What is Ethereum?

Published in

LitePaper

2 min readSep 4, 2018

We’re exploring a different cryptocurrency today, uncovering the ideas and principles behind Ethereum, and it’s potential to become the future of the internet.

What is Ethereum

If Bitcoin is the floppy disk of blockchain, Ethereum is the CD: it’s an evolution of the technology.

Today, companies own and manage all your data. Photos, records, your notes, everything.

Tomorrow, in Ethereum’s vision for the future, you own that data, thanks to ‘BLOCKCHAIN’ .

How? Through Smart Contracts. These little bits of code allow people to exchange money, property, shares, anything of value without the need for a middleman i.e. those companies that currently own and manage your data.

Who Invented Ethereum?

A Russian/Canadian computer programmer called Vitalik Buterin wrote the white paper Ethereum is based on.

A brief history

📝2013 — Vitalik Buterin produces a white paper explaining the concept of Ethereum
🗣️January 2014 — Ethereum is publicly announced
₿ July 2014 — Ethereum launches an ICO using Bitcoin to buy Ether
😭June 2016 — $50 million of Ether was stolen from a crowdsale and Ethereum developers agree to reverse the decision by creating a ‘hard fork’
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦March 2017 — a group of companies including Toyota, Samsung, Microsoft, Intel and J.P. Morgan establish Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a non-profit designed to make Ethereum suitable for big business.

What’s so special about it

Ethereum is taking the technology Bitcoin is built on and making it more than just a currency.

It allows developers to build apps — they’re called Dapps or ‘distributed apps’ in the Ethereum world — which bundle those smart contracts together into an easy-to-use interface.

You can even build your own currency on top of Ethereum.

If Bitcoin is the gold of the cryptocurrency world, Ethereum is the oil that machines are powered on.

How is Ether produced?

In a similar way to how Bitcoin works, miners create Ether by creating blocks and solving puzzles.

Roughly every 15 seconds, a new block is added to the Ethereum blockchain, with the computer or miner that solves the puzzle at the heart of the block being rewarded with Ether.

Read more about mining in our MINING ARTICLE

Want to know more?

This is just the tip of the crypto iceberg. LitePaper has a a whole host of easy-to-understand articles that make learning about cryptocurrencies, blockchain and DLT technology really bloody simple.

Click here to learn more.