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I want to experiment with Ethereum without having to download the entire blockchain. My ISP limits my bandwidth to 50GB and downloading the ETH chain would consume a lot of that, not to mention the time. Is there any SPV like implementation of Ethereum? With Bitcoin, I could simply download bitcoinj and start coding.

I have also considered Blockchain as a Service by Azure. Are there any alternatives? (because they need my credit card number.)

What I want to do:

  1. Experiment with simple transactions (sending Ether)
  2. Create contracts
  3. Store arbitrary data on blockchain.

Ideally I would prefer something that runs on JVM but that is not a hard constraint.

One method I have in mind is to run a private blockchain using Ethereum code but with my own genesis block. Will this approach work with other 3rd party Ethereum frameworks (such as Truffle)?

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up vote 3 down vote

You can connect to a remote ethereum node such as INFURA, using the JSON RPC API, so you won't need to worry amount maintaining and synchronizing a local node.

You can see this guide about using Truffle with INFURA

Disclaimer: INFURA Founder here.

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up vote 3 down vote

Besides Browser Solidity (as Rob Hitchens recommended), you could also experiment Smart Contracts using Populus. You could write your contracts and test it.

Populus is a smart contract development framework for the Ethereum blockchain.(http://populus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

In addition to that you could also create your private ethereum network, where blockchain will start from beginning. You could find the guide here: http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/2571/4575 and https://souptacular.gitbooks.io/ethereum-tutorials-and-tips-by-hudson/content/private-chain.html

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Creating private chain with Populus is recommended way for development, as public chain is way too slow to be useful for local development. – Mikko Ohtamaa 2 hours ago
up vote 0 down vote

You can work with Browser Solidity. It let's you experiment with Smart Contracts, compile them, run them and debug them using an in-memory execution environment (default), or the real thing. https://ethereum.github.io/browser-solidity/

testRPC is a sort of blockchain emulator that's very popular with developers. It will initialize a bunch of accounts and respond like a real blockchain would (mostly), but much faster.

Agree with Avatar, a private chain is another step toward realism before contending with the weight of testnet and the real thing. You can create a network as small as one node mining all by itself and test against that.

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