From simple crypto investments (buy & hold), speculative day trades, investments in cloud mining contracts, to building a custom 12 GPU ethereum mining rig. Sound enough? Not for me, it was yesterday I decided to get my hands dirty and understand this blockchain economy better and building a few test ethereum smart contracts.
There is one simple explanation I can find for my desire to explore more - just to understand how this blockchain economy works from the technical point of view. You see - setting up a mining rig is one thing - giving a direct benefit to me as a miner in a form of block rewards. I fact I don't like the name mining or miner - I better prefer transaction verifier or something.
Now, back to the subject -
Learning to code Ethereum Smart Contracts
A great starting place to learn more and code your first ethereum smart contract in Ethereum's official guide ( Building a smart contract using the command line)
Smart contracts are account holding objects on the ethereum blockchain. They contain code functions and can interact with other contracts, make decisions, store data, and send ether to others. Contracts are defined by their creators, but their execution, and by extension the services they offer, is provided by the ethereum network itself. They will exist and be executable as long as the whole network exists, and will only disappear if they were programmed to self destruct.
What can you do with contracts? Well, you can do almost anything really, but for our getting started guide let's do some simple things: To start you will create a classic "Hello World" contract, then you can build your own crypto token to send to whomever you like. Once you've mastered that then you will raise funds through a crowdfunding that, if successful, will supply a radically transparent and democratic organization that will only obey its own citizens, will never swerve away from its constitution and cannot be censored or shut down. And all that in less than 300 lines of code.
Make sure to follow Ethereum's official guide (Building a smart contract using the command line) to learn more