Cryptocurrency in a nutshell

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, What’s all that?

They are distributed public blockchain networks. Although there are some significant technical differences between the two, they usually differ in purpose and capability.

For example, Bitcoin offers one particular application of blockchain technology, a peer to peer electronic cash system that enables online Bitcoin payments. While the Bitcoin blockchain is used to track digital currency transactions, the Ethereum blockchain focuses on running the programming code of any decentralised application.

Smart contracts

So blockchains are used to record transactions and user can use them to make payments, store their wallet etc?

There seem to be more: Smart contracts, used to facilitate the exchange of money, content, property, shares, or anything of value.

When running on the blockchain a smart contract is programmed to automatically executes when specific conditions are met. They run exactly as programmed without any possibility of censorship, downtime, fraud or third party interference.

Banks seems to be interested in this, as they haven’t been able to resolve this problem for decades. Hence Ethereum popularity, the implementation supports smart contracts and…