Travis Patron is a digital money researcher and instructor of the Ethereum Technology Course . Here he explains why he believes the smart contracting innovation enabled by Ethereum could unlock a new frontier in Internet innovation. Since the beginning of 2016, those with a pulse on the digital currency industry have eagerly watched the development of next-generation cryptocurrency platform Ethereum. As a relatively new development utilizing bitcoin technology, Ethereum aims to implement a globally decentralized, un-ownable, digital computer for executing peer-to-peer contracts. Put more simply, Ethereum is a world computer you can’t shut down.
This combination of cryptographic architecture and Turing completeness could enable entirely new industries to spawn. In turn, traditional business models, occupying the role of middleman, could increasingly feel the pressure to innovate or face irrelevance.
Such an innovation, proponents say, could eliminate censorship, fraud, and the role of the third party in online collaboration. The Ethereum virtual machine
The Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) refers to part of the protocol that handles internal state and computation. It is often referred to as the project’s defining innovation over other blockchain-based systems.
By taking the cryptographic payment structure of bitcoin and adding a Turing complete scripting language, Ethereum is attempting to create the most viable tool for executing smart contracts using blockchain technology.
The term "Turing complete" here means a system capable of performing any logical step of the computational function.
A technology in wide use today which employs Turing completeness is JavaScript, the programming language which powers the World Wide Web. Smart contract technology would describe a computer protocol which obviates the need for a contractual clause and, instead, is self-executing and self-enforcing.
What differentiates Ethereum from bitcoin is that it doesn’t stand first to be a payment system, but rather a computing platform.The cryptocurrency that runs Ethereum’s blockchain, ether , acts as […]
