If you had tried developing Ethereum smart contract, you might be amaze by how easy it is to write smart contracts. However, running ethereum private blockchain is a pain in the ass...

I tried to setup a private blockchain today and these are the traps I summarize:

Trap 1: Choices of protocol

Proof of work are used to remove trust in between people using blockchain and it is being used by Ethereum. However in private blockchain, you might not use this protocol since all your nodes are trustworthy, Proof of Authority would be used to reduce computing power and cost.

Trap 2: Technical skill

Blockchain developers required a lot of technical knowledges.

• Dev Ops skill

As a blockchain developer, you need to have dev ops skill such as setting up VPS and docker to host a server up to make the blockchain sync between all the servers.

• Test driven development

Testing is essential for Ethereum blockchain, because once the smart contract is deployed, there is no way you can patch an update to the blockchain.

• Cryptography

Knows the fundamentals of how blockchain works, which is based on Cryptography.

• Front end web

Front end web required you to use modern framework like React, Vue or Angular in order to interact with the blockchain for the users.

Trap 3: Using the Geth CLI

Geth CLI sometimes might be confusing on setting up private network (Maybe I need to spend more time reading the docs). I had been trial and error a lot on the cli tools for the whole day, I even rented 2 VPS server just to test out stuff.

Conclusion

I thought I have enough skills to setup the Ethereum server, I guess I have to take a step back to the basic first in order to setup the servers before deploy smart contract on to the private network.