Ethereum

 

Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. After Bitcoin, it is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain.

Ethereum was proposed in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. In 2014, development was crowdfunded, and the network went live with an initial supply of 72 million coins on 30 July 2015.  The platform allows developers to build and operate decentralized applications that users can interact with. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide a broad array of financial services without the need for typical financial intermediaries, such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks, allowing cryptocurrency users to borrow against their holdings or lend them out for interest. Ethereum also allows for the creation and exchange of NFTs, which are non-interchangeable tokens connected to digital works of art or other real-world items and sold as unique digital property. Additionally, many other cryptocurrencies operate as ERC-20 tokens on top of the Ethereum blockchain and have utilized the platform for initial coin offerings.

 

In 2016, a hacker exploited a flaw in a third-party project called The DAO and stole $50 million of Ether.[13] As a result, the Ethereum community voted to hard fork the blockchain to reverse the theft and Ethereum Classic (ETC) continued as the original chain.

 

Ethereum has started implementing a series of upgrades called Ethereum 2.0, which includes a transition to Ethereum was initially described in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin,[18] a programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, in late 2013 with a goal of building decentralized applications.[19][20] Buterin argued that Bitcoin and blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and needed a scripting language for application development that could lead to attaching real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain.[21] In 2013, Buterin briefly worked with eToro CEO Yoni Assia on the Colored Coins project and drafted its white paper outlining additional use cases for blockchain technology.[22] However, after failing to gain agreement on how the project should proceed, he proposed the development of a new platform with a more general scripting language that would eventually become Ethereum.[4]

 

Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014. During the conference, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio (who financed the project) rented a house in Miami with Buterin to develop a fuller sense of what Ethereum might become. Di Iorio invited friend Joseph Lubin, who invited reporter Morgen Peck, to bear witness. Peck subsequently wrote about the experience in Wired.[24] Six months later the founders met again in a house in Zug, Switzerland, where Buterin told the founders that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that time.

 

Ethereum has an unusually long list of founders. Anthony Di Iorio wrote: "Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, Myself, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie & Amir Chetrit (the initial 5) in December 2013. Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, & Jeffrey Wilcke were added in early 2014 as founders." Formal development of the software began in early 2014 through a Swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse). The basic idea of putting executable smart contracts in the blockchain needed to be specified before the software could be implemented. This work was done by Gavin Wood, then the chief technology officer, in the Ethereum Yellow Paper that specified the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Subsequently, a Swiss non-profit foundation, the Ethereum Foundation (Stiftung Ethereum), was created as well. Development was funded by an online public crowdsale from July to August 2014, with the participants buying the Ethereum value token (Ether) with another digital currency, Bitcoin. While there was early praise for the technical innovations of Ethereum, questions were also raised about its security and scalability. proof of stake and aims to increase transaction throughput using sharding.


Popular Posts

Bitcoin

Image
  Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services,but the real-world value of the coins is extremely volatile. Research produced by the University of Cambridge estimated that in 2017, there were 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin. Users choose to participate in the digital currency for a number of reasons: ideologies such as commitment to anarchism, decentralization and libertarianism, convenience, using the currency as an investment and pseudonymity of transactions. Increased use has led to a desire among governments for regulation in order to tax, facilitate legal use in trade and for other reasons (such as investigations for money laundering and price manipulation).   Bitcoin has been criticized for its use in illegal transactions, the large amount of electricity (and thus carbon footprint) used by mining, price volatility, and thefts...
Read more

TRON

Image
  TRON is a Blockchain-based decentralized operating system based on a cryptocurrency native to the system, known as TRX. TRON was founded by Justin Sun in 2017. TRON Foundation raised $70 million in 2017 through an Initial coin offering shortly before China outlawed the digital tokens. The white paper of TRON was accused of plagiarism. Researchers from Digital Asset Research (DAR) have discovered multiple instances of code copied from other projects in the Tron code base. It is also accused of violating the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL) because the project does not mention that its client, Java-Tron, was derived from EthereumJ. These accusations were denied by the TRON Foundation, the organization behind the design of the system. In 2018, TRON switched its protocol from an ERC-20 token on top of Ethereum to an independent peer-to-peer network. After that, marketed to rival Ethereum. On 25 July 2018, the TRON Foundation announced it had finished the acquisitio...
Read more

Litecoin

Image
free litecoin faucet instant payout   Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011. In technical details, Litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin. Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee who later became Engineering Director at Coinbase. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.   It was a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.   During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours. In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market...
Read more

Bitcoin Cash

Image
  Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is a spin-off or altcoin that was created in 2017. In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash split into two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. Since its inception, Bitcoin users had maintained a common set of rules for the cryptocurrency. In 2017 a group of bitcoin activists, investors, entrepreneurs, developers, and largely China-based miners were unhappy with Bitcoin's proposed SegWit improvement plans meant to increase bitcoin's capacity and pushed forward alternative plans which would increase the block size limit to eight megabytes through a hard fork. Segwit controversially would later enable second layer solutions on bitcoin such as the Lightning Network, and this controversy would eventually lead to the split that created Bitcoin Cash. Supporters of a block size increase were more committed to an on-chain medium of exchange function. A key difference of opinion between Bitcoin Cash and Bitco...
Read more

Tether

Image
  Tether is a controversial cryptocurrency with tokens issued by Tether Limited, which in turn is controlled by the owners of Bitfinex. Tether Limited formerly falsely claimed that each token was backed by one United States dollar, but on 14 March 2019 changed the backing to include loans to affiliate companies. The Bitfinex exchange was the subject of a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General of using Tether's funds to cover up $850 million in funds missing since mid-2018. The investigation found that iFinex — the operator of Bitfinex and Tether — made false statements about the backing of the Tether and about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars between the two companies to cover up the truth about massive losses by Bitfinex. According to the New York Attorney General, "Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie". Tether is called a stablecoin because it was originally designed to always be worth $1.00...
Read more