Quotes About Ethereum

Initially, I thought that Ethereum was a thing that would be used for people to write simple financial scripts. As it turns out, people are writing stuff like Augur on top of it.

Ethereum is in some sense a logical extension of the applications of Bitcoin because it allows for smart contracts – which are code that lives on a blockchain, can control assets and data, and define interactions between the assets, data, and network participants. The capacity for smart contracts defines Ethereum as a smart contract platform.

Ethereum and other smart contract platforms specifically gave rise to the decentralized application, or dApp. The backend components of these applications are built with interoperable, transparent smart contracts that continue to exist if the chain they live on exists. dApps allow peers to interact directly and remove the need for a company to act as a central clearing house for app interactions. It quickly became apparent that the first killer dApps would be financial ones.

The largest fiat-collateralized stablecoin is Tether5 (USDT) with a market capitalization of $62 billion, making it the third largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin and Ethereum at time of writing. Tether also has the highest trading volume of any cryptocurrency but is not audited.

With a market capitalization of $5 billion as of writing, the most popular crypto-collateralized stablecoin is DAI, created by MakerDAO9 and and backed by ETH and other crypto assets. It is soft pegged with economic mechanisms that incentivize supply and demand to drive the price to $1.

In Ethereum, there are two types of addresses: the externally owned account (EOA) and an address of a contract account. Transactions sent to an EOA can only transfer ETH.1 In Bitcoin, all addresses are EOA. In Ethereum, when data is sent to a contract account, the data are used to execute code in that contract. The transaction may or may not have an accompanying ETH payment for use by the contract.

The gas price is determined by the market and effectively creates an auction for inclusion in the next Ethereum block.

Fungible tokens are a cornerstone of the value proposition of Ethereum and DeFi. Any Ethereum developer can create a token divisible to a certain decimal granularity and with units that are all identical and interchangeable.

Burning a token means removing it from circulation and can be done in two ways: (1) manually send it to an unowned Ethereum address; or (2) even more efficiently, create a contract that is incapable of spending it. Either approach renders the burned tokens unusable, although the decrease in circulating supply would not be "known" by the token contract.

When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, 'Okay, this thing is too good to be true.' As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good - fundamentally, completely sound.

Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.

If you look at the market cap of Ethereum before the hard fork and the split into Ethereum Classic, the combined market cap of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic is greater than the market cap before the split - and everybody got what they want.

Working on Ethereum could be similar to working at a Google: lower risk with broad impact right away. Working on a token is similar to working on a startup: higher risk and lower initial impact but higher upside potential.

Working on a token is similar to working on a startup: higher risk and lower initial impact but higher upside potential. How core protocol work is best funded beyond the initial Ethereum Foundation endowment is an open question, but likely further out.

When you drill down, blockchains are really a shared version of reality everyone agrees on. So whether it's a fully immersive VR experience, augmented reality, or even Bitcoin or Ethereum in the physical world as a shared ledger for our 'real world,' we'll increasingly trust blockchains as our basis for reality.

Today Ethereum is the second-longest and fastest-growing public blockchain. The