Ethereum Crypto

“The next Internet.”
It’s a phrase that’s often used when discussing
bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency, and
the blockchain, its distributed global ledger. Yet,
the phrase is perhaps misleading in its simplicity.
While commonly referred to as a singular construct,
“the Internet” is rather a web of protocols and rule
sets that combine to power complex communications,
collaboration and business processes.
When viewed similarly, “the blockchain”, or the
public, permissionless blockchain protocols,
could be seen as a more primitive version of
what could become a mature “Internet of Value”.
Such a public utility could one day provide a
similarly layered architecture to expand the Internet
of Information, or the Internet as we know
it today, to deliver all manner of financial and
non-financial transactional services.
If the Internet decentralized access to information,
thereby increasing access to communication
tools, the vision for the blockchain is that it would
decentralize, and reduce barriers to establishing
trust and transacting in the digital world.
First introduced in 2014, ethereum can be seen
as both a realization of this future, and a recognition
of the limitations of the bitcoin network, the
first widely used public blockchain.

In his keynote announcement for the project,
creator and inventor Vitalik Buterin described
ethereum in such terms, arguing that bitcoin
was not designed to serve as the blockchain’s
answer to the Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP) or Internet Protocol (IP), the code that
forms the basic communication language of the
Internet.
Buterin wrote:
“Bitcoin was designed to be a [Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol] SMTP. It’s a protocol
that is very good at one particular
task. It is good for transferring money,
but it was not designed as a foundational
layer for any kind of protocols to be built
on top.”
In remarks, Buterin spoke of the need for a
technology that was more expansive, and that
replicated the functionality of Turing-complete
programming languages in a way that would be
so powerful as to describe any blockchain application
that could possibly be built.
“Ethereum does not have features, it just
has a programming language,” he said.

Vision
Ethereum is perhaps best viewed as an attempt
to apply learnings from bitcoin’s decentralized,
global cryptographic network to challenges
beyond value exchange. Rather than disintermediate
third parties in e-commerce, it envisioned
how removing other traditional arbitrators of trust
could enable a new wave of application development.
Ethereum’s “business problem”, as articulated by
former ethereum CCO Stephan Tual, is that most
Internet services are centralized.
“You trust your bank to keep your
money safe. The same is true of
Facebook when you upload a picture
of your kids or you push a document
to Dropbox. As a developer you need
to submit your application to an app
store and risk having it removed.”
Tual explains.
Ethereum seeks to enable the creation of similar
Internet services while restoring the control of
personal data and funds to users.