In this article, I will assume that you read my other articles on the Geth Ethereum node and that you already have an Ubuntu machine running Ethereum Geth. If not, please go back to my other articles to find how to deploy and connect the Ethereum node:

• An Ethereum node running on Ubuntu. Check this article where I explain how to deploy an Ethereum node on Ubuntu AWS
• You already know a few commands to play around with the Etehreum network. Check this article where I talk about some commands to explore Ethereum blocks
• Also please get a pup 🐶🤩

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This article will create and run a script that will audit and calculate the “total difficulty” in the Ethereum blockchain. This is super useful and fun, trust me! 😇

To be able to follow along, I’m assuming that you have already the following:

• An Ethereum node running on Ubuntu. Check this article where I explain how to deploy an Ethereum node on Ubuntu AWS
• You already know a few commands to play around with the Etehreum network. Check this article where I talk about some commands to explore Ethereum blocks
• You have already the Python web3 library installed. …

In this article, we will learn how to install Python on your Ubuntu machine, install the web3 library and connect to the Ethereum network. This article assumes that you have already the following:

• An Ethereum node running on Ubuntu. Check this article where I explain how to deploy an Ethereum node on Ubuntu AWS
• You already know a few commands to play around with the Etehreum network. Check this article where I talk about some commands to explore Ethereum blocks
• You know what an 🦄 is! 😇

Python is a great programming language to play around with blockchain and other…

In the previous article of the Ethereum Node Series, we went through the steps to deploy an Ethereum node on AWS Cloud. Now that our node is deployed and running let’s start playing around with it, learn how to retrieve Egthereum blocks, understand the different components of the Ethereum block and understand a few other commands related to the Ethereum network.

Ethereum — the world’s biggest distributed computer

Ethereum is also described as a second-generation blockchain (being Bitcoin-like blockchains, the first-generation), supporting the first-time smart contracts and scripting functionality. Smart contracts allow a world of possibilities, and they can pretty much automate anything, being self-executing computer code…

First, a Brief Ethereum Intro (to refresh our memory)

Created in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum has its native currency, Ether, ticker symbol ETH, which has a market cap of around 200 billion dollars as of June 2021. Ether is used both for transactions and used as currency to reward the miners for their work through transaction fees paid by the users and smart contracts. Per day, Ethereum processes more than one million transactions which are approximately four times more than Bitcoin.

Ethereum is a proof of work blockchain just like Bitcoin. It’s moving however to Ethereum 2.0 which will adopt proof of stake as a consensus mechanism.

It’s…

If you are in the blockchain space, almost for sure, you have heard about ECDSA. ECDSA stands for Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and uses the elliptic curve cryptography.

ECDSA is the signature scheme used in Bitcoin. Every Bitcoin address (the one you use to send and receive funds) is a cryptographic hash of the ECDSA public key. You can check this article to learn more about cryptographic hashing.

For this ECDSA article, we will follow Ethereum’s method with Ethereum libraries.

ECDSA is also used in many other applications other than blockchains. For example, the Apple ecosystem widely uses ECDSA…

It's been quite a journey! Writing for Medium and actually, get people to read what you write… it’s not easy at the beginning. However, just like for almost anything else, consistency is the key!

Now, after writing my 50th article, I start to collect the crops that I’ve planted months ago. The audience is growing, the number of followers is growing and the number of publications sending me messages to publish with them is also growing.

I’ve decided to do zero promotion of my articles because… let’s be honest, I don’t have a huge social media following and basically, if…

For hashing, prime numbers are used since they provide a better chance of creating unique values for a hash function. Hash functions (if you don’t know what hashing is please read this article) use modulus, and the use of composite numbers (i.e. non-prime) increases the probability of hash collisions (i.e. different inputs to result in the same hash). Prime numbers will increase the chance of creating unique values when hashing by multiplying values by the prime number. This is just the nature of mathematics. For example, if you have a string “Unblockchain”, multiplying each letter with a prime number and…