In an effort to better understand Ethereum’s potential for disruption, I’ve aggregated this list of things you should know about the digital currency.
“The intent of Ethereum is to create an alternative protocol for building decentralized applications, providing a different set of tradeoffs that we believe will be very useful for a large class of decentralized applications, with particular emphasis on situations where rapid development time, security for small and rarely used applications, and the ability of different applications to very efficiently interact, are important. Ethereum does this by building what is essentially the ultimate abstract foundational layer: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized applications where they can create their own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and state transition functions. Smart contracts can also be built on top of the platform, with vastly more power than that offered by Bitcoin scripting because of the added powers of Turing-completeness, value-awareness, blockchain-awareness, and state.” -Ethereum White Paper![]
The main difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin with regard to the blockchain architecture is that, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum blocks contain a copy of both the transaction list and the most recent state.
Theoretically, Ethereum-based token systems acting as sub-currencies can potentially include another important feature that on-chain Bitcoin-based meta-currencies lack: the ability to pay transaction fees directly in that currency.
Ethereum applications include:
Savings wallets.
Crop insurance.
IOT.
Farm-to-table produce.
Electricity sourcing and pricing.
Decentralized data feed.
Smart multisignature escrow.
Cloud computing.
Peer-to-peer gambling.
Prediction markets.
On-chain decentralized marketplaces.
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