frameworks and tools analogous to those that exist for modern web development. But why not see the blockchain’s nascent state as an opportunity to impact a paradigm-shifting technology?
On the blockchain, you don’t need to deploy any centralized servers, which means that there’s no single point of failure. If your whole stack is decentralized, there is no trusted third party involved making it censorship resistant, and your database is publicly verifiable. As the new paradigm offers opportunity to publicly share data, we observe a supreme advantage to decentralizing databases. This is the future we’re building towards on the Blockchain— where information and power are distributed systematically by cutting out the middleman.
Thanks to Ben Yu (Stream) and Brandon Millman (0x) for lending their time to be interviewed, and thanks to Niharika Bedekar, Craig Cannon, Claire Shu for reading drafts of this post.
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