Many following the world of cryptocurrencies will have heard of Ethereum, but what is ethereum?
Obviously to talk about ethereum a single post would not be enough but I will try to talk to you about the most important things.
But what is Ethereum
What exactly is ethereum is what many people are asking today.
As you well know, ethereum was born in 2014, from the idea of Vitalik Buterin to create a decentralized smart contract platform.
Vilatik, studying the bitcoin project and understanding what was missing, innovated the system by creating a new decentralized platform.
So ethereum began as the Bitcoin project but the possibility of creating smart contracts is added to its blockchain.
In fact ethereum is the first crypto project that has the characteristic of being able to create Dapps in its system.
It uses the POW (proof of stake) algorithm as bitcoins, that is, the miners maintain the network and validate the blocks, but in 2020 it should go to the POS (proof of stake).
The smart contract function
In Ethereum you have the possibility to create Dapps that are decentralized applications that use the ethereum blockchain to work.
Smart contracts are used for the functioning of Dapps, as they exchange payment information with the blockchain.
Ethereum Virtual Machine EVM was created by the Ethereum foundation and is the official platform for creating Dapps.
The EVM uses the programming language called SOLIDITY which is a new language similar to C ++ or C #, very light is simpler.
Ethereum is the platform that has more Dapps inside as the first to have introduced them.
Smart contracts use the ERC20 protocol which is Ethereum’s technical standard.
There is the possibility of exchanging smart contracts of other blockchains on ethereum enough that they have the ERC20 protocol.
The Ethereum network
The Ethereum blockchain is focused on the possibility of creating the Dapps.
In order to work, each user must pay Gas Call fees to the miners in order to validate the blocks and keep the network.
Having the POW consent system, the miners validate the blocks and maintain the network.
The blocks are generated every 12 seconds which makes it scalable, and today they weigh about 20 KB.
It has a maximum of 107 million Tokens, but updates to the network are expected to decrease between 0.5 and 2% with the Casper update by 2026.
Within the network everyone can transfer contracts without the use of third parties, as ethereum acts as Exchange itself.
On Ethereum
With the increase in the network, Ethereum is having scalability problems and sudden increases in Gas due to the POW consensus system.
In fact the community is introducing a series of updates on the network, which should in 2021 move from a POW system to the POS.
This is because one would like to have greater scalability by increasing transactions per second and lowering the cost of gas.
All these updates are part of the Ethereum 2.0, which consists of a series of updates to transform the Ethereum blockchain.
Over time, Ethereum has undergone a Hard Fork that has divided the community into two parts regarding the Dao project.
Since then we have:
- Ethereum classic following the old project e
- L’ethreum headed by Vitalik Buterin who follows the new philosophy
The ethereum classic presents many problems that lead it to be uncommon.
The Ethereum community
The community of ethereum is very active and spread all over the world, there are groups everywhere.
We have the community of:
The official website is available here:
We find the whitepiper here:
The official Wallets are:
When it comes to blockchain research, go here:
The Ethereum source code can be found here on Github.
Where to buy Ethereum
Ethereum can be bought on all available Exchange as it is one of the first cryptocurrencies in circulation
My advice is to buy them on reliable Exchange like Coinbase or Binance.
If you don’t know how to buy cryptocurrencies I invite you to visit my post on the purchase.
The price is now traded at:
Conclusion
Ethereum represents one of the main existing cryptocurrencies, even the one with a greater solidity together with Bitcoin.
Today it is used with companies like Microsoft and Amazon where they are basing their platforms on smatcontract creation.
In the future it will surely reserve us some surprises as it is constantly evolving and improving.
Ethereum wants to create something new, it’s innovative, to do so it needs time and support and trust from many people.