Ethereum: Part One: The introduction
In case you haven't heard of it, there's this little thing called cryptocurrencies. They run on this other tiny thing called a blockchain.
Oh, you've heard of them?
Well then, I probably don't have to tell you much about Ethereum, right?
Just to be on the safe side, Ethereum, or ETH, is a cryptocurrency.
It's developed with code that is open source, and is most noted for it's smart contract process added to the distributed transactional network, or blockchain. ETH was developed by the now-famous Vitalik Buterin, taking further the Bitcoin concept of virtual machines spread across a network of nodes, using it's own unique formula of scripting.
ETH came on the scene circa 2014 and has uniquely launched the growth of crypto forward by eons. The first major hurdle took place in 2016 when ETH was hacked because of a major flaw, which led to a new and improved ETH (and a theft of $50 Million in ETH ouch!), and die-hard 'wack' ETH fans stuck with the old model and forked it to ETC, or Ethereum Classic, which now has updated and fixed it's 'wack-ness' and continues to be a pretty cool project.
There's a fast-track background on ETH:
https://ethereum.org/
Ethereum has been thoughtfully developed with a 4-stage road map.
It calls its upgrades, track, or improvements EIP's, or ETH Improvement Proposals.
Don't 'ya love that we live in a world of abbreviations for... everything?
Phase one: Frontier
This was an infinitely significant launch, allowing the existence of a working model of ETH, and people could mine it, build decentralized applications (uh huh, got another acronym- wanna keep count? dApps), and people could experiment, make tools, and kick the digital tires. by 2015, Frontier was working and people started talking about the next Bitcoin... Ethereum.
Phase two
In 2016, ETH essentially came out of first beta release and became a 'real' released network for public consumption. Welcome the Ethereum network.
Now we had the ETH, that is essentially the ETH we love today, with protocols for upgrades and improvements in speed and performance. Nice. Oh yeah, and it was called Homestead. I did that for effect; like it?
We now live in a dystopian society... uh, digital node network, called Phase three: Metropolis
To fit in a world where people, you know, expect stuff, this important phase helped to make transaction fees, called gas, a specific pre-determined value, and extremely important to why we have any other coins to trade beyond BTC, ETH and ETC, they made it easy to create a coin on the ETH network; now we call these tokens. That's a really big deal, because fixed gas costs (the thing they call makin' payments for usin' ETH) and the ability to deploy a coin without having to be deeply involved in writing code, meant that people could get a cool idea, fund a project, and launch a token, and ETH provided the source code to do so. As the Brits would say; "Brilliant"!
Oh yeah, they kinda fixed the privacy thing too, y'know, so you don't lose $50 million, 'cause that's bad.
Now you know a lot of things about Ethereum, so you're ready for part two. GO! Read!
