The following contract implements the simplest form of a cryptocurrency. The contract allows only its creator to create new coins (different issuance schemes are possible). Anyone can send coins to each other without a need for registering with a username and password, all you need is an Ethereum keypair.
The line address public minter; declares a state variable of type address. The address type is a 160-bit value that does not allow any arithmetic operations. It is suitable for storing addresses of contracts, or a hash of the public half of a keypair belonging to external accounts.
The keyword public automatically generates a function that allows you to access the current value of the state variable from outside of the contract. Without this keyword, other contracts have no way to access the variable. The code of the function generated by the compiler is equivalent to the following (ignore external and view for now):
function minter() external view returns (address) { return minter; }
You could add a function like the above yourself, but you would have a function and state variable with the same name. You do not need to do this, the compiler figures it out for you.
The next line, mapping (address => uint) public balances; also creates a public state variable, but it is a more complex datatype. The mapping type maps addresses to unsigned integers.
Mappings can be seen as hash tables which are virtually initialised such that every possible key exists from the start and is mapped to a value whose byte-representation is all zeros. However, it is neither possible to obtain a list of all keys of a mapping, nor a list of all values. Record what you added to the mapping, or use it in a context where this is not needed. Or even better, keep a list, or use a more suitable data type.
The getter function created by the public keyword is more complex in the case of a mapping. It looks like the following:
function balances(address _account) external view returns (uint) {
return balances[_account];
}
You can use this function to query the balance of a single account.
The line event Sent(address from, address to, uint amount); declares an “event”, which is emitted in the last line of the function send. Ethereum clients such as web applications can listen for these events emitted on the blockchain without much cost. As soon as it is emitted, the listener receives the arguments from, to and amount, which makes it possible to track transactions.
To listen for this event, you could use the following JavaScript code, which uses web3.js to create the Coin contract object, and any user interface calls the automatically generated balances function from above:
Coin.Sent().watch({}, '', function(error, result) {
if (!error) {
console.log("Coin transfer: " + result.args.amount +
" coins were sent from " + result.args.from +
" to " + result.args.to + ".");
console.log("Balances now:\n" +
"Sender: " + Coin.balances.call(result.args.from) +
"Receiver: " + Coin.balances.call(result.args.to));
}
})
The constructor is a special function that is executed during the creation of the contract and cannot be called afterwards. In this case, it permanently stores the address of the person creating the contract. The msg variable (together with tx and block) is a special global variable that contains properties which allow access to the blockchain. msg.sender is always the address where the current (external) function call came from.
The functions that make up the contract, and that users and contracts can call are mint and send.
The mint function sends an amount of newly created coins to another address. The require function call defines conditions that reverts all changes if not met. In this example, require(msg.sender == minter); ensures that only the creator of the contract can call mint. In general, the creator can mint as many tokens as they like, but at some point, this will lead to a phenomenon called “overflow”. Note that because of the default Checked arithmetic, the transaction would revert if the expression balances[receiver] += amount; overflows, i.e., when balances[receiver] + amount in arbitrary precision arithmetic is larger than the maximum value of uint (2**256 - 1). This is also true for the statement balances[receiver] += amount; in the function send.
Errors allow you to provide more information to the caller about why a condition or operation failed. Errors are used together with the revert statement. The revert statement unconditionally aborts and reverts all changes similar to the require function, but it also allows you to provide the name of an error and additional data which will be supplied to the caller (and eventually to the front-end application or block explorer) so that a failure can more easily be debugged or reacted upon.
The send function can be used by anyone (who already has some of these coins) to send coins to anyone else. If the sender does not have enough coins to send, the if condition evaluates to true. As a result, the revert will cause the operation to fail while providing the sender with error details using the InsufficientBalance error.