Comparing Distributed Ledgers by Game of Thrones use case — Ethereum
This is the seventh part of our series “Comparing Distributed Ledgers by Game of Thrones Use Case”. To find out more about the series and the other articles of it, check out our intro article!
What is a comparison of distributed ledger technologies without Ethereum?
Right, garbage!
So here there are, our insights we got by incorporating the seven kingdoms in Ethereum.
Ethereum of course is the best known and most used platform for decentralized applications. Anyone who’s interested in blockchain and DLT’s in general knows about it, and most people who start getting their feet wet by fooling around with any blockchain code do it with Ethereum.
It is a public blockchain that currently uses Proof-of-Work consensus with its native currency Ether. Anyone can mine, and anyone can make transactions on it. Ethereum enables smart contracts to be executed by the runtime environment “Ethereum Virtual Machine”.
Implementation
To see the source code of our implementation, head over to our GitHub.
We used the truffle suite for our implementation. The smart contract was coded in solidity, and tested with the frameworks mocha and chai. Therefore tests are written in javascript, and can be tested with a local blockchain provided by Ganache, a tool that’s included in the truffle suite.
We also deployed our Game of Thrones contract to the Ropsten Testnet with Truffle and Infura. The whole process of writing the contract, to testing and to deploying to Ropsten was straight-forward, apart from a self-induced neat little off-by-one error along the way…
Implementing the Game of Thrones use case in Ethereum was relatively easy, because we already had experience with it. Futhermore, there are a lot of tutorials, github threads and tools out there, that really help while developing.
However, we realized that it was only “easy” to implement in Ethereum because we already had knowledge of solidity, mocha, truffle, metamask and so on.
Additionally, we already knew what to expect, instead of stumbling across tools and dependencies we didn’t know we would need as it happened to us in other DLT’s.
So if you’re a beginner in the blockchain field, the whole ecosystem is still hard to grasp at first, and needs some time. Ethereum is awesome because of its great and big community, and because of its wide spread adoption. The only issue are the fairly high transaction fees, which are undesirable for micropayments. Also the speed of transaction confirmation could be faster for specific use cases. As we look into the future, the introduction of Proof-of Stake consensus and Sharding in Ethereum will replace the resource intensive Proof-of-Work consensus and further enhance scaling possibilities.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Tons of documentation
- Well tested platform that works
- Strong community that develops both the blockchain protocol as well as decentralized Apps.
- Roadmap indicates that current issues will be solved in the near future (PoS, Sharding)
Cons:
- Solidity and deployment of smart contracts is complicated
- Rather costly
- Rather slow
Special thanks to the thousands of developers, who are working on Ethereum every month!
Special thanks to Vitalik Buterin for creating the Ethereum ecosystem!
Block42 is a blockchain solution provider developing applications on top of most recognized blockchain frameworks like Ethereum, Hyperledger and many more.
