Bitcoin came into existence in 2009 shortly after the infamous stock market crash in 2008. The purpose of bitcoin is to facilitate Peer to peer(P2P) transactions without any third parties involved in the process. Bitcoin was created with the sole motive to replace the traditional payment system which mainly involved a lot of trust in the banks. Now suppose you want to transfer some bitcoins to your friend you can just fill in the amount you want to send, enter the receivers address and then send it. But what if you want to send the amount at a specific date with certain conditions in it and also without any disagreements from both the peers? That's where smart contracts come into play.
Ethereum was founded in 2013 and it wanted to not only be used as a currency but also be used to build and facilitate smart contracts. In today's crypto world you see many decentralized applications (DApps) being built on blockchains. The fundamentals of a smart contract involve certain rules and regulations that have to be met. Coding can be done to make sure that the rules and regulations are being followed and hence eliminating the dependence on banks to make sure that both the peers on either end of the transaction are satisfied and not cheated.
Image Source: dapp.com
From the above image it is clear that Ethereum dominates the DApps market in all the categories. Ethereum boasts 1,129 Active DApps which is more than all the other active apps combined.
To add logic into a smart contract, the programming languages should be object oriented in nature. Let us look at the commonly used programming languages that are used for creating smart contracts.
1) SOLIDITY: Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Steem, TRON, Hyperledger
2) C++: EOS, Steem
3) JAVA: NEO
4) JAVASCRIPT: Steem, NEO, IOST
5) GOLANG: Hyperledger
6) SQL: AERGO
If you want to try Solidity programming you can check this link out (https://remix.ethereum.org/)
No installation is required, have a look at the guide and start programming. Everything can be done on the virtual machine.
