Ethereum is a term you’ll often hear when researching cryptocurrencies. At Ethereum.org, it’s described as the “blockchain app platform“. So what does that mean?
In simple terms, Ethereum is the name of the network developers are creating applications on, these (decentralised apps or dApps) are called smart contracts. It uses the blockchain global ledger as storage, conceptually similar to a database.
As a side note, Ether is the name of the cryptocurrency, just like Bitcoin or Litecoin. Ether is used as a type of payment to nodes on the network, which is how most cryptocurrencies are earned, referred to as mined. It’s a lot to get your head around, and it’s a little more complex than this, but I hope this helps as a quick overview. I’ll be adding more resources on creating your own Ethereum applications in the future, it’s already being used in the real world to solve many interesting problems.
If you’re looking for more learning materials, check out the resources below.
Ethereum Explained Infographic
https://medium.com/@angelomilan/ethereum-explained-to-my-mom-infographic-673e32054c1c
(The link to the creators website is currently down, as is the printable PDF version, I’ll check back on this shortly)
Here’s a post on the Ethereum subreddit:
Explaining Ethereum to My Mom
Ethereum for Developers
If you’re looking for technical or developer documentation, this will point you in the right direction:
- https://www.ethereum.org/
- http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/introduction/
- https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki
- https://github.com/ethereum/solidity
We have a few articles on Solidity in the pipeline, you can subscribe to our email list here if you want to get notified when they’re live.
