Ever since the world of cryptocurrency has been established, Bitcoin has been (and still is, for the time being) the leader of the e-coin market. But Ethereum is another cryptocurrency project that has amassed a considerable amount of interest due to its unique qualities.

Ethereum is a blockchain-based platform that uses peer-to-peer contracts for its currency, called Ether. The blockchain stored applications used in Ethereums smart contracts offer a decentralized way of verifying and enforcing said contracts, making it very hard for any potential fraud and censorship to occur.

These smart contracts applications run on Ether, which quickly became the worlds second most valuable digital coins. Much like Bitcoin and its Bitcoin Wallet, ether is kept in the Ethereum Wallet.

Its important to understand that Ether differs from Bitcoin, thus they have different uses and overall a different impact on the market.

A first difference between the two blockchain-based projects would be their average block time (which is the time necessary for a new token to be issued). This is 10 minutes for Bitcoin, while Ethereums block time ranges from 10 to 20 seconds with an average of 12 seconds. This time gap is due to Ethereums GHOST protocol.

The monetary supply concerning the two cryptocurrencies is also different. Bitcoins supply style is of deflationary nature (a finite number of Bitcoins exist/will be made), while Ethereums is the opposite, meaning more ether tokens will be made over time. The current number of mined Bitcoins is 16 million (most of them belonging to early miners). There is no supply cap for ether, which is why its monetary supply is considered of inflationary nature.

In Ethereum, the costing of transactions is dependent on storage needs, the use of bandwidth and the smart contracts complexity. These transactions in the Bitcoin network are limited only by the blocks size.

Mining for ether is easier, with 5 tokens given for each block, in contrast to Bitcoins half a token at 210.000 blocks (that means 12.5 tokens at every 4 years). Ethereum uses a proof-of-work memory hard hashing algorithm called Ethash, attracting users looking for a decentralized way of mining, rather than using ASICs to mine, as is the case with Bitcoins.

The usage of Bitcoins can range from purchasing goods and services, to storing value (much like precious metals). Ethereum can be used for making decentralized applications on its blockchain that represent virtual shares, assets, proof membership etc.

Although they are both considered cryptocurrencies and its normal to want to compare how the technologies differ from one another, one must keep in mind with what purpose each project was created. Bitcoin was made to be a new currency to compete against existing money, aiming to be a globally stable digital currency, while Ethereum makes use of its smart contracts to make digital agreements and transactions.

More here:

Ethereum vs Bitcoin: The Battle for the Crypto Throne - Coindoo

Ethereum price spiked a few times higher against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH formed a solid support near $130 and it may climb higher above the $134 and $135 resistance levels.

Yesterday, we saw a few swing moves near the $130 level in ETH price against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair spiked sharply below the $130 and $129 levels and later recovered above the $130 level. Later, there were consolidation moves before the price climbed above the $131 and $132 resistance levels. More importantly, there was a close above the $132 resistance and the 100 hourly simple moving average.

During the upside, this weeks important bearish trend line was breached with resistance at $131 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. The pair broke the 50% Fib retracement level of the last slide $135 swing high to $129 swing low. It opened the doors for more gains above the $132 level. There was also a spike above the $133 level, but upsides were capped by the key $134 resistance. The price also faced sellers near the 76.4% Fib retracement level of the last slide $135 swing high to $129 swing low. It is currently consolidating above the $132 support and the 100 hourly SMA.

On the upside, the price needs to clear the $134 resistance to continue higher. The next main resistance is near the last swing high at $135. Once the price clears both hurdles, it is likely to test the $140 resistance. On the other hand, if there is a downside correction, the $132 level might provide support. Any further losses might push it back towards the $130 support.

Looking at the chart, ETH price clearly made a few nasty moves, but it managed to settle above $132, which is a positive sign. As long as it stays above the $132 support and the 100 hourly SMA, it remains supported for more upsides towards the $135, $137 and $140 levels.

Hourly MACD The MACD for ETH/USD is gaining pace in the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI for ETH/USD climbed well above the 60 level and it is currently correcting lower towards 55.

Major Support Level $132

Major Resistance Level $135

The rest is here:

Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Could Make a Sustained Move ...

This is going to be a post about cryptoeconomics. I hope the moderators will allow this to be posted to r/ethereum because cryptoeconomics is at the core of the success or failure of any decentralized crypto project, including Ethereum. I will discuss price but only in reference to the cryptoeconomic factors contributing to the success of Ethereum.

The motivation for writing this post came about because I have been hearing and reading a lot of people involved with Ethereum who seem to feel that price isn't important or needed for Ethereum to succeed. I even heard this sentiment stated by one of the main speakers at ETHDenver last month! I aim to show in this post that this viewpoint is very much incorrect, and that a high and increasing price of Ether over time is a critical component to achieving success for the Ethereum platform.

First of all, the very fact that ETHDenver exists is a function of the fact that there are thousands of people being paid to write code targeting Ethereum (wallets, clients, exchanges, smart contracts, vertically-integrated Dapps etc.) In some cases, the funding for those salaries comes directly from the millions of dollars investors made in the last price cycle, while in others it comes from VC and other investors building on Ethereum who are looking forward to future large-scale growth in Ethereum, mostly driven by growth of the value of Ether and other tokens running on Ethereum. This is the virtuous cryptonomic cycle, an increasing ether price brings more projects and developers which leads to more network effects and value to the entire ecosystem.

Secondly, Ethereum needs to do very well in the crypto marketplace to continue to attract future talent, investment, and network effects. If Ethereum slips to the #10 crypto asset, it will have far fewer people choosing to build on Ethereum, those projects and developers instead looking to build on platforms with better future prospects for becoming the global financial backbone for decentralized applications.

Finally, a high price of Ether provides security for the Ethereum chain. It funds mining hardware and electricity in the PoW phase of Ethereum. And directly secures the chain in the proof-of-stake phase. Ethereum has the potential one day of securing a significant fraction of all digital financial assets on a single platform of sharded ledgers and smart contracts. If those assets are worth trillions of dollars, then Ethereum needs to be worth enough so that it is not viable to attack those assets by attacking the underlying Ethereum cryptoeconomic system.

To summarize, when some people in the Ethereum community denigrate Ether investors, say that Ethereum can work fine with the price of Ether at $10, and that a strong and growing price of Ether isn't important, they are way off base! The price of Ether is critical to the success of Ethereum.

This virtuous cycle also explains why the value of the Ether token is important to the entire Ethereum community, and why some people react quite negatively to attempts to siphon value from ETH and accrue it to competitors instead. Those attempts, if successful, will damage the future success of the entire community.

Original post:

Ethereum - reddit

DEFINITION of Ethereum

Launched in 2015, Ethereum is a decentralized software platform that enables SmartContracts and Distributed Applications (Apps) to be built and run without any downtime, fraud, control or interference from a third party. The platform is also the basis for its own virtual currency, Ether. Ethereum is not just a platform but also a programming language (Turing complete) running on a blockchain, helping developers to build and publish distributed applications. The potential applications of Ethereum are wide ranging.

The applications on Ethereum are run on its platform-specific cryptographic token, ether. During 2014, Ethereum had launched a pre-sale for ether which had received an overwhelming response. Ether is like a vehicle for moving around on the Ethereum platform, and is sought by mostly developers looking to develop and run applications inside Ethereum. Ether is used broadly for two purposes, it is traded as a digital currency exchange like other cryptocurrencies and is used inside Ethereum to run applications and even to monetize work. The current market cap of ether (ETH) is now more than Ripple and Litecoin although its far behind bitcoin (BTC).

According to Ethereum, it can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything. One of the big projects around Ethereum is Microsofts partnership with ConsenSys which offers Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on Microsoft Azure so Enterprise clients and developers can have a single click cloud based blockchain developer environment.

In 2016 Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains - Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic, after a malicious actor stole more than $50 million worth of funds which had been raised on The DAO, a set of smart contracts originating from Ethereum's software platform. The new Ethereum was a hard fork from the original software intended to protect against further malware attacks. As of July 2018 Ethereum was the second-largest virtual currency on the market, behind only Bitcoin. It is much faster to acquire ether currency than bitcoin (about 14 or 15 seconds to bitcoin's near-uniform 10 minutes) and there are far more ether units in circulation than there are bitcoin.

Excerpt from:

Ethereum - Investopedia

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Ethereum Technical Analysis - FXStreet

Buy and Sell ETH With The Peer-to-Peer Ethereum Marketplace LocalEthereum

You need to enable Javascript in your web browser settings to access localethereum.com's marketplace.

LocalEthereum is how people exchange ETH peer-to-peer

Money in your account within minutes.* Use any payment method in 130+ countries.

A trading interface built for all audiences. No KYC requiredbegin trading in 30 seconds!

The only marketplace thats self-custodial and end-to-end encrypted.

Choose from more than 30 payment methods.

* Most trades complete in a few minutes, however this largely depends on the chosen payment method.

LocalEthereum is the fast and secure way to make Ethereum trades.

Thanks to LE, I can earn money securely and save myself from hyperinflation.

Consider the offers. Anyone in the world can post a bid to buy or sell ETH. Offers can be filtered by payment method, currency, location and popularity.

From bank transfers to gift cardsevery payment method is allowed.

Find an offer youre happy with and open a trade with the user. Choose the amount you want to buy or sell, and lock the rate in.

After the seller puts the ETH in an escrow account, the buyer pays the seller outside the platform. Payment details are discussed using encrypted messages.

Once the seller confirms payment, the ETH is released from escrow to the buyer.

The escrow account is a decentralized Ethereum smart contract. Rather than trusting a centralized authority to hold your ETH, LocalEthereum's escrow system is trust-free.

Every conversation is protected by a unique secret key which self-destructs after completion. We can only decrypt your messages if the key is volunteered; e.g. during a payment dispute.

Optionally, you can log in without a password by using a compatible Ethereum wallet. Most popular wallets including imToken, MetaMask and Ledger are compatible.

Tested with these Ethereum wallets.

Stay up to date with the latest crypto-news and connect with other traders and staff in our official Telegram groups.

LocalEthereum

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Buy and Sell ETH With The Peer-to-Peer Ethereum Marketplace ...

Ethereum price is setting up for the next break against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD buyers remain in action above $133 and they could attempt to push the price above $136 and $138.

After a sharp decline, ETH price bounced back from the $130 support level against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair recovered nicely and climbed back above the $134 level. It retested the $138 resistance levels, where sellers emerged. Later, the price started a downside correction and traded below the $136 level. There was a break below the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent wave from the $130 swing low to $138 high. Besides, there was a break below the $135 level and the 100 hourly simple moving average.

However, the $133-134 support area acted as a solid buy zone and prevented further losses. Moreover, the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent wave from the $130 swing low to $138 high acted as a support. At the moment, the price is trading higher and it recently surpassed the $135 level and the 100 hourly SMA. On the upside, there are many hurdles near the $136, $138 and $140 resistance levels. There is also a major bearish trend line formed with resistance at $136 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD.

If there is a successful break above the trend line and $136, the price could test the $138 or $140 resistance levels. Having said that, the price must clear the $140 barrier for more gains in the near term. On the other hand, if there is a bearish reaction, the price may slide towards the $131 level.

Looking at the chart, ETH price is trading in a range between $133 and $136. The next move could be either above the $136 resistance or below the $133 level. Having said that, buyers are likely to defend losses near the $134, $133 or $131 support level and buying dips might be considered as long as the price is above $129.

Hourly MACD The MACD for ETH/USD is gaining strength in the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI for ETH/USD is rising higher and it is still placed above the 50 level.

Major Support Level $133

Major Resistance Level $138

Read the original post:

Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Buyers Wont Give Up Easily ...

The Coin

We are going to create a digital token. Tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem can represent any fungible tradable good: coins, loyalty points, gold certificates, IOUs, in-game items, etc. Since all tokens implement some basic features in a standard way, this also means that your token will be instantly compatible with the Ethereum wallet and any other client or contract that uses the same standards.

The standard token contract can be quite complex. But in essence a very basic token boils down to this:

But if you just want to copy paste a more complete code, then use this:

So let's start with the basics. Open the Wallet app, go to the Contracts tab and then Deploy New Contract. On the Solidity Contract Source code text field, type the code below:

A mapping means an associative array, where you associate addresses with balances. The addresses are in the basic hexadecimal Ethereum format, while the balances are integers, ranging from 0 to 115 quattuorvigintillion. If you don't know how much a quattuorvigintillion is, it's many vigintillions more than anything you are planning to use your tokens for. The public keyword, means that this variable will be accessible by anyone on the blockchain, meaning all balances are public (as they need to be, in order for clients to display them).

If you published your contract right away, it would work but wouldn't be very useful: it would be a contract that could query the balance of your coin for any addressbut since you never created a single coin, every one of them would return 0. So we are going to create a few tokens on startup. Add this code before the last closing bracket, just under the mapping.. line.

Notice that the function MyToken has the same name as the contract MyToken. This is very important and if you rename one, you have to rename the other too: this is a special, startup function that runs only once and once only when the contract is first uploaded to the network. This function will set the balance of msg.sender, the user which deployed the contract, with a balance of 21 million.

The choice of 21 million was rather arbitrary, and you can change it to anything you want in the code, but there's a better way: instead, supply it as a parameter for the function, like this:

Take a look at the right column beside the contract and you'll see a drop-down list, written pick a contract. Select the "MyToken" contract and you'll see that now it shows a section called Constructor parameters. These are changeable parameters for your token, so you can reuse the same code and only change these variables in the future.

Right now you have a functional contract that created balances of tokens but since there isn't any function to move it, all it does is stay on the same account. So we are going to implement that now. Write the following code before the last bracket.

This is a very straightforward function: it has a recipient and a value as the parameter and whenever someone calls it, it will subtract the _value from their balance and add it to the _to balance. Right away there's an obvious problem: what happens if the person wants to send more than it owns? Since we don't want to handle debt in this particular contract, we are simply going to make a quick check and if the sender doesn't have enough funds the contract execution will simply stop. It's also to check for overflows, to avoid having a number so big that it becomes zero again.

To stop a contract execution mid-execution you can either return or throw The former will cost less gas but it can be more headache as any changes you did to the contract so far will be kept. In the other hand, 'throw' will cancel all contract execution, revert any changes that transaction could have made and the sender will lose all Ether he sent for gas. But since the Wallet can detect that a contract will throw, it always shows an alert, therefore preventing any Ether to be spent at all.

Now all that is missing is having some basic information about the contract. In the near future this can be handled by a token registry, but for now we'll add them directly to the contract:

And now we update the constructor function to allow all those variables to be set up at the start:

Finally, we now need something called Events. These are special, empty functions that you call to help clients like the Ethereum Wallet keep track of activities happening in the contract. Events should start with a capital letter. Add this line at the beginning of the contract to declare the event:

And then you just need to add these two lines inside the "transfer" function:

And now your token is ready!

What are those @notice and @param comments, you might ask? That's Natspec an emerging standard for a natural language specification, which allows wallets to show the user a natural language description of what the contract is about to do. While not currently supported by many wallets, this will change in the future, so it's nice to be prepared.

If you aren't there already, open the Ethereum Wallet, go to the contracts tab and then click "deploy new contract".

Now get the token source from above and paste it into the "Solidity source field". If the code compiles without any error, you should see a "pick a contract" drop-down list on the right. Get it and select the "MyToken" contract. On the right column, you'll see all the parameters you need to personalize your own token. You can tweak them as you please, but for the purpose of this tutorial we recommend you to pick these parameters: 10,000 as the supply, any name you want, "%" for a symbol and 2 decimal places. Your app should be looking like this:

Scroll to the end of the page and you'll see an estimate of the computation cost of that contract and you can select a fee on how much Ether you are willing to pay for it. Any excess Ether you don't spend will be returned to you so you can leave the default settings if you wish. Press "deploy", type your account password and wait a few seconds for your transaction to be picked up.

You'll be redirected to the front page where you can see your transaction waiting for confirmations. Click the account named "Etherbase" (your main account) and after no more than a minute you should see that your account will show that you have 100% of the shares you just created. To send some to a few friends: select "send", and then choose which currency you want to send (Ether or your newly created share), paste your friend's address on the "to" field and press "send".

If you send it to a friend, they will not see anything in their wallet yet. This is because the wallet only tracks tokens it knows about, and you have to add these manually. Now go to the "Contracts" tab and you should see a link to your newly created contract. Click on it to go to its page. Since this is a very simple contract page there isn't much to do here, just click "copy address" and paste the contract address into a text editor, you'll need it shortly.

To add a token to watch, go to the contracts page and then click "Watch Token". A pop-up will appear and you only need to paste the contract address. The token name, symbol and decimal number should be automatically filled but if it's not you can put anything you want (it will only affect how it displays on your wallet). Once you do this, you'll automatically be shown any balance you have of that token and you'll be able to send it to anyone else.

And now you have your own crypto token! Tokens by themselves can be useful as value exchange on local communities, ways to keep track of worked hours or other loyalty programs. But can we make a currency have an intrinsic value by making it useful?

You can deploy your whole crypto token without ever touching a line of code, but the real magic happens when you start customizing it. The following sections will be suggestions on functions you can add to your token to make it fit your needs more.

You'll notice that there are some more functions in your basic token contract, like approve, sendFrom and others.These functions are there for your token to interact with other contracts: if you want to, say, sell tokens to a decentralized exchange, just sending them to an address will not be enough as the exchange will not be aware of the new tokens or who sent them, because contracts aren't able to subscribe to Events only to function calls. So for contracts, you should first approve an amount of tokens they can move from your account and then ping them to let them know they should do their thing - or do the two actions in one, with approveAndCall.

Because many of these functions are having to reimplement the transferring of tokens, it makes sense to change them to an internal function, which can only be called by the contract itself:

Now all your functions that result in the transfer of coins, can do their own checks and then call transfer with the correct parameters. Notice that this function will move coins from any account to any other, without requiring anyone's permission to do so: that's why it's an internal function, only called by the contract: if you add any function calling it, make sure it properly verifies if the caller should be have permission to move those.

All dapps are fully decentralized by default, but that doesn't mean they can't have some sort of central manager, if you want them to. Maybe you want the ability to mint more coins, maybe you want to ban some people from using your currency. You can add any of those features, but the catch is that you can only add them at the beginning, so all the token holders will always know exactly the rules of the game before they decide to own one.

For that to happen, you need a central controller of currency. This could be a simple account, but could also be a contract and therefore the decision on creating more tokens will depend on the contract: if it's a democratic organization that can be up to vote, or maybe it can be just a way to limit the power of the token owner.

In order to do that we'll learn a very useful property of contracts: inheritance. Inheritance allows a contract to acquire properties of a parent contract, without having to redefine all of them. This makes the code cleaner and easier to reuse. Add this code to the first line of your code, before contract MyToken {.

This creates a very basic contract that doesn't do anything except define some generic functions about a contract that can be "owned". Now the next step is just to add the text is owned to your contract:

This means that all the functions inside MyToken now can access the variable owner and the modifier onlyOwner. The contract also gets a function to transfer ownership. Since it might be interesting to set the owner of the contract at startup, you can also add this to the constructor function:

Suppose you want the amount of coins in circulation to change. This is the case when your tokens actually represent an off blockchain asset (like gold certificates or government currencies) and you want the virtual inventory to reflect the real one. This might also be the case when the currency holders expect some control of the price of the token, and want to issue or remove tokens from circulation.

First, we need to add a variable to store the totalSupply and assign it to our constructor function.

Now let's add a new function finally that will enable the owner to create new tokens:

Notice the modifier onlyOwner on the end of the function name. This means that this function will be rewritten at compilation to inherit the code from the modifier onlyOwner we had defined before. This function's code will be inserted where there's an underline on the modifier function, meaning that this particular function can only be called by the account that is set as the owner. Just add this to a contract with an owner modifier and you'll be able to create more coins.

Depending on your use case, you might need to have some regulatory hurdles on who can and cannot use your tokens. For that to happen, you can add a parameter that enables the contract owner to freeze or unfreeze assets.

Add this variable and function anywhere inside the contract. You can put them anywhere but for good practice we recommend you put the mappings with the other mappings and events with the other events.

With this code, all accounts are unfrozen by default but the owner can set any of them into a freeze state by calling Freeze Account. Freezing does not yet have a practical effect because we haven't added anything to the transfer function. We are changing that now:

Now any account that is frozen will still have their funds intact, but won't be able to move them. Alternatively, you can also create a whitelist where all accounts are frozen by default and each account needs to be manually approved. Just rename frozenAccount into approvedAccount and change the last line to:

So far, you've relied on utility and trust to value your token. But if you want you can make the token's value be backed by Ether (or other tokens) by creating a fund that automatically sells and buys them at market value.

First, let's set the price for buying and selling:

This is acceptable for a price that doesn't change very often, as every new price change will require you to execute a transaction and spend a bit of Ether. If you want to have a constant floating price we recommend investigating standard data feeds

The next step is making the buy and sell functions:

Notice that this will not create new tokens but change the balance the contract owns. The contract can hold both its own tokens and Ether and the owner of the contract, while it can set prices or in some cases create new tokens (if applicable) it cannot touch the bank's tokens or Ether. The only way this contract can move funds is by selling and buying them.

Note Buy and sell "prices" are not set in Ether, but in wei the minimum currency of the system (equivalent to the cent in the Euro and Dollar, or the Satoshi in Bitcoin). One Ether is 1000000000000000000 wei. So when setting prices for your token in Ether, add 18 zeros at the end.

When creating the contract, send enough Ether to it so that it can buy back all the tokens on the market otherwise your contract will be insolvent and your users won't be able to sell their tokens.

The previous examples, of course, describe a contract with a single central buyer and seller, a much more interesting contract would allow a market where anyone can bid different prices, or maybe it would load the prices directly from an external source.

Everytime, you make a transaction on Ethereum you need to pay a fee to the miner of the block that will calculate the result of your smart contract. While this might change in the future, for the moment fees can only be paid in Ether and therefore all users of your tokens need it. Tokens in accounts with a balance smaller than the fee are stuck until the owner can pay for the necessary fee. But in some use cases, you might not want your users to think about Ethereum, blockchain or how to obtain Ether, so one possible approach would have your coin automatically refill the user balance as soon as it detects the balance is dangerously low.

In order to do that, first you need to create a variable that will hold the threshold amount and a function to change it. If you don't know any value, set it to 5 finney (0.005 Ether).

Then, add this line to the transfer function so that the sender is refunded:

You can also instead change it so that the fee is paid forward to the receiver by the sender:

This will ensure that no account receiving the token has less than the necessary Ether to pay the fees.

There are some ways to tie your coin supply to a mathematical formula. One of the simplest ways would be to make it a "merged mining" with Ether, meaning that anyone who finds a block on Ethereum would also get a reward from your coin, given that anyone calls the reward function on that block. You can do it using the special keyword coinbase that refers to the miner who finds the block.

It's also possible to add a mathematical formula, so that anyone who can do math can win a reward. On this next example you have to calculate the cubic root of the current challenge gets a point and the right to set the next challenge:

Of course, while calculating cubic roots can be hard for someone to do on their heads, they are very easy with a calculator, so this game could be easily broken by a computer. Also since the last winner can choose the next challenge, they could pick something they know and therefore would not be a very fair game to other players. There are tasks that are easy for humans but hard for computers but they are usually very hard to code in simple scripts like these. Instead, a fairer system should be one that is very hard for a computer to do, but isn't very hard for a computer to verify. A great candidate would be to create a hash challenge where the challenger has to generate hashes from multiple numbers until they find one that is lower than a given difficulty.

This process was first proposed by Adam Back in 1997 as Hashcash and then was implemented in Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto as Proof of work in 2008. Ethereum was launched using such system for its security model, but is planning to move from a Proof of Work security model into a mixed proof of stake and betting system called Casper.

But if you like Hashing as a form of random issuance of coins, you can still create your own Ethereum based currency that has a proof of work issuance:

Also change the Constructor function (the one that has the same name as the contract, which is called at first upload) to add this line, so the difficulty adjustment will not go crazy:

Once the contract is online, select the function "Proof of work", add your favorite number on the nonce field and try to execute it. If the confirmation window gives a red warning saying "Data can't be execute" go back and pick another number until you find one that allows the transaction to go forward: this process is random. If you find one you will be awarded 1 token for every minute that has passed since the last reward was given, and then the challenge difficulty will be adjusted up or down to target an average of 10 minutes per reward.

This process of trying to find the number that will give you a reward is what is called mining: if difficulty rises it can be very hard to find a lucky number, but it will always be easy to verify that you found one.

If you add all the advanced options, this is how the final code should look like:

Scroll down and you'll see an estimated cost for deployment. If you want you can change the slider to set a smaller fee, but if the price is too below the average market rate your transaction might take longer to pick up. Click Deploy and type your password. After a few seconds you'll be redirected to the dashboard and under Latest transactions you'll see a line saying "creating contract". Wait for a few seconds for someone to pick your transaction and then you'll see a slow blue rectangle representing how many other nodes have seen your transaction and confirmed them. The more confirmations you have, the more assurance you have that your code has been deployed.

Click on the link that says Admin page and you'll be taken the simplest central bank dashboard in the world, where you can do anything you want with your newly created currency.

On the left side under Read from contract you have all the options and functions you can use to read information from the contract, for free. If your token has an owner, it will display its address here. Copy that address and paste it into Balance of and it will show you the balance of any account (the balance is also automatically shown on any account page that has tokens).

On the right side, under Write to Contract you'll see all the functions you can use to alter or change the blockchain in any way. These will cost gas. If you created a contract that allows you to mint new coins, you should have a function called "Mint Token". Select it.

Select the address where those new currencies will be created and then the amount (if you have decimals set at 2, then add 2 zeros after the amount, to create the correct quantity). On Execute from select the account that set as owner, leave the Ether amount at zero and then press execute.

After a few confirmations, the recipient balance will be updated to reflect the new amount. But your recipient wallet might not show it automatically: in order to be aware of custom tokens, the wallet must add them manually to a watch list. Copy your token address (at the admin page, press copy address) and send that to your recipient. If they haven't already they should go to the contracts tab, press Watch Token and then add the address there. Name, symbols and decimal amounts displayed can be customized by the end user, especially if they have other tokens with similar (or the same) name. The main icon is not changeable and users should pay attention to them when sending and receiving tokens to ensure they are dealing with the real deal and not some copycat token.

Once you've deployed your tokens, they will be added to your list of watched tokens, and the total balance will be shown on your account. In order to send tokens, just go to the Send tab and select an account that contains tokens. The tokens the account has will be listed just under Ether. Select them and then type the amount of tokens you want to send.

If you want to add someone else's token, just go to the Contracts tab and click Watch token. For example, to add the Unicorn () token to your watch list, just add the address 0x89205A3A3b2A69De6Dbf7f01ED13B2108B2c43e7 and the remaining information will be loaded automatically. Click Ok and your token will be added.

Unicorn tokens are memorabilia created exclusively for those who have donated to the address 0xfB6916095ca1df60bB79Ce92cE3Ea74c37c5d359 that is controlled by the Ethereum Foundation. For more information about them read it here

You just learned how you can use Ethereum to issue a token, that can represent anything you want. But what can you do with the tokens? You can use, for instance, the tokens to represent a share in a company or you can use a central committee to vote on when to issue new coins to control inflation. You can also use them to raise money for a cause, via a crowdsale. What will you build next?

See the article here:

Create a cryptocurrency contract in Ethereum

Ethereum price started a major decline against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD is following a downtrend and it could continue to move down towards the $120 and $118 levels.

Recently, we saw a downside extension below the $130 support in ETH price against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair gained bearish momentum and broke the $126 and $125 support levels. It even traded below the $124 level and settled well below the 100 hourly simple moving average. A new monthly low was formed near $122 and the price is currently consolidating losses. It recovered above the $124 level and the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent drop from the $135 swing high to $122 swing low.

However, the previous support at $127 is acting as a solid resistance. Above $127, the $128 and $129 levels are waiting to prevent gains. There is also a crucial bearish trend line in place with resistance at $130 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. Below the trend line, the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent drop from the $135 swing high to $122 swing low is near $129. Finally, the 100 hourly simple moving average is positioned near the $131 level.

Therefore, there are many resistances on the upside, starting with $127 and ending near $131. If the price corrects higher, it is likely to find a strong selling interest near $127 and $128. Once the current consolidation/correction pattern is complete, the price may resume its decline below $124. The next key support is positioned near the $120 level. If sellers remain in action, the price could even test the $118 level in the near term.

Looking at the chart, ETH price is trading heavily in the bearish zone below the $131 resistance. There could be short-term corrective moves, but upsides remain capped below $130 and $131. On the downside, buyers are likely to take a stand near the $120 and $118 levels in the coming sessions.

Hourly MACD The MACD for ETH/USD is about to move back in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI for ETH/USD is slowly recovering, but it is still well below the 50 and 45 levels.

Major Support Level $120

Major Resistance Level $130

The rest is here:

Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Remains Sell Near $128, Target ...

Ethereum price started a major decline against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD is following a downtrend and it could continue to move down towards the $120 and $118 levels.

Recently, we saw a downside extension below the $130 support in ETH price against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair gained bearish momentum and broke the $126 and $125 support levels. It even traded below the $124 level and settled well below the 100 hourly simple moving average. A new monthly low was formed near $122 and the price is currently consolidating losses. It recovered above the $124 level and the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent drop from the $135 swing high to $122 swing low.

However, the previous support at $127 is acting as a solid resistance. Above $127, the $128 and $129 levels are waiting to prevent gains. There is also a crucial bearish trend line in place with resistance at $130 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. Below the trend line, the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent drop from the $135 swing high to $122 swing low is near $129. Finally, the 100 hourly simple moving average is positioned near the $131 level.

Therefore, there are many resistances on the upside, starting with $127 and ending near $131. If the price corrects higher, it is likely to find a strong selling interest near $127 and $128. Once the current consolidation/correction pattern is complete, the price may resume its decline below $124. The next key support is positioned near the $120 level. If sellers remain in action, the price could even test the $118 level in the near term.

Looking at the chart, ETH price is trading heavily in the bearish zone below the $131 resistance. There could be short-term corrective moves, but upsides remain capped below $130 and $131. On the downside, buyers are likely to take a stand near the $120 and $118 levels in the coming sessions.

Hourly MACD The MACD for ETH/USD is about to move back in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI for ETH/USD is slowly recovering, but it is still well below the 50 and 45 levels.

Major Support Level $120

Major Resistance Level $130

Read more:

Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Remains Sell Near $128 ...

Ethereum price made a sharp bearish turn against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD is now trading in a bearish zone and it could continue to move down towards $104.

In the weekly analysis, we discussed the next possible break in ETH price either above $120 or below $114 against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair failed to gain momentum above the $116 and $118 resistance levels. As a result, there was a bearish reaction below the $114 support. The pair even broke the $112 support and traded well below the 100 hourly simple moving average. The decline was such that the price even traded below the $110 level and formed a new low near $109.

At the moment, the price is consolidating losses near $110, with a bearish angle. An initial resistance is near the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $117 high to $109 low. More importantly, there is a major bearish trend line formed with resistance at $112 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. It wont be easy for buyers to clear the trend line resistance and $112. The next hurdle is near the $113 level. It coincides with the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $117 high to $109 low.

Looking at the chart, ETH price is clearly trading in a bearish zone below the $114 and $112 levels. If there is an upside correction, the price is likely to face a lot of sellers near $112, $113 and $114.

Hourly MACD The MACD for ETH/USD is now placed heavily in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI for ETH/USD is currently placed in the oversold area, but with no major sign of a recovery.

Major Support Level $104

Major Resistance Level $112

Read more:

Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Breaks Down, Turned Sell on ...

Ethereum is an open-source blockchain-based platform that essentially enables hundreds of decentralized cryptocurrencies and projects to be built and deployed without having to build their own blockchains.

With the second largest market cap in the cryptocurrency world, Ethereum has drawn a lot of attention from investors and crypto enthusiasts alike.

Ethereum not only presents a significant change to the status quo, it also allows for the quick development and deployment of new applications presenting niche solutions for various industries.

While Ethereums utility is obvious to programmers and the tech world at large, many people who are less tech-savvy have trouble understanding it. Weve designed this guide to appeal to both crowds and expose anyone from complete crypto beginners and intermediates to this potentially world-changing cryptocurrency.

If youre interested in Ethereum, chances are you have some sort of foundational knowledge of Bitcoin.

All cryptocurrencies inevitably get compared to Bitcoin, and it frankly makes understanding them much easier.

Bitcoin launched in 2009 as the worlds first cryptocurrency, with the single goal of creating a decentralized universal currency. This currency would not require any intermediary financial institutions, but would still ensure safe and valid transactions. This was made possible by a revolutionary technology called the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger, continuously recording and verifying records. Its used to track and verify Bitcoin transactions. Since the global network of communicating nodes maintains the blockchain, its pretty much incorruptible. As new blocks are added to the network, they are constantly validated.

Similar to Bitcoin, Ethereum is a distributed public blockchain network. While both Ethereum and Bitcoin are cryptocurrencies that can be traded among users, there are many substantial differences between the two.

Bitcoin, for example, utilizes blockchain to track ownership of the digital currency, making it an extremely effective peer to peer electronic cash system. Ethereum, on the other hand, focuses on running the programming code of an application. Application developers largely use it to pay for services and transaction fees on the Ethereum network.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralized, meaning they have no central control or issuing authority. Respective miners run each network by validating transactions to earn either bitcoin (for Bitcoin) or ether (for Ethereum).

If youre still having trouble making the distinction, the words of Dr. Gavin Woodone of Ethereums Co-Foundersmight help:

Bitcoin is first and foremost a currency; this is one particular application of a blockchain. However, it is far from the only application. To take a past example of a similar situation, e-mail is one particular use of the internet, and for sure helped popularise it, but there are many others.

Ethereum is simply the application of blockchain technology for a completely different purpose.

Simply put, Ethereum is a blockchain-based decentralized platform on which decentralized applications (Dapps) can be built.

Ethereums appeal is that its built in a way that enables developers to create smart contracts. Smart contracts are scripts that automatically execute tasks when certain conditions are met. For example, a smart contract could technically say, pay Jane $10 if she submits a 1000 word article on goats by September 15, 2018, and it would pay Jane once the conditions are met.

These smart contracts are executed by the Turing-complete Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), run by an international public network of nodes.

The cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network is called ether. Ether serves two different functions:

If youre still a little confused, dont worry. The underlying technology is complicated even at a surface level.

By the end of this guide, youll have a better understanding of Ethereum than 99.999% of people out there and thats a pretty good start!

Well go over things such as how Ethereum functions, Ethereums history, and some of the exciting dapps running on the Ethereum platform.

In 2011, a 17-year-old Russian-Canadian boy named Vitalik Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father.Buterin became a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and a leading writer for the publication.Buterin currently serves on the Editorial Board of Ledger. As a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Ledger publishes original research articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The publication shows interest in any topics relating blockchain to mathematics, computer science, engineering, law, and economics.

In 2013, after visiting developers across the world who shared an enthusiasm for programming, Buterin published a white-paper proposing Ethereum.

In 2014, Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo after receiving the Thiel Fellowship of $100,000 to work on Ethereum full-time.

In 2015, the Ethereum system went live.

In 2017, Ethereum hit a cap rate of $36 billion dollars.

Whether youre looking at this from an investment standpoint, tech perspective, or witness to history; Ethereum is extremely exciting.

Buterins goal was to bring the same decentralization from Bitcoin to more than just currency. This could be accomplished by building a fully-fledged Turing-complete programming language into the Ethereum blockchain.

The Ethereum white paper goes into detail for some of the potential use cases, all of which could be built through decentralized apps on the Ethereum network. The list goes on and on:

By building these apps on the Ethereum network, these dapps can utilize Ethereums blockchain instead of having to create their own.

The core Ethereum founding team in 2014 consisted of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson, additionally attracting the attention of Joseph Lubin to join the team. Lubin moved on to found the now near 1,000-employee Brooklyn-based venture production studio ConsenSys.

Rumored to be one of the top buyers in the Ethereum crowdsale, Lubin, who had been funding ConsenSys with his stash of Bitcoins, says he began selling some of his Ethers last year to fund the firms development

Early blockchain applications like Bitcoin only allowed users a set of predefined operations. For example, Bitcoin was created exclusively to operate as a cryptocurrency.

Unlike these early blockchain projects, Ethereum allows users to create their own operations. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) makes this possible. As Ethereums runtime environment, the EVM executes smart contracts. Since every Ethereum node runs the EVM, applications built on it reap the benefits of being decentralized without having to build their own blockchain.

Smart contracts are strings of computer code capable of automatically executing when certain predetermined conditions are met.

Instead of requiring a single central authority to say yay or nay, these contracts are self-operated. This not only makes the entire process more effective, it also makes it more fair and objective.

For example, a simple smart contract use case would be:

Using the smart contract, theres no need for Jim and Sarah to trust each other. They just have to trust the data feed.

Keep in mind that this is only a very simple example. Many smart contracts are extremely complex and can work wonders.

The takeaway: Smart contracts can automate a variety of tasks, without requiring intermediaries. All a smart contract needs is the arbitrary rules written into it.

Handling financial transactions alone presents hugely complex problems in terms of reliability and security. And since the Ethereum network comprises a general purpose blockchain that handles assets other than money, more complex challenges arise beyond mere financial transactions. Moving into the future, Ethereum confronts issues of scalability, energy consumption, security, privacy, and decentralization.

As a general purpose blockchain, Ethereum needs a mechanism to represent assets other than money. The ERC-721 standard has been created to transact unique items of value. The ERC acronym stands for Ethereum Request for Comment and provides a formal process for the Ethereum Foundation to improve its product. The ERC-721 standard originally drove the development of the highly successful CryptoKitties collectibles, but it allows for the representation of any digital asset.

Any blockchain relies on a trustworthy, fair, secure, and reliable consensus protocol for placing transactions onto the system. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses a Proof of Work (PoW) approach, but the Ethereum blockchain plans to implement a Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm.

The Casper finality gadget implements PoS as an independent module. As an independent module, Casper lives on top of the current PoW system, making the Ethereum network a hybrid system of both PoW and PoS. Also as an independent module, this allows the PoW portion of the network to be removed at a later date.

The Casper PoS protocol utilized game theory incentives to maintain the integrity of the system. It also provides benefits of greater security and reduces the massive energy consumption required by PoW mining.

Scaling presents a great challenge for Ethereum, as it does for other blockchains. Scaling defines a systems ability to handle a large and growing workload without showing strain or stress to the system. Think of this both as a systems power and efficiency to complete tasks and also as a user experience challenge. If a user waits too long for a response after clicking a button, frustration results, and users give up on the system.

The web confronted this problem in the early days as well. In the first web applications, every action a user took on a web page resulted in the entire page having to be reloaded from the server and rendered again on the clients browser. Web 2.0 came along, introduced the ability to refresh only the relevant part of the page, and responsive user interfaces became the norm on the internet.

Vitalik Buterin identifies scaling as a primary concern that needs to be addressed in blockchain technology. He made the following comments in September 2017 in an interview with Naval Ravikant at the Disrupt SF 2017 conference.

Bitcoin is currently processing a bit less than three transactions a second; and if it goes close to four, its already at peak capacity. Ethereum over the last few days, its been doing five a second. And if it goes above six, then its also at peak capacity. On the other hand, Uber on average 12 rides a second, PayPal several hundred, Visa several thousand, major stock exchanges tens of thousands. And if you want to go up to IoT, then youre talking hundreds of thousands

What the Lightning Network brings to Bitcoin, Plasma brings to Ethereum. Joseph Poon (the creator of the Lightning Network protocol) and Vitalik Buterin jointly design and architect Plasma.

Efforts like Lightning and Plasma ease stress on the network by taking work offline to a side chain. Users engage in multiple transactions over time on a channel on the side chain without utilizing the main blockchain at this point. After a number of transactions complete, the final state of these transactions moves over to the main blockchain as a single transaction with a single fee. Multiple interactions to process thereby reduce to a single action on the blockchain, consequently reducing strain on resources and improving scalability.

Computer science boils down to the art of putting something somewhere, then retrieving it when you want it. Storing only what you require in a manner that makes retrieval simple and elegant, and retrieving only what you need, and doing it all as quickly as possible defines efficiency. Sharding presents a technique for storing data in an efficient manner to improve retrieval. And efficiency determines scalability.

Sharding basically defines ways to break data into separate pieces and store them separately. Consequently, you only have to deal with the small piece containing the data you are interested in and not wade through every piece of data contained in the entire system. Database technology has long utilized sharding to increase scalability, and now the Ethereum Foundation researches how sharding can improve blockchain technology.

Similarly, Raiden also presents side chain capability similar to Lighting and Plasma. Raiden is not a project of the Ethereum Foundation but a product of an independent company.

Most of us have a pretty good understanding of what an application (app) is. An application is formally defined as a program or piece of software designed and written to fulfill a particular purpose of the user. We use apps every day: Apps allow us to check our bank balance, scroll through a live feed of pictures, or even launch a Flappy Bird into oblivion.

Now take this definition and ~*~decentralize~*~ it. Dapps serve similar functions, but run on an entire network of nodes rather than a central source. The fact that they are decentralized gives dapps an enormous advantage over traditional apps.

You know when Instagram is down because the server is down? This doesnt happen with dapps. How about when Zomato got hacked and exposed the information of 17 million people? This doesnt happen either.

Moreover, Dapps are:

In many cases, front-end users cant even distinguish dapps from regular apps. Dapps typically use HTML/JavaScript web applications to communicate with the blockchain, appearing the same to users as many applications youre already using today.

While Bitcoin provides a network for financial transactions, Ethereum aspires to provide a platform for decentralized application development. Ultimately, a programming platform requires good applications built on it to be taken seriously. CryptoKitties gained popularity for a while, but we continue to wait and see how well Ethereum serves as a foundation for application development.

Quartz asked Vitalik Buterin What decentralized apps do you find interesting? on September 14, 2017. He answered as follows:

There are a few categories that are flourishing already. Some of them are various financial applications, financial contracts, derivatives, things like Maker. Games are another one. In the non-financial space, identity verification is getting to be a big one. With prediction markets, Augur and Gnosis are going to be fairly successful. Also in the not-quite financial space theres an interesting thing called Akasha. Its an Ethereum-based forum that uses ether-based cryptocurrency mechanisms to manage things like upvote and downvote and spam prevention.

Fasten your seatbelts and get your Twitter-fingers ready, its finally time for the most exciting part of this guide.

Ethereums intersection with the real world is paved with innovation and disruption. There are already a huge number of projects, both live and in development, built on the Ethereum network. Here are just some of the most successful and promising of these dapps.

Golem: The Golem project aims to make a global supercomputer easily accessible to anyone. Its essentially the first decentralized sharing economy of computing power. As a global market, users would be able to make money by renting out their idle computing power, or spend money to have access to a supercomputer. Hold up, have you ever used a supercomputer? Supercomputers cost between a million dollars and a good fraction of a billion dollars. The modern Tianhe-2 Supercomputer has the power of roughly 18,400 Playstation 4s. Golems goal is to make this sort of power easily accessible anywhere in the world at an infinitesimal cost.

Check out our Golem Beginners Guide.

Augur: Augurs goal is to utilize a decentralized network to create a powerful forecasting tool using prediction markets. Augur would reward users for correctly predicting future events. While at a surface level it may just seem like a decentralized betting platform (which is still worth a lot), Augur could potentially provide powerful predictive data for virtually any industry. Prediction markets are more accurate at forecasting than individual experts, traditional opinion polling, and surveys.

Check out our Augur Beginners Guide.

Civic: Civic aims to protect users identities and provide blockchain-based, secure, low-cost, on-demand access to identity verification. This would not only prevent and provide users with assistance for identity fraud, but it would also remove the need for constant personal information and background verification checks. Think about how many times youve left your social security number with someones assistant and you can see the benefits of Civic.

Check out our Civic Beginners Guide.

OmiseGO: OmiseGO vision is to solve the problems and inefficiencies of financial institutions, processors, and gateways by enabling decentralized exchange on a public blockchain at a lower cost and high volume. This means anyone will be able to conduct financial transactions such as payments, payroll deposits, B2B commerce, supply-chain finance, asset management, and loyalty programs without having to rely on a single server and without exorbitant fees! The system is built in a way that allows the best currency (whether fiat or decentralized) to win.

Check out our OmiseGO Beginners Guide.

Storj: Storjs aim is to make it possible for users to rent out their excess hard drive space in exchange for the crypto STORJ. Users could therefore also use Storj to rent additional hard drive space.

These are only a handful of different dapps all running on the Ethereum platform. What really stands out with dapps is how their founder are able to raise real capital by selling tokens. Whereas traditional apps have to seek outside investment or IPO, a dapp can simply ICO and raise the capital they need to build their company. While this removes friction from the financing processes, it has unfortunately also made it possible for many sub-par dapps to ICO and take advantage of eager speculators.

Check out our Storj Beginners Guide.

For more dapps, check out the State of the Dapps.

Now that you have a decent understanding of what Ethereum is and how it functions, its useful to revisit how it compares to Bitcoin at a technical level.

While the two cryptocurrencies serve different purposes, Ethereum provides a number of benefits over Bitcoin:

Ethereum arguably currently functions better than Bitcoin as a currency. With Ethereum, you can reliably send transactions faster, pay lower transaction fees, and mine at a more profitable rate (although it still has its downfalls for miners).

Read: Is Ethereum Mining Profitable?

However, Bitcoin does have a relatively more stable priceand therefore functions as a better value storage optionfrom a trading and value storage perspective. Ethereum is much younger but has covered a substantial amount of ground in recent years. Although Ethereum certainly shows promise as a currency, its true potential lies in features nonexistent in Bitcoins code.

The most famous DAO was simply known as The DAO. The nearly identical name causes a lot of confusion for people and gives DAOs a bad reputation.

The DAO was a decentralized autonomous organization primarily functioning as its own investor-directed venture capital fund. It didnt have the conventional management structure or board of directors, was not tied to any particular government, and instead ran on open source code. The DAO was set up to give funders the power to vote for which dapps deserved investment through DAO tokens.

Dapps had somewhat of an approval process:

The DAO is most famous for the largest crowdfunding campaign in history, raising over $150 million in ether from more than 11,000 investors. The DAO is also most infamous for getting hacked for $50 million. This hack inevitably caused a split in the Ethereum community, creating what we now know as Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

The hack happened because of The DAOs Split Function. Funders who wanted to exit The DAO could use its Split Function, which would give them back the ether they had invested. The only stipulation was that existing funders had to hold their ether for 28 days before they could withdraw them.

On June 17th 2016, an unknown person or group of people took advantage of a lapse in the Split Functions security with a simple recursive function. This frustratingly easy hack allowed the hacker(s) to repeat their request to withdraw the same DAO tokens multiple times before the system registered it as $50 million.

The news of this hack created chaos in the Ethereum community. While this hack had nothing to do with the Ethereum platform and everything to do with The DAO platform, many members of the Ethereum community were invested in The DAO. The community as a whole had 28 days to come up with a solution, which ended up being to forkstop the current blockchain entirely and create something new from scratch.

The new Ethereum (ETH) is the result of the fork, and is essentially the blockchain before the hack. The old Ethereum (Ethereum Classic ETC) is still running the original blockchain with the hack included.

The vast majority of the Ethereum community including the Ethereum founders pivoted along with ETH, with a small minority staying loyal to the original blockchain.

Software never stops changing until people stop using it. The Ethereum Foundation follows a roadmap of future modifications and enhancements to the system. No system ever runs fast enough, so scaling continues to develop. Privacy remains paramount, and research into zero-knowledge proofs continues. Decentralized systems demand constant attention to security. Many aspects of the future remain unknown. Some new and popular application not yet on the market may well demand new capabilities from the system. As the world changes, Ethereum continues to evolve.

See the original post here:

What is Ethereum? | The Ultimate Beginners' Guide - CoinCentral

Ethereum price is confined in a tight range against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD is likely setting up for a major move in the coming sessions either above $120 or below $114.

Yesterday, we saw a bearish reaction from the $119-120 resistance zone in ETH price against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair declined below the $116 level and revisited the $114 support area. There was even a close below the $116 level and the 100 hourly simple moving average. However, there was a strong buying interest near the $114 support area. Moreover, the 61.8% Fib retracement level of the last upside from the $111 low to $120 high acted as a support. The price bounced back and it slowly moved above the $115 and $116 levels.

Besides, there was a break above the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $120 swing high to $114 swing low. At the outset, the price is approaching key resistances near $117, $119 and $120. More importantly, yesterdays highlighted declining channel is intact with resistance near $117 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. The 100 hourly SMA is also positioned just near the trend line and $117. Finally, the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $120 swing high to $114 swing low is near $117.

Looking at the chart, ETH price is recovering, but it remains below the key hurdles such as $117, $119 and $120. A successful break above these is needed for a push towards $130. If not, the price could drop back to $114 or $110.

Hourly MACD The MACD for ETH/USD is slightly placed in the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI for ETH/USD is placed just above the 50 level, with a flat structure.

Major Support Level $114

Major Resistance Level $119

More:

Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Relatively Muted, Next Move ...

Buy and Sell ETH With The Peer-to-Peer Ethereum Marketplace LocalEthereum

You need to enable Javascript in your web browser settings to access localethereum.com's marketplace.

LocalEthereum is how people exchange ETH peer-to-peer

Money in your account within minutes.* Use any payment method in 130+ countries.

A trading interface built for all audiences. No KYC requiredbegin trading in 30 seconds!

The only marketplace thats self-custodial and end-to-end encrypted.

Choose from more than 30 payment methods.

* Most trades complete in a few minutes, however this largely depends on the chosen payment method.

LocalEthereum is the fast and secure way to make Ethereum trades.

Thanks to LE, I can earn money securely and save myself from hyperinflation.

Consider the offers. Anyone in the world can post a bid to buy or sell ETH. Offers can be filtered by payment method, currency, location and popularity.

From bank transfers to gift cardsevery payment method is allowed.

Find an offer youre happy with and open a trade with the user. Choose the amount you want to buy or sell, and lock the rate in.

After the seller puts the ETH in an escrow account, the buyer pays the seller outside the platform. Payment details are discussed using encrypted messages.

Once the seller confirms payment, the ETH is released from escrow to the buyer.

The escrow account is a decentralized Ethereum smart contract. Rather than trusting a centralized authority to hold your ETH, LocalEthereum's escrow system is trust-free.

Every conversation is protected by a unique secret key which self-destructs after completion. We can only decrypt your messages if the key is volunteered; e.g. during a payment dispute.

Optionally, you can log in without a password by using a compatible Ethereum wallet. Most popular wallets including imToken, MetaMask and Ledger are compatible.

Tested with these Ethereum wallets.

Stay up to date with the latest crypto-news and connect with other traders and staff in our official Telegram groups.

LocalEthereum

Go here to see the original:

Buy and Sell Ether With The Peer-to-Peer Ethereum Marketplace ...

Ethereum is an open-source blockchain-based platform that essentially enables hundreds of decentralized cryptocurrencies and projects to be built and deployed without having to build their own blockchains.

With the second largest market cap in the cryptocurrency world, Ethereum has drawn a lot of attention from investors and crypto enthusiasts alike.

Ethereum not only presents a significant change to the status quo, it also allows for the quick development and deployment of new applications presenting niche solutions for various industries.

While Ethereums utility is obvious to programmers and the tech world at large, many people who are less tech-savvy have trouble understanding it. Weve designed this guide to appeal to both crowds and expose anyone from complete crypto beginners and intermediates to this potentially world-changing cryptocurrency.

If youre interested in Ethereum, chances are you have some sort of foundational knowledge of Bitcoin.

All cryptocurrencies inevitably get compared to Bitcoin, and it frankly makes understanding them much easier.

Bitcoin launched in 2009 as the worlds first cryptocurrency, with the single goal of creating a decentralized universal currency. This currency would not require any intermediary financial institutions, but would still ensure safe and valid transactions. This was made possible by a revolutionary technology called the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger, continuously recording and verifying records. Its used to track and verify Bitcoin transactions. Since the global network of communicating nodes maintains the blockchain, its pretty much incorruptible. As new blocks are added to the network, they are constantly validated.

Similar to Bitcoin, Ethereum is a distributed public blockchain network. While both Ethereum and Bitcoin are cryptocurrencies that can be traded among users, there are many substantial differences between the two.

Bitcoin, for example, utilizes blockchain to track ownership of the digital currency, making it an extremely effective peer to peer electronic cash system. Ethereum, on the other hand, focuses on running the programming code of an application. Application developers largely use it to pay for services and transaction fees on the Ethereum network.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralized, meaning they have no central control or issuing authority. Respective miners run each network by validating transactions to earn either bitcoin (for Bitcoin) or ether (for Ethereum).

If youre still having trouble making the distinction, the words of Dr. Gavin Woodone of Ethereums Co-Foundersmight help:

Bitcoin is first and foremost a currency; this is one particular application of a blockchain. However, it is far from the only application. To take a past example of a similar situation, e-mail is one particular use of the internet, and for sure helped popularise it, but there are many others.

Ethereum is simply the application of blockchain technology for a completely different purpose.

Simply put, Ethereum is a blockchain-based decentralized platform on which decentralized applications (Dapps) can be built.

Ethereums appeal is that its built in a way that enables developers to create smart contracts. Smart contracts are scripts that automatically execute tasks when certain conditions are met. For example, a smart contract could technically say, pay Jane $10 if she submits a 1000 word article on goats by September 15, 2018, and it would pay Jane once the conditions are met.

These smart contracts are executed by the Turing-complete Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), run by an international public network of nodes.

The cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network is called ether. Ether serves two different functions:

If youre still a little confused, dont worry. The underlying technology is complicated even at a surface level.

By the end of this guide, youll have a better understanding of Ethereum than 99.999% of people out there and thats a pretty good start!

Well go over things such as how Ethereum functions, Ethereums history, and some of the exciting dapps running on the Ethereum platform.

In 2011, a 17-year-old Russian-Canadian boy named Vitalik Buterin learned about Bitcoin from his father.Buterin became a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and a leading writer for the publication.Buterin currently serves on the Editorial Board of Ledger. As a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Ledger publishes original research articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The publication shows interest in any topics relating blockchain to mathematics, computer science, engineering, law, and economics.

In 2013, after visiting developers across the world who shared an enthusiasm for programming, Buterin published a white-paper proposing Ethereum.

In 2014, Buterin dropped out of the University of Waterloo after receiving the Thiel Fellowship of $100,000 to work on Ethereum full-time.

In 2015, the Ethereum system went live.

In 2017, Ethereum hit a cap rate of $36 billion dollars.

Whether youre looking at this from an investment standpoint, tech perspective, or witness to history; Ethereum is extremely exciting.

Buterins goal was to bring the same decentralization from Bitcoin to more than just currency. This could be accomplished by building a fully-fledged Turing-complete programming language into the Ethereum blockchain.

The Ethereum white paper goes into detail for some of the potential use cases, all of which could be built through decentralized apps on the Ethereum network. The list goes on and on:

By building these apps on the Ethereum network, these dapps can utilize Ethereums blockchain instead of having to create their own.

The core Ethereum founding team in 2014 consisted of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson, additionally attracting the attention of Joseph Lubin to join the team. Lubin moved on to found the now near 1,000-employee Brooklyn-based venture production studio ConsenSys.

Rumored to be one of the top buyers in the Ethereum crowdsale, Lubin, who had been funding ConsenSys with his stash of Bitcoins, says he began selling some of his Ethers last year to fund the firms development

Early blockchain applications like Bitcoin only allowed users a set of predefined operations. For example, Bitcoin was created exclusively to operate as a cryptocurrency.

Unlike these early blockchain projects, Ethereum allows users to create their own operations. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) makes this possible. As Ethereums runtime environment, the EVM executes smart contracts. Since every Ethereum node runs the EVM, applications built on it reap the benefits of being decentralized without having to build their own blockchain.

Smart contracts are strings of computer code capable of automatically executing when certain predetermined conditions are met.

Instead of requiring a single central authority to say yay or nay, these contracts are self-operated. This not only makes the entire process more effective, it also makes it more fair and objective.

For example, a simple smart contract use case would be:

Using the smart contract, theres no need for Jim and Sarah to trust each other. They just have to trust the data feed.

Keep in mind that this is only a very simple example. Many smart contracts are extremely complex and can work wonders.

The takeaway: Smart contracts can automate a variety of tasks, without requiring intermediaries. All a smart contract needs is the arbitrary rules written into it.

Handling financial transactions alone presents hugely complex problems in terms of reliability and security. And since the Ethereum network comprises a general purpose blockchain that handles assets other than money, more complex challenges arise beyond mere financial transactions. Moving into the future, Ethereum confronts issues of scalability, energy consumption, security, privacy, and decentralization.

As a general purpose blockchain, Ethereum needs a mechanism to represent assets other than money. The ERC-721 standard has been created to transact unique items of value. The ERC acronym stands for Ethereum Request for Comment and provides a formal process for the Ethereum Foundation to improve its product. The ERC-721 standard originally drove the development of the highly successful CryptoKitties collectibles, but it allows for the representation of any digital asset.

Any blockchain relies on a trustworthy, fair, secure, and reliable consensus protocol for placing transactions onto the system. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses a Proof of Work (PoW) approach, but the Ethereum blockchain plans to implement a Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm.

The Casper finality gadget implements PoS as an independent module. As an independent module, Casper lives on top of the current PoW system, making the Ethereum network a hybrid system of both PoW and PoS. Also as an independent module, this allows the PoW portion of the network to be removed at a later date.

The Casper PoS protocol utilized game theory incentives to maintain the integrity of the system. It also provides benefits of greater security and reduces the massive energy consumption required by PoW mining.

Scaling presents a great challenge for Ethereum, as it does for other blockchains. Scaling defines a systems ability to handle a large and growing workload without showing strain or stress to the system. Think of this both as a systems power and efficiency to complete tasks and also as a user experience challenge. If a user waits too long for a response after clicking a button, frustration results, and users give up on the system.

The web confronted this problem in the early days as well. In the first web applications, every action a user took on a web page resulted in the entire page having to be reloaded from the server and rendered again on the clients browser. Web 2.0 came along, introduced the ability to refresh only the relevant part of the page, and responsive user interfaces became the norm on the internet.

Vitalik Buterin identifies scaling as a primary concern that needs to be addressed in blockchain technology. He made the following comments in September 2017 in an interview with Naval Ravikant at the Disrupt SF 2017 conference.

Bitcoin is currently processing a bit less than three transactions a second; and if it goes close to four, its already at peak capacity. Ethereum over the last few days, its been doing five a second. And if it goes above six, then its also at peak capacity. On the other hand, Uber on average 12 rides a second, PayPal several hundred, Visa several thousand, major stock exchanges tens of thousands. And if you want to go up to IoT, then youre talking hundreds of thousands

What the Lightning Network brings to Bitcoin, Plasma brings to Ethereum. Joseph Poon (the creator of the Lightning Network protocol) and Vitalik Buterin jointly design and architect Plasma.

Efforts like Lightning and Plasma ease stress on the network by taking work offline to a side chain. Users engage in multiple transactions over time on a channel on the side chain without utilizing the main blockchain at this point. After a number of transactions complete, the final state of these transactions moves over to the main blockchain as a single transaction with a single fee. Multiple interactions to process thereby reduce to a single action on the blockchain, consequently reducing strain on resources and improving scalability.

Computer science boils down to the art of putting something somewhere, then retrieving it when you want it. Storing only what you require in a manner that makes retrieval simple and elegant, and retrieving only what you need, and doing it all as quickly as possible defines efficiency. Sharding presents a technique for storing data in an efficient manner to improve retrieval. And efficiency determines scalability.

Sharding basically defines ways to break data into separate pieces and store them separately. Consequently, you only have to deal with the small piece containing the data you are interested in and not wade through every piece of data contained in the entire system. Database technology has long utilized sharding to increase scalability, and now the Ethereum Foundation researches how sharding can improve blockchain technology.

Similarly, Raiden also presents side chain capability similar to Lighting and Plasma. Raiden is not a project of the Ethereum Foundation but a product of an independent company.

Most of us have a pretty good understanding of what an application (app) is. An application is formally defined as a program or piece of software designed and written to fulfill a particular purpose of the user. We use apps every day: Apps allow us to check our bank balance, scroll through a live feed of pictures, or even launch a Flappy Bird into oblivion.

Now take this definition and ~*~decentralize~*~ it. Dapps serve similar functions, but run on an entire network of nodes rather than a central source. The fact that they are decentralized gives dapps an enormous advantage over traditional apps.

You know when Instagram is down because the server is down? This doesnt happen with dapps. How about when Zomato got hacked and exposed the information of 17 million people? This doesnt happen either.

Moreover, Dapps are:

In many cases, front-end users cant even distinguish dapps from regular apps. Dapps typically use HTML/JavaScript web applications to communicate with the blockchain, appearing the same to users as many applications youre already using today.

While Bitcoin provides a network for financial transactions, Ethereum aspires to provide a platform for decentralized application development. Ultimately, a programming platform requires good applications built on it to be taken seriously. CryptoKitties gained popularity for a while, but we continue to wait and see how well Ethereum serves as a foundation for application development.

Quartz asked Vitalik Buterin What decentralized apps do you find interesting? on September 14, 2017. He answered as follows:

There are a few categories that are flourishing already. Some of them are various financial applications, financial contracts, derivatives, things like Maker. Games are another one. In the non-financial space, identity verification is getting to be a big one. With prediction markets, Augur and Gnosis are going to be fairly successful. Also in the not-quite financial space theres an interesting thing called Akasha. Its an Ethereum-based forum that uses ether-based cryptocurrency mechanisms to manage things like upvote and downvote and spam prevention.

Fasten your seatbelts and get your Twitter-fingers ready, its finally time for the most exciting part of this guide.

Ethereums intersection with the real world is paved with innovation and disruption. There are already a huge number of projects, both live and in development, built on the Ethereum network. Here are just some of the most successful and promising of these dapps.

Golem: The Golem project aims to make a global supercomputer easily accessible to anyone. Its essentially the first decentralized sharing economy of computing power. As a global market, users would be able to make money by renting out their idle computing power, or spend money to have access to a supercomputer. Hold up, have you ever used a supercomputer? Supercomputers cost between a million dollars and a good fraction of a billion dollars. The modern Tianhe-2 Supercomputer has the power of roughly 18,400 Playstation 4s. Golems goal is to make this sort of power easily accessible anywhere in the world at an infinitesimal cost.

Check out our Golem Beginners Guide.

Augur: Augurs goal is to utilize a decentralized network to create a powerful forecasting tool using prediction markets. Augur would reward users for correctly predicting future events. While at a surface level it may just seem like a decentralized betting platform (which is still worth a lot), Augur could potentially provide powerful predictive data for virtually any industry. Prediction markets are more accurate at forecasting than individual experts, traditional opinion polling, and surveys.

Check out our Augur Beginners Guide.

Civic: Civic aims to protect users identities and provide blockchain-based, secure, low-cost, on-demand access to identity verification. This would not only prevent and provide users with assistance for identity fraud, but it would also remove the need for constant personal information and background verification checks. Think about how many times youve left your social security number with someones assistant and you can see the benefits of Civic.

Check out our Civic Beginners Guide.

OmiseGO: OmiseGO vision is to solve the problems and inefficiencies of financial institutions, processors, and gateways by enabling decentralized exchange on a public blockchain at a lower cost and high volume. This means anyone will be able to conduct financial transactions such as payments, payroll deposits, B2B commerce, supply-chain finance, asset management, and loyalty programs without having to rely on a single server and without exorbitant fees! The system is built in a way that allows the best currency (whether fiat or decentralized) to win.

Check out our OmiseGO Beginners Guide.

Storj: Storjs aim is to make it possible for users to rent out their excess hard drive space in exchange for the crypto STORJ. Users could therefore also use Storj to rent additional hard drive space.

These are only a handful of different dapps all running on the Ethereum platform. What really stands out with dapps is how their founder are able to raise real capital by selling tokens. Whereas traditional apps have to seek outside investment or IPO, a dapp can simply ICO and raise the capital they need to build their company. While this removes friction from the financing processes, it has unfortunately also made it possible for many sub-par dapps to ICO and take advantage of eager speculators.

Check out our Storj Beginners Guide.

For more dapps, check out the State of the Dapps.

Now that you have a decent understanding of what Ethereum is and how it functions, its useful to revisit how it compares to Bitcoin at a technical level.

While the two cryptocurrencies serve different purposes, Ethereum provides a number of benefits over Bitcoin:

Ethereum arguably currently functions better than Bitcoin as a currency. With Ethereum, you can reliably send transactions faster, pay lower transaction fees, and mine at a more profitable rate (although it still has its downfalls for miners).

Read: Is Ethereum Mining Profitable?

However, Bitcoin does have a relatively more stable priceand therefore functions as a better value storage optionfrom a trading and value storage perspective. Ethereum is much younger but has covered a substantial amount of ground in recent years. Although Ethereum certainly shows promise as a currency, its true potential lies in features nonexistent in Bitcoins code.

The most famous DAO was simply known as The DAO. The nearly identical name causes a lot of confusion for people and gives DAOs a bad reputation.

The DAO was a decentralized autonomous organization primarily functioning as its own investor-directed venture capital fund. It didnt have the conventional management structure or board of directors, was not tied to any particular government, and instead ran on open source code. The DAO was set up to give funders the power to vote for which dapps deserved investment through DAO tokens.

Dapps had somewhat of an approval process:

The DAO is most famous for the largest crowdfunding campaign in history, raising over $150 million in ether from more than 11,000 investors. The DAO is also most infamous for getting hacked for $50 million. This hack inevitably caused a split in the Ethereum community, creating what we now know as Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

The hack happened because of The DAOs Split Function. Funders who wanted to exit The DAO could use its Split Function, which would give them back the ether they had invested. The only stipulation was that existing funders had to hold their ether for 28 days before they could withdraw them.

On June 17th 2016, an unknown person or group of people took advantage of a lapse in the Split Functions security with a simple recursive function. This frustratingly easy hack allowed the hacker(s) to repeat their request to withdraw the same DAO tokens multiple times before the system registered it as $50 million.

The news of this hack created chaos in the Ethereum community. While this hack had nothing to do with the Ethereum platform and everything to do with The DAO platform, many members of the Ethereum community were invested in The DAO. The community as a whole had 28 days to come up with a solution, which ended up being to forkstop the current blockchain entirely and create something new from scratch.

The new Ethereum (ETH) is the result of the fork, and is essentially the blockchain before the hack. The old Ethereum (Ethereum Classic ETC) is still running the original blockchain with the hack included.

The vast majority of the Ethereum community including the Ethereum founders pivoted along with ETH, with a small minority staying loyal to the original blockchain.

Software never stops changing until people stop using it. The Ethereum Foundation follows a roadmap of future modifications and enhancements to the system. No system ever runs fast enough, so scaling continues to develop. Privacy remains paramount, and research into zero-knowledge proofs continues. Decentralized systems demand constant attention to security. Many aspects of the future remain unknown. Some new and popular application not yet on the market may well demand new capabilities from the system. As the world changes, Ethereum continues to evolve.

More:

What is Ethereum? | The Ultimate Beginners Guide

WHAT IS A BLOCKCHAIN?

Put simply, blockchains provide a way to keep track of digital assets (money, things) without the need for intermediaries, such as banks and other financial institutions.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a smarter blockchain, it is a network, a community, and a cryptocurrency that takes digital assets further. In addition to allowing people to send value to each other, ETC allows for complex contracts that operate autonomously and cannot be modified or censored.

This may be best explained with an analogy, imagine Bitcoin as a landline phoneit does one thing very well. ETC is like a smartphoneit can do everything Bitcoin can and much more.

If the Internet was simply a bunch of interconnected computers, and didnt have any users or creators making websites, it would be largely useless. In much the same way a blockchain needs users and creators. ETC has both and were working on solving real world problems of interconnecting people and their devices.

More here:

Ethereum Classic - A smarter blockchain that takes digital ...

There are absolutely no boundaries when we talk about transfer of value. Sometimes, it is real pain full to get that money transfer from another country.

Problem no more, cryptocurrencies do not recognize the concept of borders, and they can be transferred from point A to point B in a matter of seconds.

Another great point is transparency. You cannot cheat the system without letting others know about that.

This is why Bitcoin or Ethereum had their rough days with someone exploiting the loopholes, but due to the fact that everyone could see what was happening, the loopholes were closed in a short period of time with the determination of community and developers.

It is not only expensive to send money, but you also have to put a lot of effort into filling all the necessary papers for it.

In comparison to SWIFT/SEPA, the transaction time is fast as a lightning strike.

I know that the cryptocurrency community is not very close to VISA transfer speed, but the crypto community is actively working on solving the problem.

Originally posted here:

Ethereum Cash Pro

Ethereum has taken the world by storm...but how does it work and why is it becoming so popular?

This guide will teach you everything you need to know about Ethereum.

Read on or skip to the section you're interested in...

1. What is Ethereum?

Ethereum can be thought of as a virtual supercomputer.

It's designed as a platform to host applications that can run without the need for human interference.

These applications are called 'Decentralized Apps', and I'll explain how they work later in this guide.

The cryptocurrency, Ether (usually referred to as Ethereum) is the currency or utility token that you pay to use this virtual network.

2. How Ethereum Works.

2.1. Ethereum Blockchain.

Like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has it's own blockchain.

This is like a record of all transactions on the Ethereum network. It's stored on nodes (computers, miners, etc.) across the world.

However, while Bitcoins blockchain just stores transaction records, Ethereums blockchain also hosts smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps).

Smart contracts are contracts programmed to run by themselves. In simple terms, this means: If x happens, y results.

(I'll explain Smart Contracts in more detail below).

The Ethereum blockchain keeps a record of the latest execution of each smart contract.

2.2. How Do Transactions Work?

Transactions, whether they are simple money transfers or executions of smart contracts or DApps, require gas.

Gas can be thought of as transaction fees. You pay for gas using Ether.

Transaction fees go to miners (explained below).

2.3. What is Ethereum Used for?

Since you can program different smart contracts and DApps on the Ethereum blockchain, Ethereum use cases are only limited by the imagination.

Ethereums innovation in this regard has even led to copycats trying to mimic Ethereums popularity and success.

Note: Want to see how Ethereum works in the 'real world'?

Check out section 7 of this guide for some examples.

2.4. Smart Contracts.

As mentioned, smart contracts are contracts that are programmed to run by themselves.

So why is this helpful?

Smart contracts can eliminate the inefficiencies often caused by middlemen.

Smart contracts get rid of middlemen like banks and even service providers like Airbnb and Uber.

For example, banks are usually the ones that give people loans.

Instead of having a bank, smart contracts could be written so that loans are disbursed once certain conditions are fulfilled.

For instance, once you pay your loan amount, funds could be disbursed into your account automatically without the need for a loan collector.

For something like Airbnb, instead of having Airbnb connect renters and landlords, smart contracts could grant a renter access to an apartment once he or she makes a payment.

The examples are endless.

Smart contracts could be revolutionary and have the potential to upend many industries and business models.

2.5. Mining Ethereum.

When you make a transaction, this transaction is broadcast to the Ethereum network.

Miners verify transactions and group them into blocks (groups of transactions), which are added to the blockchain (groups of blocks or all Ethereum transactions).

The way that miners verify Ethereum transactions is via proof of work. However, they are planning to move towards "proof of stake".

Miners, using their mining devices, such as computers or specialized mining devices, perform computationally difficult work.

Whoever finishes this work first gets to add a new block to the blockchain.

For their efforts, miners are paid in transaction fees (gas paid for in Ether) and newly created Ether (if they finish the work first).

3. History of Ethereum.

3.1 Who Created Ethereum?

The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, published the idea of Ethereum in late 2013 in a whitepaper.

Buterin had originally pushed for application development (DApps) on Bitcoins blockchain, but others in the Bitcoin community didnt share his vision.

This led him to create Ethereum.

Ethereum was officially announced in January 2014 and other team members included influential cryptocurrency figures:

Ethereums ICO took place from July 2014 to August 2014. Crowd sale participants paid for Ether using Bitcoin.

A year later, in July 2015, Ethereum went live.

3.2. Ethereums Growth.

People realized the potential of Ethereum (Blockchain 2.0), and Ethereum quickly gained in popularity.

3.3 Ethereum Hacks.

While Ethereum has risen quickly in the cryptocurrency sphere, its unfortunately suffered some high profile hacks.

Here's a couple of examples.

Though The DAO was the largest crowdfunding campaign in history (at the time), it was unfortunately hacked.

One third of The DAOs funds were stolen (valued at about $50 million at the time).

The community was split with regards to how to deal with the hack, which led to the split of Ethereum (discussed below).

Parity is an Ethereum wallet provider thats had a run of bad publicity.

In July 2017, $30 million in Ether was stolen from Parity wallets.

3.4. Ethereum Classic.

The aforementioned DAO hack was the first of its kind in the Ethereum community.

People werent sure with how to deal with the hack and two camps emerged.

On the one hand, some wanted to hard fork (split) the Ethereum blockchain to restore the stolen funds.

The other side argued doing so would go against the immutability ethos of blockchain.

This disagreement led to the split of Ethereum into Ethereum (forked blockchain) and Ethereum Classic (unchanged blockchain).

4. Benefits Of Ethereum.

Here's a few of Ethereum's benefits (we'll come onto it's disadvantages next)

Nothing can be censored on Ethereum because of blockchain technology.

Data is hosted on nodes across the world so censorship or changing of data wouldnt be possible without controlling thousands of nodes.

Since Ethereum isnt held on one server (centralized) and is instead hosting on thousands of nodes (decentralized), there's no downtime.

(Unless all nodes crash at the same time which is rare).

With the introduction of Smart Contracts, Ethereum is a very versatile platform and could revolutionise many industries (as mentioned earlier with banking and Airbnb.

Ethereum is one of the most popular platforms for launching ICOs.

Ethereum's blockchain makes it relatively easy for developers to create DApps, DAOs and other crypto-assets.

Therefore it's become an increasingly more popular and convenient platform for ICOs and developers to launch from.

Mining and transferring tokens is faster on the Ethereum blockchain, especially when compared to Bitcoin.

Transferring Bitcoin can take 10 minutes (or even longer) - whereas transferring Ethereum takes a matter of seconds.

5. The Disadvantages Of Ethereum.

Ethereum uses its own programming language, Solidity.

Developers unfamiliarity with Solidity has led to code being written incorrectly, which led to problems like The DAO hack.

Projects similar to Ethereum have emerged addressing this issue and allow programmers to use more familiar languages like Javascript.

Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is facing problems, as it grows more popular.

The fact that games like CryptoKitties can cause network congestion is a cause for concern.

If Ethereum cant handle many transactions, some critics are wondering how will it ever scale to meet the demands of a mainstream user base?

Transaction fees on the Ethereum platform are paid in Gas - and they can quickly inflate.

In fact, transaction fees increased by up to 70% for Ethereum at peak usage.

As you can see in the chart below, transaction fees have fluctuated dramatically over the last few months.

Another technical problem with Ethereum is that sometimes the Ethereum wallet won't sync properly with the blockchain.

This means sometimes users can't see their wallet's actual balance - and the figures are can be inaccurate.

As you can imagine, that's a bit worrying for some users!

You can find more details about this here.

6. Ethereum vs. Bitcoin.

So what are the biggest differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin?

Smart Contracts the main difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is that Ethereum allows for smart contracts and DApps instead of just payments.

Faster Transactions the time for a single Ethereum block to be mined is measured in seconds vs. minutes (Bitcoin).

Purpose Bitcoin is more like a store of value, whereas Ethereum allows decentralised apps to be developed on it's platform.

Functionality Ethereum's technology is designed to allow DApps and smart contracts for developers. Ethereum is more versatile than Bitcoin in this respect.

Proof Of Work Vs Proof Of Stake Whilst Bitcoin and Ethereum are both currently mined using Proof Of Work, this could change soon.

The rest is here:

What Is Ethereum? Here's What You Need To Know

Ethereum is the largest open-source, blockchain based platform for decentralised applications. It serves as digital currency and can be traded like any other cryptocurrency. If you want to get a better idea of what Ethereum is and how it works, check out the Ethereum News category where you will find all kinds of topics you might be interested in. Even though it is a digital coin just as Bitcoin, Ethereum operates smart contracts and and has its token, known as ether (ETH). Take a look at Ethereum News and learn more about smart contracts and distributed applications (shortly called Apps). This peer-to-peer platform is famous for its free-fraud and free-third-party interference nature. You can find out more about it in Ethereum News today. The network is suitable for running transactions very fast in only a matter of seconds which is much more efficient than Bitcoin transactions, that runs in minutes. Ethereum News today will explain you the processes and nature of this cryptocurrency in detail. Its definitely an advanced type of digital currency and contracting solution read more about the future of this cryptocurrency in the Latest Ethereum News. It is classified as Crypto 2.0 for a reason, so if you are interested in digital coins, get to know what is going on in the Ethereum ecosystem. You simply cannot miss the Latest Ethereum News, therefore take a quick look and get prepared for the future of trading and transactioning. Its going to be exciting!

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Ethereum News | Ethereum News today | Latest Ethereum News

Ethereum (ETH) - Price, Chart, Info | CryptoSlate

1H -0.15%

24H -2.15%

7D +21.1%

$148.293 Market Pairs: 4,824

-2.15% -$3.19

24h Price Change

Market Cap $15,448,494,919

Volume 24h $2,892,628,283

Circ. Supply 104.18M ETH

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

Market Cap $15,448,494,919

Volume 24H $2,892,628,283

Circulating Supply 104,175,176 ETH

Total Supply 104,175,176 ETH

Proof Type Proof of Work (PoW)

Block Time ~14 seconds

Algorithm Ethhash

Team Location Zug, Switzerland

First Announced January 23, 2014

Status | Crowdsale Ended

ICO Start Date Jul 22, 2014

ICO End Date Sep 2, 2014

Total Raised $15.57M USD

Contributors 6041

Total Supply 50,000,000 ETH

1 ETH = $0.31 USD

Founder and Inventor

Founder and Go-Ethereum Lead

Researcher

Founder

Founder

Founder and CTO

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Ethereum (ETH) - Price, Chart, Info | CryptoSlate