Bitcoin and ethereum explained

Non-Fungible Tokens NFTs NFTs are unique and indivisible digital tokens that are useful for proving the provenance of rare assets, both digital and tangible. For example, NFTs can be used by an artist to tokenize their work and ensure that their work is unique and belongs to them. The ownership information is recorded and maintained on the blockchain network. NFTs are also gaining popularity in the gaming industry because they allow interoperability between gaming platforms.

Gods Unchained is a card game that gives players full ownership of their in-game items using NFTs. NFTs are gaining popularity as more companies look to tokenize assets and provide users with tamper-proof lineage information about their assets. FAQs What is an Ethereum smart contract? A smart contract is application code that resides at a specific address on the blockchain known as a contract address.

Applications can call the smart contract functions, change their state, and initiate transactions. Smart contracts are written in programming languages such as Solidity and Vyper, and are compiled by the Ethereum Virtual Machine into bytecode and executed on the blockchain. What is an Ethereum account?

An EOA is controlled by a private key, has no associated code, and can send transactions. A contract account has an associated code that executes when it receives a transaction from an EOA. A contract account cannot initiate transactions on its own. Transactions must always originate from an EOA. What is an Ethereum transaction? A transaction in Ethereum is a signed data message sent from one Ethereum account to another.

It contains the transaction sender and recipient information, the option to include the amount of Ether to be transferred, the smart contract bytecode, and the transaction fee the sender is willing to pay to the network validators to have the transaction included in the blockchain, known as gas price and limit. How can I pay for transactions on Ethereum? You can pay for transactions using Ether. Ether serves two purposes. First, it prevents bad actors from congesting the network with unnecessary transactions.

Second, it acts as an incentive for users to contribute resources and validate transactions mining. Each transaction in Ethereum constitutes a series of operations to occur on the network i. Each of these operations have a cost, which is measured in gas, the fee-measure in Ethereum.

Gas fees are are paid in Ether, and are often measured in a smaller denomination called gwei. Whenever a node wishes to include a new transaction in the blockchain, it sends a copy of the transaction to each of its peers, who then send a copy to each of their peers, and so on.

In this way, it propagates throughout the network. Certain nodes, called miners, maintain a list of all of these new transactions and use them to create new blocks, which they then send to the rest of the network. Whenever a node receives a block, it checks the validity of the block and of all of the transactions therein and, if it finds the block to be valid, adds it to its blockchain and executes all of those transactions.

Since block creation and broadcasting are permissionless, a node may receive multiple blocks competing to be the successor to a particular block. The node keeps track of all of the valid chains that result from this and regularly drops the shortest one: According to the Ethereum protocol, the longest chain at any given time is to be considered the canonical one. Ether Ether ETH is the cryptocurrency generated in accordance with the Ethereum protocol as a reward to miners in a proof-of-work system for adding blocks to the blockchain.

This is known as the block reward. Additionally, ether is the only currency accepted by the protocol as payment for a transaction fee, which also goes to the miner. The block reward together with the transaction fees provide the incentive to miners to keep the blockchain growing i. Therefore, ETH is fundamental to the operation of the network. Ether may be "sent" from one account to another via a transaction, which simply entails subtracting the amount to be sent from the sender's balance and adding the same amount to the recipient's balance.

Both types have an ETH balance, may send ETH to any account, may call any public function of a contract or create a new contract, and are identified on the blockchain and in the state by an account address. For a transaction to be valid, it must be signed using the sending account's private key, the character hexadecimal string from which the account's address is derived.

Importantly, this algorithm allows one to derive the signer's address from the signature without knowing the private key. Contracts are the only type of account that has associated code a set of functions and variable declarations and contract storage the values of the variables at any given time.

A contract function may take arguments and may have return values. In addition to control flow statements, the body of a function may include instructions to send ETH, read from and write to the contract's storage, create temporary storage memory that vanishes at the end of the function, perform arithmetic and hashing operations, call the contract's own functions, call public functions of other contracts, create new contracts, and query information about the current transaction or the blockchain.

In hexadecimal, two digits represent a byte, and so addresses contain 40 hexadecimal digits, e. Contract addresses are in the same format, however, they are determined by sender and creation transaction nonce. It includes a stack , memory, and the persistent storage for all Ethereum accounts including contract code. The EVM is stack-based, in that most instructions pop operands from the stack and push the result to the stack. The EVM is designed to be deterministic on a wide variety of hardware and operating systems , so that given a pre-transaction state and a transaction, each node produces the same post-transaction state, thereby enabling network consensus.

Each type of operation which may be performed by the EVM is hardcoded with a certain gas cost, which is intended to be roughly proportional to the amount of resources computation and storage a node must expend to perform that operation. When a sender creates a transaction, the sender must specify a gas limit and gas price. The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas the sender is willing to use in the transaction, and the gas price is the amount of ETH the sender wishes to pay to the miner per unit of gas used.

The higher the gas price, the more incentive a miner has to include the transaction in their block, and thus the quicker the transaction will be included in the blockchain. The sender buys the full amount of gas i. If at any point the transaction does not have enough gas to perform the next operation, the transaction is reverted but the sender is still only refunded for the unused gas.

Opinion home study forex trading amusing information

Bitcoin Bitcoin was launched in January It introduced a novel idea set out in a white paper by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto —Bitcoin offers the promise of an online currency that is secured without any central authority, unlike government-issued currencies. There are no physical bitcoins, only balances associated with a cryptographically secured public ledger.

Although Bitcoin was not the first attempt at an online currency of this type, it was the most successful in its early efforts. As a result, it has become known as the predecessor to virtually all cryptocurrencies that have emerged over the past decade. Over the years, the virtual, decentralized currency concept has gained acceptance among regulators and government bodies.

Ethereum Blockchain technology is being used to create applications that go beyond just enabling a digital currency. Launched in July , Ethereum is the largest and most well-established, open-ended decentralized software platform. Ethereum enables building and deploying smart contracts and decentralized applications dApps without downtime, fraud, control, or interference from a third party.

To accomplish this, Ethereum comes complete with its own programming language that runs on a blockchain. The potential applications of Ethereum are wide-ranging and are powered by its native cryptographic token, ether commonly abbreviated as ETH. In , Ethereum launched a presale for ether, which received an overwhelming response. Ether is used mainly for four purposes: It is traded as a digital currency on exchanges, held as an investment, used to purchase goods and services, and used on the Ethereum network to pay transaction fees.

Key Differences While both the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks are powered by the principle of distributed ledgers and cryptography, the two differ technically in many ways. For example, transactions on the Ethereum network may contain executable code, while data affixed to Bitcoin network transactions is only used to record transaction information.

The Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains and networks are different concerning their overall aims. Bitcoin was created as an alternative to national currencies and thus aspires to be a medium of exchange and a store of value. Ethereum was intended as a platform to facilitate immutable, programmatic contracts and applications via a global virtual machine.

Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake Bitcoin uses a consensus protocol called proof of work PoW , which allows the network nodes to agree on the state of all information recorded and prevent certain types of attacks on the network. In September , Ethereum moved to proof of stake PoS , a set of interconnected upgrades that will make Ethereum more secure and sustainable. To address issues regarding scalability, part of the transition to proof of stake is sharding, which will continue to be addressed through A major criticism of proof of work is that it is highly energy-intensive because of the computational power required.

Proof of stake substitutes computational power with staking—making it less energy-intensive—and replaces miners with validators, who stake their cryptocurrency holdings to activate the ability to create new blocks. Purposes BTC and ETH are both digital currencies, but the primary purpose of ether is not to establish itself as an alternative monetary system but to facilitate and monetize the operation of the smart contract, dApps, and any other blockchain solution that can be thought of.

Secret Service — which was founded in to counter rampant counterfeiting — estimates that there is as much as a quarter of a billion dollars of fake cash in circulation. This is not an issue with Bitcoin: as long as the network is functioning properly as it has without interruption since its inception it is impossible to spend a counterfeit Bitcoin.

This is due to the powerful encryption that secures the network and the Proof of Work consensus mechanism that turns electrical energy into a digital representation of value. All these attributes combine to make Bitcoin a perfect store of value for anyone who is uncomfortable with the risks of centralized, counterfeitable, infinitely-inflatable currencies.

Ethereum Ethereum is a smart contract platform rather than a store of value or electronic cash. Smart contracts are deterministic digital agreements. Once signed by all parties, they will self-execute according to the terms agreed upon.

This makes smart contracts ideal for escrow services, financial agreements such as bond payouts, and records of ownership. Ethereum has a native scripting language called Solidity in which all smart contracts are written. In comparison to Bitcoin which functions only as money, Ethereum aims to be an application platform. Developers can build decentralized apps dapps on the Ethereum blockchain. While early dapps took the form of games like CryptoKitties, there are now hugely important and innovative applications like decentralized finance DeFi that run on Ethereum.

Users can borrow, lend, and earn interest on their cryptocurrency holdings, all while taking advantage of the security and trustlessness of smart contracts. Supply The supply of each cryptocurrency is one of the major differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

While both assets have decreasing rates of inflation, the way the two go about this is quite different. Every , blocks — which at a block time of roughly 10 minutes works out to about four years — the reward given to miners for mining a block is cut in half. This block reward will continue to decrease until about , when the last of the 21 million Bitcoins to ever exist will have been issued.

Monetary inflation is the rate at which the supply of a currency increases. Annual issuance was capped at 18 million per year. Unlike Bitcoin, which is capped at 21 million, there is no limit on the total supply of Ether.

Currently, there are more than million Ether tokens in circulation.