what is ethereum?

[riponsumo]

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[riponsumo]

Learn Blockchain Development with Blockgeeks

As a leader in the blockchain community, Blockgeeks have organized our own courses to help people gain a greater understanding of the technology and prime them for excellent opportunities in the job market. These classes aim to bring students up to speed on blockchain technology, as well as give them practical skills that will help their careers.

[riponsumo]

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[riponsumo]

What apps are currently being developed on Ethereum?

The Ethereum platform is being used to create applications across a broad range of services and industries. But developers are in unchartered territory, so it’s hard to know which apps will succeed and which ones will fail. Here are a few exciting projects. 
Weifund provides an open platform for crowdfunding campaigns that leverages smart contracts. It enables contributions to be turned into contractually backed digital assets that can be used, traded or sold within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Uport provides users with a secure and convenient way to take complete control of their identity and personal information. Instead of relying on government institutions and surrendering their identities to third parties, users control who can access and use their data and

personal information.

BlockApps is looking to provide the easiest way for enterprises to build, manage and deploy blockchain applications. From the proof of concept to full production systems and integration with legacy systems, Blockapps provides all the tools necessary to create private, semi-private and public industry-specific blockchain applications.

Provenance is using Ethereum to make opaque supply chains more transparent. By tracing the origins and histories of products, the project aims to build an open & accessible framework of information so consumers can make informed decisions when they buy products.

Augur is an open-source prediction & forecasting market platform that allows anyone to forecast events and get rewarded for predicting them correctly. Predictions on future real world events, like who will win the next US election, are carried out by trading virtual shares. If a person buys shares in a winning prediction, they receive monetary rewards.

To view other projects currently in development on Ethereum, click here.

[riponsumo]

“Ethereum is a spectacular public experiment that is showing the value of smart contracts on a public blockchain. It is the result of and the source of disruptive innovation of the likes that we haven’t seen since the early days of the Internet.” – Caleb Chen London Trust Media

[riponsumo]

“Ethereum is a spectacular public experiment that is showing the value of smart contracts on a public blockchain. It is the result of and the source of disruptive innovation of the likes that we haven’t seen since the early days of the Internet.” – Caleb Chen London Trust Media The DAO hack that threatened everything

Remember how Ethereum can be used to build Decentralized Autonomous Organizations? Well in 2016, something bad happened. A startup working on one particular DOA project, aptly named ‘The DAO’ got hacked.

The DAO was a project developed and programmed by a team behind another startup called Slock.it. Their aim was to build a humanless venture capital firm that would allow investors to make decisions venture capital firm that would allow investors to make decisions through smart contracts. The DAO was funded through a token sale and ended up raising around $150 million dollars from thousands of different people.

Shortly after the funds were raised, The DAO was hacked by an unknown attacker who stole Ether worth around $50 million dollars at the time. While the attack was made possible by a technical flaw in The DAO software, not the Ethereum platform itself, the developers and founders of Ethereum were forced to deal with the mess.

[riponsumo]

An Ethereum fork in the road

After much debate, the Ethereum community voted and decided to retrieve the stolen funds by executing what’s known as a hard fork or a change in code. The hard fork moved the stolen funds to a new smart contract designed to let the original owners withdraw their tokens. But this is where things get complicated. The implications of this decision are controversial and the topic of intense debate.

Here’s why. Ethereum is based on
blockchain technology where all transactions are meant to be irreversible and unchangeable. By executing a hard fork and rewriting the rules by which the blockchain executes, Ethereum set a dangerous precedent that goes against the very essence of blockchain. If the blockchain is changed every time a large enough amount of money is involved, or enough people get negatively impacted, the blockchain will lose its main value proposition – secure, anonymous, tamper proof & unchangeable.

While another less aggressive soft
While another less aggressive soft fork solution was put forth, the Ethereum community and its founders were placed in a perilous position. If they didn’t retrieve the stolen investor money, confidence in Ethereum could be lost. On the other hand, recovering investor money required actions that went against the core ideals of decentralization and set a dangerous precedent.

[riponsumo]

The aftermath – Ethereum splits

In the end, the majority of the Ethereum community voted to perform a hard fork, and retrieve The DAO investors money. But not everyone agreed with this course of action. This resulted in a split where two parallel blockchains now exist. For those members who strongly disagree with any changes to the blockchain even when hacking occurs there is Ethereum classic. For the majority who agreed to rewrite a small part of the blockchain and  return the stolen money to their owners, there is Ethereum. 

Both blockchains have the same features and are identical in every way up to a certain block where the hard-fork was implemented. This means that everything that happened on Ethereum up until the hard-fork is still valid on the Ethereum Classic Blockchain. From the block where the hard fork or change in code was executed onwards, the two blockchains act individually.

[riponsumo]

A future of unimagined possibilities for Ethereum

Despite the fallout from The DAO hack, Ethereum is moving forward and looking to a bright future. By providing a user-friendly platform that enables people to harness the power of blockchain technology, Ethereum is speeding up the decentralization of the world economy. Decentralized applications have the potential to profoundly disrupt hundreds of industries including finance, real estate, academia, insurance, healthcare and the public sector amongst many others.

[riponsumo]

  “If you think the internet has affected your life, Ethereum will have that same pervasive influence on our communications, on our entire information infrastructure. It’s going to impact all aspects of our existence

Building the public Ethereum ecosystem:   As scalability and configurable privacy/confidentiality grow on public Ethereum over the next two years, consumers will use their blockchain identity and access point (uPort) to interact with a variety of interesting early stage offerings.

Including crowdfunding platforms (Weifund), group governance tools (Boardroom), music/film/art content registration and utilization platforms (ujo), wisdom markets (Gnosis), and gaming apps (Virtue Poker)”   

Joseph Lubin, CEO of Consensys

[riponsumo]

interesting early stage offerings.

Including crowdfunding platforms (Weifund), group governance tools (Boardroom), music/film/art content registration and utilization platforms (ujo), wisdom markets (Gnosis), and gaming apps (Virtue Poker)”   

Joseph Lubin, CEO of Consensys

[PaulT]

This is the second-generation crypto currency.

[troiano9]

Anyone that doesnt this most likely wouldnt even be on this forum lol

[dekafee79]

Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. ... Ether can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant mining nodes for computations performed.

Yes I agree. Ethereum is an open source, block chain based, smart contract and many tokens used it.

[MelchiZedek]

In many ways, Ethereum is similar to Bitcoin. It’s a public, peer-to-peer network or blockchain with its own digital currency called Ether. Ethereum was created by Vitalik Buterin in 2014 and the purpose of Ethereum is to be a platform on which smart contracts can be built and run.
Put very simply, Ethereum is intended to be a world computer.
Where Bitcoin stores a list of balances and transactions on its blockchain, the Ethereum blockchain is designed to store different types of data. This data can be accessed and used by computer programs running on the Ethereum blockchain. These programs are called decentralized apps, or dapps.
Developers around the world can build and run decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. The purpose of these is to improve the industries of finance, personal information storage, governance and more by using the transparent nature of a blockchain.