Product Manager’s guide to Blockchain- Part 3

Mechanics of Ethereum, Gas, Contracts & Smart Contracts

This post appeared in my weekly newsletter on Product Management & Tech. 
👉 Sign up here to get new posts straight to your inbox.
👉 Follow me on twitter For more Product Management & Tech Content

In Part 2 of this blockchain series, we looked at a blockchain platform called Ethereum, and the reasons that led to its development. The most important being Ethereum provides the ability for regular developers to build trustless applications of arbitrary complexity without being bogged down by the details of how everything under the hood is working.

In essence, the platform abstracts the underlying blockchain’s complexity and lets people manipulate the blockchain via a high level programming language.

As I often do, In my quest to understand the platform better, I decided to actually build something on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and in the process learn the mechanics of it. Turned out it wasn’t such a good idea this time — I had trouble setting up the environment and understanding why certain things were happening the way they were.

I went back and forth on the documentation and Stack Overflow searches, and was finally able to get it to work and…