There’s already demand for blockchain developers. And also a limited supply. When that kind of dynamic exists in the marketplace, certain skills can become really valuable.
So I decided to train myself in blockchain development. I wanted to know exactly how blockchains worked, what they were actually doing, what problems they solved, and what the right business use-cases were for blockchain.
As I trained myself on the blockchain fundamentals, I learned a few key points.
First, I noticed the first mistake every new blockchain developer makes: thinking of it in terms of a regular database.
Blockchain is not a database. It’s more like an accounting ledger. Except you’re able to keep track of anything you could imagine without the need for centralization. You can account for things like money or currency in a decentralized way, which was previously unheard of.
The second thing I learned were the core business use-cases blockchain enable. Via a process called “tokenization”, we’re now able to create all sorts of digital assets. Digital assets that exist purely in the digital world, and digital assets that represent things in the physical world.
The cool thing about tokenization is that the true owner of a digital asset will be the person who created it, and they’ll have unique access to a private key that directly controls that asset. We won’t have what I call “the illusion of ownership” that we have through centralized intermediaries.
Finally, I learned how to write Smart Contracts which automatically enforce the terms of some kind of business agreement. And without the need for a middleman.
The cool thing about writing Smart Contracts is that you get to work with real programmable money. And because you can do that, you literally have the ability to create applications with real built-in economic incentives.
Which ultimately means that I, a once lowly outsourced developer, now have the ability to create new markets the world has never seen before.
Like providing economic incentives to do things like plant trees. Or automatically pay people in cryptocurrency for actions that regenerate the planet (just my personal dream). These are new markets we’ve never seen before, and it’s totally possible with blockchain.
Here’s another important thing I learned. Writing Smart Contracts is easy, but it requires extensive auditing. That’s because you’re dealing with real money.
And that brought me to my final epiphany. Smart Contracts on Ethereum are open-sourced. And if they’re on the main network, they’ve already been extensively audited. All you have to know how to do is read them and build front-end applications for them.
There’s a lot of eye-opening potential in the blockchain space. It has huge money-making opportunities, and as with all technology it needs to be guided consciously for the good of all.
So it is my mission to teach developers across the world the best way to build dApps for Ethereum (the largest Smart Contract platform on the planet) using the best tools, libraries, and frameworks available today.