Some Notes on Ethereum

Ethereum has lots of potential because of the DAPPS developing on it: success depends precisely on the apps being developed on it. The way the eth network reacted to the DAO attack of 2016 is a good sample of the potential it has.

Ethereum is a software that runs on a distributed network of clients, or node computers. This would be useless on itself, but Ethereum is about a decentralized, trustless BC platform to build decentralized applications over it. This networks is composed of 000s of nodes that verify and secure the BC.

Its the second most successful application of public Blockchains and its Blockchain was launched in 2015 as a Swiss company by crowdfunding.

Ethereum and its Decentralized Virtual Machine (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is mainly used to build and implement smart contracts. Its a hole ecosystem that also includes a rewards system. The person executing the smart contracts is rewarded in ‘gas’ which is priced in Ethereum.

Beyond being a tradeable crypto, Ether is also used by application developers to pay for transactions fees and services on the Ethereum Network.

One of the inconveniences is that it hasn’t a light client. This means each node needs to download about 10GB, which is the current size of the Ethereum blockchain weight. This is inconvenient for mass adoption.

Solidity is the most used language for smart contracts, but there are many others.

ETHEREUM VIRTUAL MACHINE. (“EVM”), which can execute code of arbitrary algorithmic complexity. In computer science terms, Ethereum is “Turing complete.” This is the core and primary innovation behind the Ethereum project. Each participant of the Ethereum networks runs an instance of the virtual machine, and its purpose is to execute the smart contracts in a completely isolated environment, meaning no access to Network, Filesystem or other processes.

Ethereum Blockchain

You can scan the hole contents of the blockchain and its addresses without consent from the owner of the coins. Because this is a public BC. https://etherscan.io/block/4855281

What is Ether

Ether is the crypto token of the Ethereum Blockchain. ETG has a metric system that divides it into 10e18 wei.

What is GAS

Gas is a concept unique to the ethereum platform and is way to limit the resources available to a given smart contract. For every instruction executed in the EVM, there is a fixed Gas cost associated with it. Gas is transaction fee to conduct transactions in ETH BC, the computational services of the network. Due to the gas cost, developers need to optimize the code, because as the code complexity increases, so does the gas cost.

Gas helps to prevent DoS attacks making their infinite loops costly to perform and encourage performance in the code.

Gas limit is the max amount assigned to the operation. Unspent gas is returned to the owner. Max gas expenditure is limited by the corresponding field: 2exp(128)-1

If you provide less gas than required the transaction is not done: you need to provide enough gas.

Gas price is the amount of ETH you are willing to spent for your transactions. You can check the gas price o Etherscan or EthGasStation.

Ethereum Miners

In general, miner means a computer / server that does the calculations to add a block for a reward. The owner of the server is a miner as well. The miner who solves first the mathematical problem first is the one chosen to add the block and receive the rewards.

Miners use CPU to identifiy a nonce, a simply big random number with certain restrictions that is needed to create a block. Once they guess the code they send it to the network and create the reward.

The signature of the new block must be in a particular order (ascending or descending) => The new digest is lesser or greater than the previous one.

ETH has unlimitd supply, but its mining is similar to gold. Reward is 5 ETH/block average 12 seconds. The reward compensates the computational efforts and transactional costs to secure the network.

– Block reward: everyminer gets 5TH for accepted block. (12.5 for BTC).
– Uncle reward: some blocks are mined a little later and don´t form part of the main BC network. In ETH they are called ‘uncles’. and can be refered by a later block. Create 4.375 (7/8th) of a full 5TH reward. A miner who can refer an uncle also gets 0.15 ETH per uncle (max 2 uncles).
– Miner also gets GAS (the transaction fee) from contracts that were running during the block. This can be very large.

Ethereum PoW vs PoS
Why choose PoS for ETH
– No need to consume large quanties of electricity (efficiency).
– No need to issue as many new coins.
– Important: Safer network as attacks 51% become more expensive.

For more information: https://theethereum.wiki/

ETH CLIENTS
For develop and app you need to connect to the ETH network.
• Through any Ethereum client you can connect to the Ethereum network.
• You can also create decentralized apps with the help of Ethereum clients.
• Go-Ethereum built on Python and others

ETH WALLETS
• Ethereum Wallet uses a client to connect with Ethereum network.
• You can also make Ether transactions with Ethereum wallets.
• Here are the types of Ethereum wallets:
– Light wallet: don’t download the Blockchain on the device.
– Full node wallet: download entire Blockchain on the device. More used for development projects.

Here are the list of some Ethereum wallets:
– Mist Wallet (Desktop Wallet)
– MetaMask (Desktop Wallet)
– Jaxx (Mobile Wallet)
– Trezor (Hardware Wallet)
– Myetherwallet (Paper wallet)

ETH EXPLORER
• It is a website (etherscan.io) that lets user to search and navigate about their
Ethereum account.
• Uses include: Checking address balances. tracking coin transfer histories.
watching for transaction acceptance.

ERC20 TOKENS
• ERC20 is a common list of protocols that an Eth token has to implement.
• Developed in the late 2015.
• It gives developers the ability to program on how new tokens will function within

SOLIDITY. Solidity is a contact-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts. The syntax resembles javascript and is influenced by languages like C++ and Python, and it compiles directly to EVM assembly.