Ethereum - Everything you need to get started

Ethereum is second most valued digital asset in the crypto market in today's date.

Ethereum is an open blockchain platform that allows anyone build and use decentralized applications that run on blockchain technology. Like Bitcoin, no one controls or owns Ethereum - it's an open source project built by many individuals around the globe. Unlike the Bitcoin protocol, Ethereum is designed to be adaptable and flexible. It's simple to create new applications on the Ethereum platform and safe for anybody to use those applications. In late 2013, Ethereum's inventor Vitalik Buterin proposed that a single blockchain with the capacity to be reprogrammed to perform any arbitrarily complex calculation could subsume these numerous other projects. 

In the year 2014, Ethereum founders Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke started working on a next-generation blockchain that had the aspirations to implement a general, fully trusted smart contract platform. As opposed to giving users a set of predefined operations, Ethereum allows users to create their very own operations of any complexity they wish. Ethereum in the narrow sense refers to a suite of protocols that define a platform for decentralized applications. In the heart of it's the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which can execute code of arbitrary algorithmic complexity. In computer science terms, Ethereum is Turing complete. 

Like any blockchain, Ethereum also features a peer-to-peer network protocol. The Ethereum blockchain database is maintained and updated by many nodes connected to the network. For this reason, Ethereum is sometimes described evocatively as a World computer. This massive parallelization of computing across the entire Ethereum network isn't done to make computation much more efficient. Rather, every Ethereum node runs the EVM in order to maintain consensus across the blockchain. Decentralized consensus gives Ethereum extreme levels of fault tolerance, ensures zero downtime, and makes data stored on the block permanently unalterable and censorship-resistant. The Ethereum platform itself is devoid of value agnostic. 

Particularly, ethereum is suitable for applications that automate direct interaction among peers or facilitate coordinated group action across a network. Theoretically, financial interactions or exchanges of any complexity might be carried out automatically and reliably using code running on Ethereum. Beyond financial applications, any environments where trust, security, and permanence are important - for example, asset registries, voting, governance, and the internet of things - might be enormously impacted by the Ethereum platform. Ethereum incorporates many features and technology which will be familiar to users of Bitcoin, while also introducing many adjustments and innovations of its own.

Bitcoin vs Etherum list what makes ethereum differs from bitcoin in side-by-side comparision.

Similar to Bitcoin, ethereum requires mining operation and the currency is referred as ether and listed as ETH. The mining algorithm that is currently supported is proof-of-work, similar to bitcoin. However, in next fork or release of ethereum, this algorim will be changed to proof-of stake.

Here is a side-by-side difference among proof-of-work Vs proof-of-stake algorithms

What Is Smart Contract

Blockchain technology, subsequently, is currently gaining attention for its promise to allow asset and its value transport across a selection of use cases and businesses - and its capacity to disintermediate lots of middleman companies and institutions.  Smart contracts, meanwhile, work hand-in-hand with blockchain technology and have the capacity to automate, and also disrupt, processes in many industries.

Smart contracts enforce rules in terms of code whereas a traditional arrangement defines the principles around an arrangement between parties or people. In a smart contract strategy, an asset or currency is transferred to a program. Smart contract runs these defined rules as a code and at some stage it automatically supports a condition and it automatically decides whether the asset ought to go to one individual or back into another individual, or if it must be instantly reimbursed to the individual who sent it or any combination thereof, said Buterin, who talked about a panel in one of the DC Blockchain Summit in Washington, D.C. 

When smart contract runs on ethereum blockchain, it consumes processing power. And it is easy to run random code to consume whole network power. This is avoided by imposing the cost to run any code such as smart contract on ethereum blockchain. This cost is measured in "gas" on ethereum blockchain. Gas is a measurement of how much processing power the program will require, and the higher the gas requirement, the more Ether tokens the user will need to spend.

Ethereum is not the only blockchain platform that allows smart contract. There is another coin, NEO, a chinease blockchain platform which is also gaining in popularity. We will get to know about NEO in our future articles.

One of the key advantages of ethereum is that it allows creating utility tokens which are tradable over ethereum blockchain. This opens up a lot of opportunities where people can create their own utility tokens to raise funds for their project using decentralized crowdfunding mechanism.


Ethereum coins can be bought at popular crypto exchanges around the world.
As of writing this article, according to coinmarketcap, the total valuation of ethereum was $84,546,818,332 next to Bitcoin.

What do you think of ethereum and its future in the crypto world? 
Do let everyone know in comments below.