Toppie Lessons №3 : What is Ethereum ?
If it’s needed to introduce Ethereum to you guys, the story should be started with a man named Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency in the world. Buterin was 21-years-old when the cryptocurrency was initially released.
In a life defining moment, Buterin remembers playing World of Warcraft in the year 2010. One day, Blizzard made the decision to remove the damage component of “… beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.” Crushed, he “cried to sleep,” and “realized what horrors centralized services can bring.”
In 2011, the 17-year-old Russian-Canadian boy learned about Bitcoin from his father. Buterin became a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and a leading writer for the publication.
The publication shows interest in any topics relating blockchain :to mathematics, computer science, engineering, law, and economics.
In 2013, after visiting developers across the world who shared an enthusiasm for programming, Buterin published a white-paper proposing Ethereum.
In 2014, Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo after receiving the Thiel Fellowship of $100,000 to work on Ethereum full-time.
In 2015, the Ethereum system went live.
In 2017, Ethereum hit a cap rate of $36 billion dollars.
Whether you’re looking at this from an investment standpoint, tech perspective, or witness to history; Ethereum is extremely exciting.
Although commonly associated with Bitcoin, blockchain technology has many other applications that go way beyond digital currencies.
| What is smart contract?
As Vitalik Buterin explained, in a smart contract approach, an asset or currency is transferred into a program “and the program runs this code and at some point it automatically validates a condition and it automatically determines whether the asset should go to one person or back to the other person, or whether it should be immediately refunded to the person who sent it or some combination thereof.” For example, a smart contract could technically say, “pay Jane $10 if she submits a 1000 word article on goats by September 15, 2018,” and it would pay Jane once the conditions are met.
You can think of Ethereum as a programmable Bitcoin where developers can use the underlying blockchain to create markets,Nshared ledgers, digital organizations, and other endless possibilities that need immutable data and agreements, all without the need for a middleman.
That’s the difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin. So you guys can think that Ethereum is an open platform that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications such as smart contracts and other complex legal and financial applications.
Ethereum released in 2015, which is the brainchild of the prodigious Vitalik Buterin, who saw the potential uses of Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology as the next steps in furthering the expansion of the blockchain community. Ethereum is now currently the cryptocurrency with the second highest coin market cap, which is based on the creation of the second generation blockchain programmable network.
| Ethereum vs Bitcoin Continued!!!
In fact, Bitcoin is only one of several hundred applications that use blockchain technology today.
Now that you have a decent understanding of what Ethereum is and how it functions, it’s useful to revisit how it compares to Bitcoin at a technical level.
While the two cryptocurrencies serve different purposes, Ethereum provides a number of benefits over Bitcoin!!!
1️Shorter Block Times — On Ethereum, blocks are mined roughly every 15 seconds compared to️ Bitcoin’s 10-minutes rate. This shorter time allows the blockchain to more quickly start confirming transaction data, although it also means more orphaned blocks.
2️More Sophisticated Fee Structure — Ethereum transaction fees are based off storage needs and network usage. Bitcoin transactions are limited by block size and compete with each other.️
3️More Sophisticated Mining — Bitcoin mining currently requires ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits), necessitating a large amount of capital investment to mine. Ethereum’s mining algorithm was designed with ASIC-resistance in mind, thus leveling the playing field and aiding in the decentralization of mining.
| How about the future of Ethereum?
Anyway, now that I have got that out of the way, I wanted to quickly let you know how I see the future of Ethereum going. I really believe that it will all come down to Ethereum’s ability to significantly improve its scalability levels.
As things stand, 15 transactions per second just aren’t good enough.
There are lots of different smart contract platforms that can perform much better. If Ethereum doesn’t fix their issues quickly, they could lose out to their competing blockchains.
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About TOP Network
TOP Network is a decentralized open communication network that provides cloud communication services on the blockchain. TOP offers secure, low-cost services such as messaging, calling, video, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing and more.
TOP Network is also a high-performance public blockchain platform designed to handle real-world business of any size or volume. Powered by innovations including three-layer network, two-layer sharding, two-layer lattice DAG and PBFT-DPoS*, TOP can process several hundred thousand transactions per second on the blockchain.
The long-term mission of TOP Network is to build a public blockchain infrastructure for all Dapps. Our world-class team of over 100 developers is striving for this goal.
TOP Network originated from the common underlying network layer of Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN, three communication apps built by the TOP team before the blockchain project. These apps, having attracted over 50 million users in total, will be ported to TOP Network upon the launch of TOP and generate huge volumes of transactions in the TOP ecosystem.
TOP Network was founded by serial entrepreneur Steve Wei and his colleagues in late 2017. Steve was one of the earliest employees of WebEx in the 1990s. After WebEx, he founded a successful video conferencing software company which was acquired by Huawei in 2010. In 2012, Steve co-founded Dingtone, a public listed company operating popular communication apps such as Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN.
TOP Network has closed $11 million early investments from prestigious institutional investors and individual billionaire investors, including DHVC, Fenbushi Capital, NEO Global Capital (NGC), Ontology Global Capital (OGC), LD Capital and more.
