What is ETHEREUM?

Some of us are familiar with the cryptocurrency called ETHEREUM and yet there are some people not familiar with it, so I am taking this time to share this info about Ethereum.


Just when you thought you had your head about Bitcoin, alongside comes the new digital currency called ETHEREUM, here is what Ethereum is,

Ethereum is an open blockchain platform that lets anyone build and use decentralized applications that run on blockchain technology. Like Bitcoin, no one controls or owns Ethereum – it is an open-source project built by many people around the world. But unlike the Bitcoin protocol, Ethereum was designed to be adaptable and flexible. It is easy to create new applications on the Ethereum platform

Ethereum provides a cryptocurrency token called ETHER for oprerations; Ether is a digital currency used for operating smart contracts on the Ethereum network. Like Bitcoin, the Ethereum network and Ether tokens are not controlled or issued by any bank or government - instead it is an open network which is managed by its users.



You might have been hearing about bitcoin for years, Ethereum was only developed two years ago while bitcoin has been around for like eight years. Ethereum was actually created by a young programmer Vitalik Buterin who by his father was told about bitcoin and he decided to create a platform for smart contracts which bitcoin is not yet designed to do. He started working on Ethereum after he dropped out of college.

How safe is Ethereum?



Ethereum has been deployed in different phases. Currently the Ethereum project is in the 2nd phase, called “Homestead”. The 4 planned phases for the growth of the Ethereum network are, in order: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. Ethereum Homestead clients are working smoothly after being in beta for several months without any major incidents. However, Ethereum is still an experimental technology. Since it allows for programs to run on a virtual machine, it’s still possible that some things may still go wrong, such as poorly written smart contracts that contain bugs.

The major difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitoin was designed to be a currency from the start but Buterin concieved of Ethereum as a platform on which two parties could enter into a contract without a third party

Another difference is that while Bitcoin allows you take part in a global financial network, with Ethereum you can participate in a global computational network. This is done by means of smart contracts, which are scripts of code that can be deployed in the Ethereum blockchain. Although smart contracts are still a very new technology, they have a wide range of potential applications in many different areas, such as voting, global supply chains, medical records, the financial system, and possibly others that have yet to be discovered.

This is little about the cryptocurrency called Ethereum, if you want to read more on Ethereum you can as well as check here. Do not forget to share this

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