Ethereum and the Future of the Internet

Ethereum implements the blockchain paradigm described in the previous blog.

Launched in 2015, Ethereum builds on Bitcoin's original innovation, but with some big differences.

Bitcoin's main innovation by Satoshi Nakamoto was to let you use digital money without payment providers or banks - this was the only use case for Bitcoin. The main advantage of Ethereum over Bitcoin is that it is programmable, this means that as a developer you can also build and deploy decentralized applications on it.

Ethereum being programmable means that you can build apps that use the blockchain to store data or control what your app can do. This results in a general purpose blockchain that can be programmed to do anything. In other words, Ethereum is like a global shared computer.

While Bitcoin is only a payment network, Ethereum is more like a computer with applications such as financial services, games, social networks, marketplaces, and more.

Now that we've understood what Ethereum is. We need to know how we can use the Ethereum global shared computer/network.

Ethereum has a native cryptocurrency called ether (ETH) and every action on the Ethereum network by anyone requires a certain amount of computational power to process the entry. This fee is paid in the form of ETH or 'ether'. This means you need some amount of ETH to use the network.

Cryptocurrency or "Crypto" as you might have heard is a new form of digital money powered by cryptography.

It all started in 2008 with Bitcoin. You could use it to send funds to anyone anywhere globally. What made crypto different from normal bank transfers or other financial services like Paypal or Alipay is that there was no middle man for the first time.

Since there is no middle-man or central authority like a bank or government that intervenes in a transaction between the sender and recipient. All Cryptocurrency transactions are purely Peer-to-Peer and so middle-men cannot surveill, censor or revert transactions that have happened. Transactions directly connect sender and recipient without having to deal with any central authority. This is possible because of the blockchain technology upon which cryptocurrencies operate.

The supply of ETH isn’t controlled by any government or company - it is decentralized and completely transparent. New coins (also commonly called tokens) are created only by miners and stakers who maintain the network. More on this later.

Now that we know what a Blockchain is, what Ethereum is, and it's native cryptocurrency ETH. We can start diving deeper into this "World Computer" and how it could be infrastructure and a new settlement layer for the future of the internet.

To completely understand Ethereum, however, we have to understanding a lot of different things, which makes it quite hard to understand. This Series is an attempt to understanding Ethereum better for developers and people interested in technology. It's fascinating technology that could have a big impact on the future and so it's worth learning about.