Ethereum. Blockchain 2.0?

There's a lot of mystique floating around Vitalik Buterin, the 24 year old coder that co-created Ethereum, the blockchain they claim to be an upgrade to Bitcoin, but lets focus on a few quick facts about the young genius before we dive into his company. His father, being a computer guy himself, peeked his interest in bitcoin in its very early days. Vitalik then quickly co-created Bitcoin Magazine in 2011, wrote for them successfully until they were purchased by BTC Media in 2012. He continued to write for them until mid-2014, when he helped create Ethereum. Ethereum is regarded by some as a Bitcoin rival, or by others, blockchain 2.0. But what is Ethereum, and how is it different than Bitcoin?

Ethereum is a decentralized platform, or blockchain, that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference. 😒 In English please??? It does everything I explained that Bitcoin does last week, only faster, cheaper and it does more. Lets break this down in a way that almost anyone can understand:

(Transactions per second/currency)

24,000/Visa(dollars)
3.3-7/Bitcoin
15/Ethereum
So, as you can see, while neither currently offer sufficient speed of transactions compared to what we all have known forever now, you can also see that Ethereum is leaps ahed of Bitcoin. How does it stack up agains Bitcoin in transaction cost? $0.001 to $0.002 USD Ethereum at current prices. Current BTC transaction fees vary anywhere from $0.01 to $0.09 USD(this information was as of December 2017)...wins there! How about total time to complete a transaction? In Ethereum the block time is set to 14 to 15 seconds compared to Bitcoins 10 minutes. Slight edge there...😳 Well, its pretty clear that as a cryptocurrency, Ethereum is clearly the winner, at least in every way that matters to regular people like myself. Now, lets talk a little about dApp's, arguably the best thing about Ethereum.

To understand what a dApp is, we must first try to understand what a smart contract is. The best way to describe smart contracts is to compare the technology to a vending machine. Ordinarily, you would go to a lawyer or a notary, pay them, and wait while you get the document. With smart contracts, you simply drop a bitcoin into the vending machine (i.e. ledger), and your escrow, driver’s license, or whatever drops into your account. More so, smart contracts not only define the rules and penalties around an agreement in the same way that a traditional contract does, but also automatically enforce those obligations. So, if an App is a piece of software that allows a person to do something specific, like play a game, a dApp is a piece of software that allows a person to play that game without the need of some rich or powerful person deciding that say, your player got too powerful and they shut you down.(that is rumored to have happened to Vitalik in World of Warcraft...sparking the fire to build Ethereum. Its just a rumor though) Bitcoin can't do anything like this, to my knowledge, so I think we have a winner folks!

Your Badass recap is gonna be short and sweet. Ethereum is clearly an upgrade to Bitcoin in every way that really matters, imo. Its faster, has more capabilities and its cheaper for you, and I. Ethereum even has a few really cool, yet sadly very technical aspects, that I didn't touch on here. Soon, I will dive into Ethereum a little deeper for you, and also explain a little about what Ethereum has in store, in the coming future. Until then, we will learn about this new frontier together, and at a medium pace.😉

Be good, Badasses✌️

(this is fore education only and is not financial advice)