The Basics Of Ethereum
by
Blockchained India
What Is Money?
"The eye has never seen, nor the hand touched a dollar"
Alfred Mitchell Ines
The Functional Definition
Medium Of Exchange
Store Of Value
Unit Of Account
Forms Of Money
A Really Long Time Ago -The Barter System
9000 BC - Livestock
3000 BC - Grains (The Shekel)
1200 BC - Sea shells (Cowry)
1000 to 600 BC - Crude Metal Coins
700 BC - Precious Metal Coins
118 BC - Leather Money
806 - Paper Money
1816 - Gold
1913 - Gold Backed US Dollar
1950 - Credit Cards
1971- The Unpegged US Dollar
2009 - Bitcoin
Money And Trust
For any currency to be viable, it must win the trust of the community using it.
What Is Bitcoin?
An Apple
A Digital Apple
The Double Spend Problem
Double spending is the process of successfully spending the some money (or thing) more than once.
The Ledger
The Distributed Ledger
How Bitcoin Works
A State Transition System
- State consisting of the ownership status of all bitcoins (UTXOs).
- State transition function that takes a state and a transaction and outputs a new state which is the result.
- A Transaction with one or more inputs and one or more outputs.
-
For each input in TX:
- If the referenced UTXO is not in S, return an error.
- If the provided signature does not match the owner of the UTXO, return an error.
- If the sum of the denominations of all input UTXO is less than the sum of the denominations of all output UTXO, return an error.
- Return S' with all input UTXO removed and all output UTXO added.
Mining
The process of creating consensus in the distributed ledger network, and creating the blockchain.
The Concensus Algorithm
- Check if the previous block referenced by the block exists and is valid.
- Check that the timestamp of the block is greater than that of the previous block and less than 2 hours into the future
- Check that the proof of work on the block is valid.
- Let S[0] be the state at the end of the previous block.
- Suppose TX is the block's transaction list with n transactions. For all i in 0...n-1, set S[i+1] = APPLY(S[i],TX[i]) If any application returns an error, exit and return false.
- Return true, and register S[n] as the state at the end of this block.
Proof Of Work
A proof of work is a piece of data which is difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify and which satisfies certain requirements.
Alternative Applications Of The
Bitcoin Blockchain
Namecoin - Decentralised Name Registration Database
Coloured Coin - Issue your own digital currency
Metacoin - Cryptocurrency protocol with advanced features
Issues With The Bitcoin Blockchain
Scalability
Weak Scripting Capability
Concentration Of Mining Power
Ethereum
“What bitcoin does for payments, Ethereum does for anything that can be programmed”
Ethereum is a blockchain :-
- With a built in fully fledged Turing complete programming language
- That can be used to create 'contracts' that can encode arbitrary state functions
- Which allows users to create decentralised applications simply by writing
a few lines of code
The Great Grandfather Of Smart Contracts
> if money received == $2.50
> && the button pressed is "Diet Coke"
> then release Diet__Coke
Vending Machines 2.0
What if the machine says, "If you put in $1000, this machine will give you $5000!"
Smart Contracts
Smart Contracts are just code which have the trust backing of a blockchain.
Ethereum consists of :-
- The Ethereum Virtual Machine
- A Turing Complete programming language called Solidity
- A P2P Network Protocol
Pros & Cons
- Massive parallelisation causes Ethereum to be much slower and more expensive than a traditional computer.
- Decentralised consensus gives Ethereum extreme levels of fault tolerance, ensures zero downtime, and makes data stored on the blockchain forever unchangable (immutability).
Ethereum's basic unit is the account.
- Externally Owned Account - controlled by private keys
- Contract Accounts - controlled by the contract code
The Account
Ether
This is the native token of Ethereum and serves two key purposes.
- By requiring applications to pay Ether for every operation they perform, broken or malicious programs are kept from running out of control.
- Given as a reward to miners for keeping the consensus in the system.
Mist
This is Ethereum's end user interface to bring blockchain technologies to non-technical users. It works similar to app stores and browsers
Applications Of Ethereum
- Token Systems
- Financial derivates and stable value currencies
- Identity & Reputation Systems
- Decentralised File Storage
- Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs)
And many many more...
Augur is a decentralised prediction market which allows users to bet on the outcome of different events and can also be used for hedging purposes.
The Blockchain Disruption
The Basics Of Ethereum
By blockchainedindia
The Basics Of Ethereum
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