Salad Guide: What Is Ethereum, Anyway?
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You’ve probably seen the effects of crypto’s recent price rally on your blossoming Salad Balance. Our users are earning beaucoup bucks to level up their game — helped, in part, by the Ethereum network.
If you’re not familiar with Blockchain , read our handy guide before diving in.
What Is Salad?
Salad turns idle PC time into the rewards gamers want. One click gets you earning your next Steam game, download, or a month of Discord Nitro on us — without reading up on crypto wallets or other heavy subjects.
Download Salad to get started.
Ethereum Is More Than Money
Whereas Bitcoin is meant for buying pizza and Lambos, Ethereum is an ecosystem for building decentralized apps (or “dapps”). In this sense, “decentralization” means private parties can get down to their biz without any interference from pesky credit card companies, banks, or censors.
But it’s not the Wild West! Dapp developers program agreed-upon rules known as “smart contracts” to execute and distribute all kinds of computer applications built to handle cryptocurrency. To keep things safe on the network, these rule sets can’t be edited once they’re added to the blockchain.
How Important Is It?
Ethereum is the most widely-supported platform of its kind. Despite contenders to its throne, Ethereum owes its place at the top to the foresight of its creators and its support for most high-level programming languages. You also don’t need any coin to play: anyone can build a dapp.
Standards (such as ERC20) emerged emerged to ensure that dapps could work together, and make it easy to exchange tokens built on Ethereum. Thanks to that common vocabulary, the platform has birthed many utility tokens, blockchain games, and even complementary networks like Chainlink, a protocol to deliver outside data to smart contracts.
What About Ether and Gas?
To keep up with Ethereum, it’s important to understand all the lingo.
Ether
Ethereum’s native currency is called “Ether.” It’s what you’re buying when you snag some ETH on a crypto exchange, and a good chunk of what Salad Chefs churn out to score fresh Salad Balance. Ethereum’s devs liken it to “fuel” for the system, useful for paying those who contribute work, and for exacting fees when smart contracts are added to the blockchain.
Gas
Because the Ethereum network trades in scarce resources, small fees (collectively known as “gas”) are imposed on every transaction. Gas is just a sub-denomination of ether counted in “Gwei,” or billionths of an ether. The actual gas price fluctuates based on the amount of code in a smart contract and how soon it needs to be executed, hence why Chopping mileage can vary.
Ethereum miners can also incrementally raise gas price limits on blocks of new ether. This makes it possible to include more transactions per block, but every ratchet higher requires more resources to run new validation nodes.
Who Uses Ethereum?
At the rate development is going, everybody and their grandma may soon use a dapp in their daily lives. There are now more than a million smart contracts deployed on Ethereum, with uses in record keeping, digital identification, supply chain management, finance, and everything in-between.
Salad relies on mining programs that interface with the Ethereum network — once we’ve taken a gander at your hardware to max out your profits, that is. Whether you’re building automated marine insurance or stocking the larders of the Salad Kitchen, Ethereum is the perfect tool for remaking the internet.
Can I Use It Today?
Social media giant Reddit recently partnered with the Ethereum Foundation to promote expansion of the network. The move builds on the success of the Community Points dapp, which permitted peer-to-peer tipping of “shares’’ in Reddit’s subcommunities.
In case you missed our big news, we’re working on bringing Salad Balance web-wide through SaladPay, so you can pay the creators you support with the value your PC creates. By opening new avenues to directly sponsor content creators, Blockchain makes everyone a Medici.
Ethereum might sound like the leftover dust from a vanquished ghost, but it’s one of the most important web technologies in development today. And it’s about to see a game-changing overhaul in Ethereum 2.0. Hit the link to learn more.
By Keith Cagney.
