[Pycon] [new paper] "Stefano Fioravanzo" - A primer on the Ethereum Blockchain and Smart Contracts using Python and Serpent

[info a pycon.it]

Title: A primer on the Ethereum Blockchain and Smart Contracts using Python and Serpent
Duration: 60 (includes Q&A)
Q&A Session: 15
Language: en
Type: Talk

Abstract: 
The Blockchain technology is an ingenious invention that has gained a lot of momentum and public attention in the recent years.
In this talk we are going to review the basic concepts behind this technology, starting from its very first conception: The Bitcoin blockchain. We will discover what problems Bitcoin was able to solve, like decentralized consensus and secure money transfer, and what are its fundamental limitations, like the lack of a Turing-complete scripting language and state management that are necessary to build complex decentralized applications.

We will then discuss how the Ethereum project tries to overcome these limitations introducing the Turing complete Ethereum Virtual Machine and advanced Smart Contracts, giving developers the power to build any kind of applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

The Blockchain has the potential to become pervasive within our society, any centralized service can now be decentralized using Ethereum or related implementations. We will look into some real case scenarios where this technology is already deployed and other where it could have a great impact.

Many of the tools to interact and develop with the Ethereum blockchain are built with Python. We will learn which are the basic tools used to run a blockchain locally on our laptops going through the installation and preparation process to get a full Ethereum node up and running on our local machine.
Serpent is one of the languages of choice when building Smart Contracts in Ethereum and it is heavily inspired by Python. We will learn how to write a simple Smart Contract, deploy it to our local running blockchain and mine it to make it valid.



Tags: [u'blockchain']