Ethereum in Practice
This chapter introduces the Ethereum development environment. Several examples will be presented in this chapter to complement the theoretical concepts provided in the previous chapter.
We will begin by considering the practical payment process in Ethereum, and some recent and upcoming innovations to the blockchain. We will then look at test nets, which can play a vital role in testing the smart contracts before deploying on the main net. Then, we will look at the private net option in Ethereum, which allows the creation of an independent private network. This private network can be used as a shared distributed ledger between participating entities and for the development and testing of smart contracts.
While there are other clients available for Ethereum, Geth is the leading client for Ethereum and the standard tool of choice, and as such, this chapter uses Geth for the examples. We will also use Remix IDE to write smart contracts and MetaMask to deploy...