New Project: Blockchain by me

Welcome to my first post.

My plan is to share my designs here.

I am also using editing software to avoid glaring typos. Please let me know if it missed a typo. I would like to get even with it!

So the first item to discuss is what I intend to do. Well, I have learned a lot about blockchain, and I have looked in detail at how to use IBM’s Hyperledger known as Fabric. I was surprised that the source is available, but instances are not really able to be installed and forked. Maybe someone else can find a way to do this, but I was unable to get that to work. I looked at a couple more, and they needed a unique combination of Linux and Boost library levels with all sorts of add-ons that had restricted versions. I did find Etherium was able to be installed and it can be forked. I did require newest releases, and these are not able to run on Raspberry Pi.

I want to run a blockchain example on a group of Raspberry Pis. I have purchased quite a few and intend to use them in a group and exchange information via blockchain like technology. Nothing really seems to work and even if it did the likelihood that it would be stable was small.

I also noticed that I did not like the code and structure of the design. I thought I could do better and I needed something less complex for the Raspberry Pis. Also, I am not sure I understand all the issues and need to account for them in the code and papers I read. I needed something less complex, maybe without all the crypto, and would actually run meaningfully on Pis.

So with a tip-of-the-hat to software heroes, I decided to write my own. But now the question came, on what? So I got the Raspberry Pi running and immediately found it slow and hard to use. The 30 hours to install Boost Library for C++ was still also fresh in my mind. I had spent hours and hours trying to get a descent Pi environment. So I did not really want to run my development on a Raspberry Pi.

My Apple computer is cool (I like to use cool here–the editing software is complaining and suggesting fresh) and fun, but I am not sure I want to test blockchain code and processing on my computer I run my life on. I have a few spare Windows and an Ubuntu server. I decided to try Linux. I tried to get Go to well go, and that was less positive than I expected. Python? Well, I like Python, but I think all of the libraries I will need will be in C++.  So C++.

Next, I found that Amazon has a new Cloud9 offering for well exactly what I was looking for, Linux based development.  Got my account running on Amazon. Cloud9 is free and thus costs about $2.00 a month. “Carrying charges,” I am told by the fat man at the Blue Parrot. 

I then loaded Boost newest. I was worried that the server would just fail. It finished the make in an hour or so. Great! I then hooked it into the library structure. I then wrote a fine C++ program to run an example program for one of the libraries. Success!

So in the first post, we learned that I am building a Raspberry Pi based example blockchain. I cannot find software that I believe will be stable and that I can understand. I decided to use Amazon’s Cloud9. So far I have Boost loaded and working.

A good start, I think.