This chapter is a hands-on guide for developing our first smart contract. As an unspoken tradition of software developers since the days of Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C language, we will start with a Hello World program. We will then introduce some basic increment, decrement, and loop operations using smart contracts. We walk through the process of creating our own private blockchain, right from the genesis block, and mining our own ethers. After studying this chapter, you will be able to:

• Write your first Hello World smart contract
• Code a contract with basic increment and decrement operation
• Code a loop
• Raise an issue on GitHub
• Create a private blockchain and mine ethers to run a smart contract