Ethereum (ETH) Price and Analysis

Ethereum Overview

Ethereum (ETH)trade is currently the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with crypto’s founding father Bitcoin being the first.

Ethereum was first described in a whitepaper by programmer Vitalik Buterin in 2013. Buterin was interested in Bitcoin and co-founded Bitcoin Magazine, one of the original news and print magazine publishers specializing in Bitcoin. While he recognized the value in Bitcoin, he argued that Bitcoin was lacking and that it needed a scripting language for application development. When Buterin failed to garner the enthusiasm for this change to Bitcoin, he set his sights on building something new.

The core Ethereum team consisted of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Gavin Wood, Anthony Di Lorio, and Charles Hoskinson. The team funded the project via an online crowdsale between July and August 2014. Ethereum officially went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million pre-mined coins.

People often find it difficult to understand the differences between cryptocurrencies, thinking they are all essentially different versions of the same tech; however, Ethereum is somewhat different. By the time Ethereum was created, the creators already had time to view and monitor other cryptocurrencies, mainly Bitcoin. The cryptocurrencies that followed on from Bitcoin essentially tried to improve on the Bitcoin model, they used the same technology but made transactions faster, or improved on the security and anonymity behind the transactions.

Ethereum took things one step further. They looked at the technology behind these cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and decided to expand its value beyond virtual currency. Ethereum is also a blockchain technology, but with Ethereum, you can transfer value the same way Bitcoin does by using Ethereum’s Ether digital coin, but you can also do much more. You can use Ethereum’s technology to build a social network, a new Wikipedia, or anything really. Ethereum is built in a way that any changes to the executable code will also be stored on the decentralized blockchain. To put it simply, Bitcoin is used to transfer monetary value, Ethereum’s value is in the transfer of data, whatever that data may be.

In the Ethereum blockchain, miners work to earn Ether. Ether can be traded like Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but it is also used by app developers to pay for transaction fees or other services on the Ethereum network.

Ethereum Co-founder Gavin Wood said:

“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.”