Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies онлайн

75 страница из 200

 Transaction time is between 10 minutes and 24 hours.

 Transactions aren’t fully anonymous.

 Bitcoin is decentralized.

 Mining Bitcoin requires a lot of (wasted) energy.

Ethereum

Ranked number two based on coin market cap as of 2021, Ethereum is another major cryptocurrency. As of September 2021, its market cap is around $465 billion.

Brief Ethereum background

Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum is a pretty young currency; Russian-American Vitalik Buterin proposed it in 2013. It’s almost five years younger than Bitcoin, which in the cryptoworld is still a big deal.

Ethereum uses the old Bitcoin’s wisdom and philosophy, but it has a different purpose and capability. According to its website, www.ethereum.org, “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts.” ssss1 of this minibook explains that smart contracts allow people to create agreements without a middleman. Ethereum creates these smart contracts by employing the same blockchain technology as Bitcoin. Just as Bitcoin’s blockchain and network validate Bitcoin ownership, Ethereum’s blockchain validates smart contracts, which the encoded rules execute.

Правообладателям