My first steps with Ethereum

I’ve created a separate Virtual Machine with Ubuntu 16.04 for this experiment. This experiment will make use of a local private Ethereum test network for easy development. Ethereum can be installed on your machine with the following commands:

A Genesis block is the first block in the chain, block 0, and the only block that does not point to a predecessor block. When first looking into Genesis block definitions, I was a bit confused. There are many variations (1, 2, 3) out there on the Internet. A custom Genesis block allows you to change specific configuration settings for your private Ethereum blockchain like gas limit and mining difficulty.

I tried to initialize the Genesis block with this configuration, however, geth rejected the config file. Why? We are allocating funds to non-existing addresses (wallets). If you want to allocate funds to certain addresses to avoid the need for mining, you have to create those with geth. A new account can be easily created with geth account new. The command will return a new address which you can add to your custom Genesis file under the "alloc" field.

The example by Go-Ethereum is the most basic version of a custom Genesis file (required fields: config, difficulty, gasLimit and alloc). I’ll try to give a proper explanation for the relevant options and the values used (1):

Blockchain deamon
Deamon to keep private blockchain running in background with the use of the geth command. Contents of Bash script (2):

To use this script, give it executable rights ( chmod +x script.sh ) and exute it ( ./script.sh ). Note the --rpcapi option, here we can define which APIs we want to have at our disposal over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: “eth, net, web3”). It is a good idea to include personal, parity, miner as well.

Let’s start with the connection to the rpcpath, and immediately unlock your main account.

Next, I want to display all the accounts and balances (logged in console). As you can see, the commands are exactly the same as in the geth console.

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