Ethereum TLDR

You have probably heard about the oddly spelled project called ethereum but you might not know what it does. This page helps breakdown what, how and why of ethereum so you can finally answer the question "what is ethereum".

What is it?

Ethereum is an open-source decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality.

What Does that mean ?

Ethereum is a crypto-currency just like bitcoin, but ethereum has a built in functionality that let's you program applications that run as part of the blockchain. This allows developers to create custom currencies, financial derivatives, escrow accounts, NFTs, onchain credit lending and other complex functionality using a programming language called "solidity".

What is gas?

Every time you run a computer program on your computer, your CPU has to run a set of different instructions. Some of these instructions are simple like adding numbers together and run pretty quickly. Others are more complex and take a longer time. Now Imagine that every computational cycle had a specific cost associated with it. So easy instructions like adding two numbers would be 1 computational unit, while more complex instructions such as multiplication would be 2 computational units.

Now imagine instead of having your computer program run inside your computer you could upload it to a swarm of computers who you could pay to run your program. These computers would be running 24/7 and would be mathematically bound to run your program as intended. You would calculate how many computational units your program would need everytime you run it. This

Historical Background

Ethereum is the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin who in 2013 started working on the concept of the network that would eventually be called "ethereum". Ethereum was officially announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in 2014. Ethereum was crowdfunded in 2014 where for 2 weeks users could purchase 2,000 ETH per 1 Bitcoin. After the two weeks the price linearly increased to 1,337 per BTC. The network officially went live on July 30th 2015.