DEV Community: geraldarzy

Intro to Blockchain: ERC-1155 Tokens

geraldarzy — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:46:44 +0000

1155 Tokens??
1155 tokens, best way put, is a combination of ERC-721 tokens and ERC-20 tokens.

What does ERC-20 tokens classify as? Fungible. They are tradeable within their own kind. For example, lets say theres a coin called Example. One example coin could be traded for another example coin because they are of the same value. Each example coin is worth the same as another example coin, therefore they are fungible.

What does an ERC-721 token classify as. Non-Fungible. They are no tradeable within their own kind. For example lets say theres a 721 token called Token1 and another called Token2. I can not trade Token1 for Token2 because they are not of the same monetary value. Let's say Token1 is worth $5 while Token2 is worth $10. They are not of the same value, they are each unique and therefore they are not fungbile.

So now lets get to it. What is an ERC-1155 token? A combination of both right? Say there is a collection of ERC-1155 tokens. The way this would look is that there are multiple token types with each type having multiple copies. To understand this better, lets relate this to 721 and 20 tokens. Inside the collection of 1155 tokens, there will be multiple different 721 tokens (token types) and within each 721 there will be multiple copies, making each 721 token basically a 20 token. That is ERC-1155 tokens.

Let's take a look at an example of a collection of 1155 tokens. Here is a project called My Curio Cards (First collection of NFT's btw).

As you can see, there are multiple types of tokens. Each picture being a different token. But if we click on one type of token, you will see that each token type, has multiple copies.

This token has 1.4k copies. Meaning that this card 'MadBitcoins' has 1.4k copies of it that are fungible between one another. But this 'MadBitcoin' token can not be traded for a different type of card, because again, they are all different values.

Intro to Blockchain: Opensea

geraldarzy — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 23:25:37 +0000

What is Opensea? Opensea is known as the most popular secondary market for NFT's at this moment. It essentially is just a platform where a user can connect their wallet and have all the contents of that wallet be shown and be eligible for trading / selling.
Although a connected wallet is not required. Without a wallet, you can still browse the current NFT's on the market.

The great thing about Opensea is that it gives the NFT community a shared space where everyone goes to share their NFT's. The even greater thing is that you dont have to transfer your NFT from your wallet to the platform. Opensea itself just retrieves the NFT from your wallet and persists the data that you attached to it.

Opensea is very crucial to the community. It's the place where you would go to sell your NFT. It's the ebay to used goods, the amazon to random products, the walmart to groceries. Currently Opensea is the top dog but there have been other companies trying to take that away from them. Insert Coinbase who is trying to make their own market. Coinbase is a more reupatable brand but will the it overcome the OG?

Intro to Blockchain: Etherscan

geraldarzy — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 06:22:51 +0000

The great thing about blockchain technology is that EVERYTHING is online.
Etherscan is a search engine that lets you see all the transactions happening on the blockchain.
To perform actions onto the blockchain, there needs to be a smart contract that has set functions. When these functions are called, usually, but depending on the type of function being called, a transaction is sent. Once this transaction is sent, it will forever be up on etherscan for people to view. If I make a transaction right now, you would be able to find my transaction and see what I did in the transaction.
How can you identify transactions? Say you made a transaction and you want to show your friend proof that you actually did what you were supposed to, a receipt, you can send them your transaction hash. With this transaction hash, you can find the transaction and easily see what was actually performed in that hash. This is a really easy way to do business as the blockchain can serve as the middleman. With the transaction hash serving as the receipt.

Intro to Blockchain: What is a DAPP?

geraldarzy — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 04:44:37 +0000

DAPP? A decentralized application. The best way to explain this is in comparison to a WebApp, Web Application. The main key difference between the two is that a DApp talks to the blockchain whereas a WebApp does not.

So what exactly does a DApp do? A DApp provides a nice Frontend User Interface for the Ethereum Smart Contracts. Basically using the blockchain itself as its backend.
What does providing an interface for a smart contract mean? To a person not familiar with blockchain or smart contracts, the code of smart contract might be confusing if not all together terrifying. The frontend interface allows a user to perform the functions stored on the smart contract in a much user friendly manner.
DApp's are really useful to introduce people into blockchain and slowly uncover the fact that the user can skip the DApp and go straight to the contract to perform all the functions.

Intro to Blockchain: Providers

geraldarzy — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 17:26:45 +0000

What exactly is a provider? A provider is an instance of what we are using to connect to a node on a blockchain. To connect to a node, there are a couple of providers we can use. Lets just go over the basic ones like MetaMask and Infura.

Lets go over Infura first. Infura can be used anywhere. From a local script to a website online. How it works is that you grab your infura API key and with that you can create a new provider instance. This works well because you just need to plug in and go with it.

With MetaMask, you actually have to be on a browser. Since MetaMask is a browser extension, to access its API, you need to be on a browser with MetaMask enabled. If MetaMask is enabled, MetaMask will inject it's API into the DOM, accessible to us with window.ethereum.

Intro to Blockchain: Ethers JS Contract Instances

geraldarzy — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 17:19:22 +0000

What is Ethers JS? Ethers JS is a Javascript library that serves to allow your webapp interact with the Ethereum Blockchain. Its competitor library is Web3 JS but here we will be talking about Ethers.

To get started, lets get familiar with the top 3 things you will need to properly communicate with a smart contract. First you will need a Provider, second a Signer, and lastly, a Contract.

What are these things? Lets break it down.

A Provider is what actually connects us the nodes that are in the blockchain. With Ethers JS we would do this by
new ethers.providers.Web3Provider(INSERT_PROVIDER_HERE).
This is creating a new instance of a provider with Ethers JS.

A Signer is actually just an abstraction of the users wallet address. This is what actually allows us to send over a signed transaction by use of our wallets address. And to do this you simply grab the provider you just made, and call provider.getSigner() on it. This will return a new Signer instance that you can use to send over signed transactions.

A contract instance is the most important part. To create a new instance of a contract, you need to pass in a couple things. First pass in the address of where the contract is deployed, whether it be locally, on a testnet, or the actual mainnet. Second we need to pass in the contracts ABI. And lastly we need to either pass in a provider or a signer.

What can we do with a contract instance? With a contract instance, we can call all the functions that are stored on the smart contract. We can communicate with the smart contract anyway we want. Up next is should we pass in a provider or a signer? If you pass in a provider to this contract instance, that instance will only be able to perform read-only functions. Whereas if you pass in a signer, that instance will be able to run both read and write functions.
new ethers.Contract(ADDRESS, ABI, SIGNER OR PROVIDER)

Intro to Blockchain: Gas Fees

geraldarzy — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 04:13:26 +0000

Gas fees. What are they?
To fully understand gas fees, I think its important to have a little more knowledge about how the blockchain works. Since the blockchain is a bunch of decentralized nodes, those nodes all require some sort of money and incentives to keep working. We call these nodes, miners. People who have nodes set up to do the work and their sole purpose is to get paid by transactions happening on the block chain.
Well whos paying them? Everytime a transaction happens on the blockchain, the person signing off on the transaction actually agrees to pay a certain gas fee. And depending on how many transactions are happening on the blockchain at the given time, the gas fee will vary. It can vary so much that at certain times, a simple action of minting a token can cost up to 1 Etherium just to complete the transaction.

Intro To Blockchain: MetaMask

geraldarzy — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 04:08:54 +0000

What is MetaMask? MetaMask is actually a company that is the leading provider for crypto wallets. What is a crypto wallet? A crypto wallet is an online storage where a user can keep all their crypto coins. With it being online and all, security is top priority number one. The way that MetaMask get's this done is by having not just an ordinary password, but also a secure set of private key words that is assigned to the user when they create their wallet. With this secret phrase, they can log onto their wallet. Without this phrase, no one can do anything. Literally no one, not even MetaMask themselves. That's the beauty about this, it is so secure that if you lose this secret phrase, you might as well just have lost all the money in your wallet, and as per usual, people in crypto, have alot to lose.

Intro to Blockchain: ERC-20 vs ERC-721 Tokens

geraldarzy — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 23:47:24 +0000

Wow those are some fancy looking words! I promise theyre easy, they just look intimidating!

ERC-20 - tokens are Fungible, meaning that they are able to be replaced by one another. Compared to each other, they are not uniques. Say a penny for example. Pennies are unique and hold their own value in the American Currency system, but amongst other pennies, pennies are all the same and worth the same amount.

ERC-721 - tokens are Non-Fungible (NFT's). Meaning that they aren't able to be replaced by one another. Lets go back to the pennies. Since ERC-721 tokens are non-fungible, one token would differ in price or value than another token. Lets pretend these ERC-721 tokens were pieces of art, it's a perfect analogy because no one piece of art is the same as another. Therefore each token having a different price.

Intro to Blockchain: NFT Art

geraldarzy — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 02:53:44 +0000

In a new era of the world where tech is booming and soaring to new heights no one could ever have imagined, there is now a way to have unique one of a kind digital art. Yes you read that correctly, one of a kind digital art.
It's kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around that digital art could be one of a kind because what is stopping someone from screenshotting the image or copy and pasting the image file. That's where blockchain comes in. With new innovations in blockchain, we've figured out how to utilize Non-Fungible Tokens to make sure that each art is unique with its own token. With the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) as the identifier of who currently owns the art, NFT's are being sold for ridiculous amounts of money that can go up to multi-million dollar transactions.

Sold for $6.6 million worth of Etherium
With NFT's there is now a market for luxury art where artist's can sell their art to aspiring art collectors.

Sorting Algorithms: Bubble Sort

geraldarzy — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:21:51 +0000

Bubble sort. A fairly familiar sorting algorithm I hope. A couple important things you should know abut bubble sort is that it is not fairly popular, not commonly used, and is not that efficient. It is still nice to know just for knowledge sake.

Let's get into it.

What is the goal of this algorithm?
Let's say that we have an array that we want to sort from smallest to largest, so ascending order. We can use bubble sort. The idea is simple, we iterate through the array and for each instance in that array, we will compare it to the instance directly next to it. Let's pretend the first instance is x and the second instance is y. If x = 1 and y = 3, we compared it and we know that the first instance is not greater than the second instance so we move on to the next set of pairs, the second instance we just talked about (y = 3) and the 3rd instance in the array, let's call it z. So now we have y = 3 and z = 2. Since y is greater than z and y comes before z, let's switch out the two so that 2 comes before the 3 which is what we want for an ascending sorted array.
That's the basic idea of bubble sort. That sequence is repeated through out the whole array until everything is right and an iteration with no switches is reached.
Here is a visual representation of that.

Now let's talk time complexity!
To get right to the answer, worst case scenario, bubble sorts time complexity is O(n^2). When actually implementing this algorithm, you began to realize that a nested for-loop is actually required to pull it off.

Intro to Blockchain: Distributed Systems

geraldarzy — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 02:22:49 +0000

Blockchain, the newest and most popular technology that everyone is currently raving about. What is it exactly?

'A blockchain is a distributed software network that functions both as a digital ledger and a mechanism enabling the secure transfer of assets without an intermediary.' -The Blockchain Research Institute

A lot of confusing words there, lets break it down to 'distributed software network', 'digital ledger', and 'secure transfer of assets'. First lets understand what a ledger is. A ledger is usually a log. A loan shark for example would have a personal ledger logging all the people that owe him money. In that same book they'll log those same transactions as either paid or late or whatever the case. It's a log of the history, the transactions, the numbers. In this case it would be a digital ledger probably keeping track of all the transactions happening.
That sounds like a pretty important thing right? A book with all the history and transactions in one place. What if whoever held that book were to make changes to that? Thats so unsecure.
That's where the power of blockchain comes in. The great thing about blockchain is that it runs on a 'distributed software network' or distributed system. What is a distributed system? A distributed system is a network of nodes that work together collectively. What are nodes? Nodes is just a fancy term for a machine that can connect to the network, it can be a computer, laptop, physical server, virtual machines, or other containers. Now through these network of nodes, the digital ledger is kept and stored on this distributed system. Each node has a piece of information of its own, and a copy of the information of the node next to it. Since our current node has a copy of the information of the node next to it, let's say that node next to it tries to change their information, we'd know right away because their information doesn't match up with what we have. Same goes for us and how the node next to us can keep us in check. Instead of a ledger being kept by one entity, we now have spread out the digital ledger amongst multiple nodes all keeping one another accountable. And that chain of nodes working together is the blockchain.