What is Ethereum, the project?
The Ethereum project is an open source effort focused on the community designed to create a new generation distributed application platform intended to be a maximum of flexible and powerful in the possibilities it allows.
What is Ethereum, the platform?
The Ethereum platform combines a generalized networking platform between peers with a new generation blockchain architecture to provide a decentralized consensus platform based on consensus (decentcon), for the development, offer and use of distributed application services. An app to consumers, called Etherbrowser, incorporates the front and rear ends to create an environment in which anyone can easily and quickly build highly secure, evolving and interoperable decentralized applications.
Like the Bittorrent content sharing system, Ethereum network nodes will operate on thousands of computers around the world and, unless you close, its operations cannot be interrupted. Indeed, the Peer-to-Peer systems generally imply a very large number of independent actors (people or organizations) who each execute the peer node software on one or more computers. In the Bitcoin system, these nodes are called “minors”.
Like Bitcoin, in Ethereum, the nodes of the network serve as minors whose aim is to treat and validate transactions and calculations on the system and to quickly reach a consensus concerning what happened on the system and when. This consensus is what offers the network its safety. The higher the number of nodes, the more these nodes must make a vote concerning what happened on the network, the greater the feeling that this shared consensual vision of the history of the system is a canonical and irrepudable representation. In Ethereum, minors receive a reward to do the work required to inform and activate their vote and they are also paid to provide network resources in the form of bandwidth, storage and computer processing.
Bitcoin is a safe transmission and storage system. As such, it can serve as a financial basis for the world emerging economy. A conservative and prudent development roadmap for Bitcoin will facilitate use and further secure the protocol against the oddities and on -board cases that could be exploited in the future (although it has so far been proven that it was remarkably solid in the protocol). On the other hand, as a platform to accommodate distributed or decentralized applications (ðApps-spelled with the uppercase letter “ETH” and “Dapps” or “ETH-APPS” by the Cognoscent :-)) and the services, Ethereum must be agile and forward. In the fourth quarter of 2014, the Ethereum team will provide a system rich in functionalities which will be fully functional and will have a rich user interface and will offer a convincing user experience for end users and ðapps companies and offering services on the platform. But the technology moves quickly, therefore Ethereum will require an upgrade roadmap and continuous development.
What is ether, cryptofthered?
Just as the Bitcoin system has a token, called Bitcoin (tiny) which serves as a means of exchange, Ethereum A Ether (ETH) which serves as a unit of exchange to a certain extent, but more importantly, it serves as fuel which feeds applications on the Ethereum system.
Ethereum project engineers create a calculation device or device, in the form of software, that anyone can download and run on your computer, smartphone or fast and fast equipment. In order to use this software device, a certain type of token is required as a fuel in appropriate quantities.
The applications distributed on Ethereum require payments of this token to supply each system for calculating and storing the system. Without requiring payments for operations, the system would be vulnerable to many kinds of attacks and would not be viable or secure. Payments are made to computer resources owners in exchange for securing the Ethereum network, transactions transmission, data storage and processing of calculations required by distributed software applications.
People and businesses are interested in buying ETH to fuel their own commercial applications, to use commercial applications offered by other service providers, to exchange up to come or to speculatively hold for a future sale to people and businesses. ETH can be purchased in the sale of Genesis (details to come, please look at this space), on the next exchanges and automatic distributors of future tickets, and on the exchanges implemented as Dapps on Ethereum.
When buying ETH in the sale of Genesis, the buyer supports product development, as with a Kickstarter campaign. When the product is finished and ready to deliver, buyers will be able to claim their ETH bought in the Genesis block – the root block of Ethereum blockchain.
What is Ethereum, the software battery?
A software stack is a set of technologies, made at different layers and levels of abstraction and having different additional capacities that work well together to allow a software development team to create a complete software service and back-end for an end user. Ethereum provides a complete solution to develop and deliver ðApps, the front of which can be accessible by an end user from a web page, dedicated frontal applications, or more generally from the Ethereum ðapp browser. The Ethereum battery is the first of its kind to allow developers to provide DECENTCON software applications.
When delivery of a ðApp, the developer or the deployer of this ðApp does not organize the accommodation of rear server processes as with traditional software services. The code is rather integrated in useful load in a transaction on the Ethereum network and sent to one or more mining nodes on the network. Minors who receive the transaction will distribute it to all the peers they know, provided that the transaction sender has included enough ETH, the cryptofuelle which feeds operations on the system, to pay the transaction. This transaction diffuses across the network, intertwine towards the peer and is finally excited in a block and locked in the blockchain. The blocks are created by minors about once per minute. Once the transaction with the code payload of the code is integrated into a block, subsequent transactions can be sent to an address designated as an controller interface so that ðApp invokes the treatment of ðApp.
When an end user wishes to activate one or more services offered by this ðApp, it will generally interact with a frontal user interface, loaded in the ðApp browser (probably based on QT or JavaScript / HTML5 / CSS3) to trigger desired actions. The components of the user interface will be cache on a sort of decentralized Bittorrent type cloud and pulled by the ðApp browser if necessary. The user interface will formulate Ethereum transactions and send them, with an appropriate quantity of cryptofuelle and all the required input data, to the interface of the ðAPP controller. Once collected in a block, the transaction will trigger the execution of the ðApp and the states of various components (called contracts) of the ðApp will pass to a state of income. A rapid messaging protocol between peers, will allow the user interface to reflect such changes and will facilitate communication between different DAPPs and between users.
One thing to notice is that, from the point of view of the accommodation of applications, there is practically nothing to do. The rear is launched in the blockchain’s “cloud” and the front will generally be represented as a tile installed in the Ethereum ðApp browser. The end user will download the browser once and the browser will receive continuous Bittorrent updates or a Bittorrent distribution system. When browsing the ðApp catalog distributed in the browser, the end user can install any ðApp of interest in their browser with an installation in one click at no cost. These tiles will be categorically organized by users and each will be invoked in a complete user and reactive size interface “and configured in the dimensions and capacities of the browser (some lower devices may have limitations).
The programming paradigm that has just been described will be very unusual compared to typical development technologies and will require innovative approaches (and perhaps sometimes Kludgey). If a programmer can only expect the state of business logic to update once per minute, stochastically, the techniques will have to be developed for certain types of applications to perhaps cache certain expected state modifications and wait for rear treatment before updating the frontal. Even more complicated is the fact that a blockchain’s ðApp transaction in blockchain can be built and included in the blockchain, but are not in the main consensus blockchain shortly after and that the associated transactions do not remain confirmed and not transformed for a period of time. Worse, an intermediate transaction can be treated first, thus making the first transaction invalid. A new field of software development techniques based on blockchain is necessary. Many developers will forge new solutions. And some fundamentally new approaches may be necessary. And for this, we are developing the cryptocurrency research group (CCRG) to conduct general research on the advantages of the whole niche. Please look at this space to find out more about the CCRG.
