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The Elysian Fields of Ethereum
Could we be on the threshold of techno utopia?
If the implications of blockchain’s potential come to fruition and create a juster, fairer society, the innovations baked into Ethereum will be thought of as the inflection point.
Blockchain’s potential to facilitate more than payments became more apparent with the creation in 2015 of the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain stores and records lines of computer code, including entire programs, which are visible to all.
This innovation enables the creation of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executing agreements in which a chain of actions follows when certain conditions are met. These are automatically enforced and tamper proof.
This math-based tamper-proof quality removes third-party and counterparty risks.
You must pay a fluctuating “gas” fee in ether to verify a transaction on the Ethereum network. That is the incentive like Bitcoin’s miner payments. Gas fees fluctuate based on the network traffic and capacity.
The Ethereum blockchain is designed to store lines of code. It and others like Cardano and Avalanche, issue and use their own tokens. Ethereum’s is called “ether.” Cardano’s is called “ada” and Avalanche is named “avax”.
Ada is a nod to the proto-computer scientist Ada Lovelace who created the first computer in the 1850s with Charles Babbage. She was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron.
Cardano is also a reference to a famous mathematician Gerolamo Cardano. These references point to the math-based nature of cryptocurrencies.
Think of money as having three eras through history as we have evolved. The first is commodity-based currencies like gold and silver. The second is government-based fiat currencies like the dollar, euro, and yen. Governments and guns back these fiat currencies. The third era we entered a decade ago is math-based currencies: cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum is the second generation of blockchain. Bitcoin was the first and is based on using the blockchain…
