Ethereum blockchain

When I came up with Ethereum, my first thought was, ‘Okay, this thing is too good to be true.’ As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good — fundamentally, completely sound.

By Vitalik Buterin (computer programmer and founder of Ethereum)

History of Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin became interested in Bitcoin as a 17-year-old programmer in 2011. He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, as he was first exposed to and intrigued by blockchain technology.

He began to foresee a platform that went beyond the financial use cases permitted by Bitcoin, and in 2013, he published a white paper outlining the broad scripting language that led to Ethereum. Buterin co-founded Ethereum when he was just 19 years old.

Ethereum is an open-source blockchain-based platform. Ether is the cryptocurrency used by Ethereum.

By offering participants Ether in exchange for contributions, Buterin and the other co-founders of Ethereum generated about $18 million in a crowdsourcing campaign they started in 2014. Frontier, the first Ethereum live release, was released in 2015.

Ethereum's ability to exchange more than just cryptocurrencies on the site makes it different.

The idea of the Ethereum blockchain

So far, we have discussed bitcoins. If Ethereum's development is the same as that of bitcoin (that is, a cryptocurrency like bitcoin), then what causes its development? How is it different?

Although Bitcoin and Ethereum have many commonalities, they are two distinct blockchain networks with their own advantages and disadvantages. Both are suitable for diverse user needs.

Earlier I discussed that, in order to replace national currencies during the 2008 financial crisis, bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. However, Ethereum was created with the intention of using blockchain technology to maintain a decentralized payment network and store program code.

So the idea was to run programs on blocks other than transactions and data. Ethereum transactions may contain some executable code, but most bitcoin transactions are just for recording transactions. Ethereum gives tokens while bitcoin does not provide any tokens.

Ethereum’s block time is 14 to 15 seconds, while bitcoin’s block time is 10 minutes.