The demand for Ether, the crypto token of Ethereum platform is increasing. The price of Ether has increased by over 10 times since the beginning of this year. That is a great improvement for any cryptocurrency. But there are still those who ask, why they should care about Ethereum. What makes it different from Bitcoin and hundreds of altcoins that followed the mother of all cryptocurrencies?
Well, for those who still have doubts about Ethereum and/or still trying to understand why people are going crazy about Ethereum, here is an explanation. We have already explained about Ethereum, compared it with Bitcoin in our previous posts as well. This is another such post in our what you call ‘ Understanding Ethereum ‘ series.
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a completely decentralized, open source platform, maintained and managed by the community. There is the developers’ community, where people contribute code to further develop the platform and then there are miners who contribute the required processing power for the network to sustain and help host applications over it. The bitcoin and ether tokens used in the respective platforms for transactions are nothing by a set of codes or a cryptographic program, which are executed when sent from one wallet to another. These programs, over the blockchain, can be referred to as smart contracts (or more like a crude form of smart contract) which are executed when a certain condition is met (in this case the condition is the execution of a transaction itself).
While the number of smart contracts that can be written on Bitcoin platform is limited. However, Ethereum allows developers to create custom smart contracts in endless ways. Thanks to the Turing-complete model of Ethereum Scripting Language that makes it possible to develop contracts similar to any programs created using conventional programming languages, but […]
