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Smart Contract Development from the Perspective of Developers: Topics and Issues Discussed on Social Media

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12063))

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Abstract

Blockchain-based platforms are emerging as a transformative technology that can provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities. One of the key features of these platforms is the trustworthy decentralized execution of general-purpose computation in the form of smart contracts, which are envisioned to have a wide range of applications. As a result, a rapidly growing and active community of smart-contract developers has emerged in recent years. A number of research efforts have investigated the technological challenges that these developers face, introducing a variety of tools, languages, and frameworks for smart-contract development, focusing on security. However, relatively little is known about the community itself, about the developers, and about the issues that they face and discuss. To address this gap, we study smart-contract developers and their discussions on two social media sites, Stack Exchange and Medium. We provide insight into the trends and key topics of these discussions, into the developers’ interest in various security issues and security tools, and into the developers’ technological background.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://stackoverflow.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/.

  3. 3.

    https://medium.com/.

  4. 4.

    www.coinbase.com/price/ethereum.

  5. 5.

    Score is the difference between the number of upvotes and downvotes for a post.

  6. 6.

    github.com/crytic/echidna.

  7. 7.

    www.ethlint.com.

  8. 8.

    github.com/quoscient/octopus.

  9. 9.

    github.com/federicobond/solcheck.

  10. 10.

    github.com/raineorshine/solgraph.

  11. 11.

    github.com/SilentCicero/solint.

  12. 12.

    protofire.github.io/solhint.

  13. 13.

    github.com/sagap/sonar-solidity.

  14. 14.

    github.com/ConsenSys/surya.

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Acknowledgment

We thank the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript for their insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Houston, Houston, USA

    Afiya Ayman, Shanto Roy, Amin Alipour & Aron Laszka

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  1. Afiya Ayman
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  2. Shanto Roy
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  3. Amin Alipour
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Correspondence to Aron Laszka .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, USA

    Matthew Bernhard

  2. Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  3. Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    L. Jean Camp

  4. Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University, Washington, WA, USA

    Shin'ichiro Matsuo

  5. Western Sydney University, Parramatta, Australia

    Alana Maurushat

  6. Maison du Nombre, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter B. Rønne

  7. Dipartimento di Matematica, University of Trento, Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

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Ayman, A., Roy, S., Alipour, A., Laszka, A. (2020). Smart Contract Development from the Perspective of Developers: Topics and Issues Discussed on Social Media. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12063. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_29

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