Coinsino: Blockchain Betting

Inspiration

As a patent attorney and developer, I was especially interested in learning how smart contracts would reshape the world of business and the role of attorneys as middle men, and my team of developers were interested in exploring opportunities with decentralized apps. The disintermediation made possible by the blockchain is also threatening to unseat participants in another popular industry: gambling. In an effort to both learn the Solidity language and explore how smart contracts can be used to facilitate simple betting operations, we worked to adapt the project posted by Merunas Grincalaitis at https://medium.com/@merunasgrincalaitis/the-ultimate-end-to-end-tutorial-to-create-and-deploy-a-fully-descentralized-dapp-in-ethereum-18f0cf6d7e0e into a more complex gaming decentalized application.

What it does

This Dapp allows players to bet Ether on what will be the last digit or letter in the most recently mined block.

How I built it

We followed the guide posted by Merunas Grincalaitis at https://medium.com/@merunasgrincalaitis/the-ultimate-end-to-end-tutorial-to-create-and-deploy-a-fully-descentralized-dapp-in-ethereum-18f0cf6d7e0e using Atom, Windows Powershell, npm, node.js, and Truffle.

Challenges I ran into

Although we had some experience in JavaScript and recent practice in Solidity, our main challenge was figuring out how to use React to connect our smart contract, which deployed successfully in the Remix IDE, with the front-end environment. As a result, we weren't able to fully implement our Dapp by the dapphack submission deadline.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're thrilled that we got our smart contract to deploy successfully, and that we understand Solidity well enough to change the focus and purpose of the sample code to handle more complicated betting functions.