Get started with Blockchain and Ethereum

Blockchain in the media is often about money, but you can get started with blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain for free and try out a lot of things.

The first thing I would recommend is to install and get familiar with wallets, both a desktop and mobile wallet.

I can recommend installing Metamask on desktop and Status.im on your mobile phone.

https://metamask.io/ for desktop

https://dev.status.im/ for mobile

Get familiar with a private/public key and backing up your wallet

Knowing how to keep your private key safe, but also without accidentally loosing it is a new skill to know when working with blockchain. We are still early in blockchain and right now everyone have to personally keep their private key safe. That can be done by writing it down on paper and storing it somewhere safe offline, this way you can recover it if you loose it!

Get familiar with a test network

There exist the main network, which is the real network and then there exist a test network which is used for development, but it is just as real as the main network.

It is funny as the networks are identical, the only difference with blockchains is that the real one is the one most people support, so in theory the test network could become real, but that is very unlikely.

You can even get free "Ether" from what is called a faucet. It is a website that the miners from the test networks have made to give out free coins so that developers and others can test their blockchain apps without having to use money, but also to test their apps when a new feature has been release before it hits mainnet.

https://faucet.rinkeby.io/

Try out writing your first Ethereum contract

Solidity is the programming language for the Ethereum blockchain. There is several ways you can started, the most fun is probrably Crypto Zombies which is a fun tutorial, learning how to write a smart contract for a small tamagotchi game.

https://cryptozombies.io/

and you can try to run some of these smart contracts in this online Solidity compiler, you can do that with the online developed Remix

https://remix.ethereum.org/

The solidity documentation is also good and contains a lot of examples:

https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.5.3/