To be among the small percentage of projects that successful deploy blockchain projects its not only crucial to understand the common challenges that face majority of companies offering blockchain solutions but your developers will also need to know and avoid some of the common problems facing blockchain programmers.

Software developers in general face alot of challenges, its not dissimilar for blockchain developers. In this post we will cover some of the common problems new blockchain software developers face and some solutions.

1. Building Dapps on Incomplete Protocols

To truly build innovative decentralized applications, the choice of blockchain protocol to build on will be the most crucial decision a blockchain development team will have to make. Your protocol of choice should provide an ecosystem of permissionless verification, trust, and payment mechanisms that provides benefits for all network participants.

Some of the characteristics I consider in my choice for a dapp platform include:

• Open-Source: Your protocol of choice should not only be open-sourced also have a large community of developers; protocols several dApps already running in production is as added advantage.
• Progamming Language: Several protocols develop new programming languages with high-level checks for their smart contracts. This is important to consider depending on your interest to learn a new language.
• Peer Reviews: Thirdly, I consider protocols whose attack-resistance and other properties have been peer-reviewed by a good number of developers, industry leaders and/or academics.
• Truly Decentralized: Since decentralization is at the heart of blockchain revolution, consider working with protocols without links to governments or those controlled by private companies.
• Documentation: It should go without saying but prior to any build process, reading a protocol documentation, white papers and other terms of network use will ensure your softwares remain within the consensus governance model.
• Cost of Smart contract Deployment: Because we're still building a business, to maintain low overheads and other network costs, consider cost of deploying smart contracts, transaction costs and other costs related to maintaining the network.

2. Writing Insecure Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are a blockchain feature expected to be that centre of changing governance models around the world. One unique quality they have is their “immutability”. Once deployed, the code is unchangeable, making the correction of bugs nearly impossible. This means there is an immeasurable need to maintain proper security. One way to do this is to ensure you write smart contracts without loopholes that can result in the loss of user funds like the case of theDao hack.

As a blockchain programmer, you will be require to remain constantly aware of the new security threats within each protocol Smart Contract Systems and adhere to the highest quality in design and verification, to ensure that we solve these security problems and build world-class, secure solutions for digital assets.

3. Building A Centralized Service on a Decentralized Protocol

Decentralization is an important characteristic of any blockchain, but we've seen implementations that are still facilitated by a single trusted party - essentially negating the whole premise of a decentralized, independent network. While platforms can still be cryptographically protected these centralization aspect risks turning blockchain into Web2.0.

Blockchain promises "nearly friction-free cooperation between members of complex networks that can add value to each other by enabling collaboration without central authorities and middle men" You should aim to remain true to this original vision in your current and future dapp(s) development.

4. Using Incomplete set of Blockchain Features

Using blockchain to power cryptocurrencies is its first successful implementation. To use this technology to decentralize applications we must incorporate all the features that make blockchain great for digital money and possibly many more applications. In computer engineering terms, a blockchain is a cryptographically hashed linked list.

Integration of these features will not only optimize your solution, it will improve your user experience increasing the value of your solution in the market. These features include:

• Immutability and tamper detection: Every block is referenced by a unique string of characters, generated by a cryptographic hash function. Therefore, any changes made to the contents of a block will change the hash of the block. This way an observer can identify tampering at any point on the blockchain, without having to verify contents of each and every block.
• Data protection: The blockchain is typically stored and maintained on multiple devices. Thousands of devices worldwide store the Bitcoin blockchain. Thus, the data is protected even if one or more of the devices are compromised by an attack or network issues.
• Relative User Anonymity: Public key cryptography, used in digital currencies, has been around since the 1970’s. Nevertheless, the clever use of cryptography in conjunction with the blockchain made viable decentralized currencies possible for the first time in history.

Conclusion

Blockchain programming is relatively new and while we have identified some common mistakes to avoid in your journey, we might be in a position to identify even more as the industry evolves. That's not to discourage you from building your dapps but you implore you to maintain mindfulness as you build the next best thing!