The Best Articles to Start with Ethereum
Ethereum started to take the concepts behind Bitcoin a step further and to make it ready for more business use cases. It attempts to do that, marrying the power of decentralized transactions with a decentralized contract system.
These articles will give you a good first overview of Ethereum and will help you to understand its potential in enterprise applications and how it can be used to solve real business problems.
A beginner’s guide to Ethereum
By Linda Xie
A good introduction to Ethereum and how it compares to Bitcoin; including a light overview of the different use cases.
“With Ethereum, a piece of code could automatically transfer the home ownership to the buyer and the funds to the seller after a deal is agreed upon without needing a third party to execute on their behalf.”
The Original Ethereum Whitepaper
By The Ethereum Foundation
The original Ethereum whitepaper can be a bit overwhelming on the first read. But it will give you the best overview of the original vision and tells you also more of the fundamentals of Blockchain and Smart Contracts.
“What Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create “contracts” that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing users to create any of the systems described above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code.”
Ethereum in 25 Minutes
By Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin is a good speaker so it is also a very interesting to hear him talking about Ethereum. It also might be the easier approach than reading the whitepaper.
Visions, Part 1: The Value of Blockchain Technology
By Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin outlines his vision for the technology in a very easy to read and non-technical way.
“…we will likely discover that at some point we will hit an inflection point, where most instances of “blockchain for X” will be made not by blockchain enthusiasts looking for something useful to do, coming upon X, and trying to do it, but rather by X enthusiasts who look at blockchains and realize that they are a fairly useful tool for doing some part of X.”
Visions, Part 2: The Problem of Trust
By Vitalik Buterin
“Trust is a complicated thing. We all want, at least to some degree, to be able to live without it, and be confident that we will be able to achieve our goals without having to take the risk of someone else’s bad behavior — much like every farmer would love to have their crops blossom without having to worry about the weather and the sun. But economy requires cooperation, and cooperation requires dealing with people.”
Introducing Casper: The Friendly Ghost
By Vlad Zamfir
A big difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin, at least eventually, is Ethereum’s plan to use “proof of stake” instead of “proof of work.” This article will tell you what it means and why it matters.
“It is called Casper “the friendly ghost” because it is an adaptation of some of the principles of the GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) protocol for proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake.”
Proof of Stake: How I Learned to Love Weak Subjectivity
By Vitalik Buterin
Another article about the “proof of stake” approach and how it works.
“Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. Although the idea has many undeniable benefits, including efficiency, a larger security margin and future-proof immunity to hardware centralization concerns, proof of stake algorithms tend to be substantially more complex than proof of work-based alternatives, and there is a large amount of skepticism that proof of stake can work at all…”
The Beginner’s Guide to Ethereum’s Roadmap
by Michael Karnjanaprakorn
A good introduction in the way Ethereum plans to develop in the future.
“If Ethereum is a computer, then each one of these updates can be looked at as an operating system (OS). Similar to Google launching Android Oreo or Apple launching iOS 10, Ethereum is launching in four stages. Each stage adds new features and improves the user friendliness and security of the platform, while allowing Ethereum to scale.”
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please leave a 👏
Say Hello On: Twitter | LinkedIn
