A indie Dev's Take On Ethereum Smart Contracts

First and foremost, This probably more of a long rant than a long article. I don't write many long things, but i really wanted to write something for this steem it thing. So my rant is about developing for Ethereum. Now, Ethereum is a great coin with a lot of potential. However, it has many short commings that need to be said and laid out in an organized manner so that hopefully, the dev team can see it, and make changes accordingly, before a competitor can take advantage of it. If you don't know what smart contracts are, you can check out this video here.

Ethereum smart contracts are leading the industry. The growing beast has lead to the endless creations of standard tokens. We really don't know where this Smart Contract craze will lead us. We could go from simple lotteries and Crypto Kitties to RPGs with real world consequence. I don't know of another coin or token that has smart contracts that is as easy to deploy as Ethereums that also has the same capabilities. With that said, it can be extremely frustrating to delpoy a smart contract.

Under the current system, Ethereum can only benifit the big companies. It no longer encourages indie developers and their projects. At over 500 dollars a peice, Ethereum is quickly leaving the indie developer arena and into the mainstream only arena. But lets say that a developer decides that even at 500, they still want to build their application on ethereum. I mean, look around, What other options do they really have. Ada and Amp make promises, but only Ethereum has a working smart contract system. (That i know of).

So what does a developer have to look forward to when dealing with ethereum and their powerful smart contracts. We'll one thing for sure, you can almost hear eminem, because you only have one shot, one opportunity, to launch your code. In Ethereum there are no updates to Smart Contracts after they are deployed. So if there is an error inside your code or your smart contract, that error will be there forever. If not properly secured on the first launch, a nefarious actor can steal or break your contract. This should scare the pants out of every indie developer. Even teams of programmers could fall to these security issues if not properly looked after.

Ethereum does pull out all the stops. They've created their own High Level Language called Solidity which closely resembles programming languages like c and c#. An experienced programmer could pick up the language in less than 2 weeks. In order to get coding, you have to find an IDE or Notepad. While your out looking, and after you can't believe remix is the only real Solidity Ide. One thing you might notice is that Remix is an online browser Ide. This thing will require some getting used to. Since its a full IDE inside of your browser, it can run a little slow. On top of that, it doesn't have the most descriptive UI. It'll require a few hours to get the hang of it. If you make an error, don't worry, you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel at stack over flow digging for answers. Only to return back to the basic tutorial tutorial on the Solidity home page.

Deploying can be a very simple process. Provided you have great internet speed, an SSD hard drive and everything updated, i hear it can be a very simple process. However if you do not have a spare 500gb SSD hard drive, this is where you may have even more trouble. Now you could spin up some instances on AWS and quickly download the block chain, but the indie developer would then have to also know linux, blockchain commands, and various other extra things. No big deal i guess, we just add it to the list of things you must have to use Ethereum's Smart Contracts. Or you try to use Meta Mask which has it's own issues involving gas prices.
Which leads me to my final point, gas prices.

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Gas prices are enormous for whats being accomplished. At the current rates, tons of ideas are no longer feasible. If Ethereum continues to grow, (Which we all hope it does), then eventually, we'll price most Dapps out of the market. This doesn't mean, ethereum wont have a substantial marketcap or growth, who know if it will to be honest. This just means if it does have these growths, it'll be open for Alt coin competition. Someone who can offer a system that is more simple that the current head ache that is developing for ethereum.

Lets lay out what ethereum needs to do. They need to figure out a way to squeeze more transactions into current gas prices so that gas prices become lower for everyone else. They need to create a new wallet that can connect and sync within a day. The wallet needs to be able see balances. The wallet should be able to deploy contracts and use the functions within those contracts. Ethereum is great and the possibilities could be endless. They allow a developer to create a progream that will keep it's state amongst many nodes. However, just like how Bitcoin's high prices allowed the creation of altcoins like litecoin. As Ethereum grows, it'll need to fix these issues or face stiff competition in the future. Otherwise, the indie community will leave Ethereum.