Binance: Supported pairs are ETH/BTC Bitfinex: Supported pairs are ETH/BTC KuCoin: Supported pairs are ETH/BTC The ETH, ETC split, The DAO, and The Hack
The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (known as The DAO) was made on the Ethereum blockchain to act as a Venture Capital Firm-owned and operated by no one.It was supposed to work on the basis of smart contracts which were executed using DAO tokens.
It launched with $150 million in crowdfunding in June 2016.
Immediately after the launch, it got hacked.
DAO tokens worth US$60 million were drained out by hackers due to a faulty code of DAO.
Then soon after that, a Hard Fork was implemented on the Ethereum blockchain at Block 192000 to refund the loss of DAO token holders.The Hard Fork made the hacked transaction invalid, and a new version of the blockchain was formed.
Hence, ETC (Ethereum Classic) was born.
Ethereum Classic’s blockchain is the same in every way with Ethereum’s until Block 192000, where the hard fork was applied.
Users who did not support the hard fork idea continued to mine on the old version of the blockchain without upgrading its version.
Since then, both communities have diverged based on the version of blockchains they are using.ETC (Ethereum Classic) is traded on an exchange platform and offers the same functionality of decentralized apps and smart contracts.
Ethereum Use-Cases: Bringing Science Fiction to Real Life
At the start of this article, we saw how exciting services like Uber could become if made decentralized on the Ethereum platform.
Similarly, there are a few such rapidly growing use-cases of Ethereum that are being developed.
A few are:
Golem is the world’s first decentralized and open-sourced supercomputer developed on Ethereum that anyone can use.
This computational power is made available from the contribution of small personal laptops to giant data centers.
As a user of this platform, you can run a website, calculate a difficult computational problem, or run along code using additional computational resources.
You can even run miners using this computational resource and mine cryptocurrencies.
It opens the possibility of an economy which shares computing power wherever unused.
Through this, anyone can make money ‘renting’ personal computers.
Brass Golem , presented by Golem, is the first practical application which makes computer graphics computation a lot faster.The Universal Sharing Network: Rent, sell or share anything.
66% of the world is willing to share their assets for financial gain.
Slock.it is developing a shared economy through its trademark products, which makes all underused things available for renting purposes.
It makes the interaction of physical objects such as apartments, vehicles, offices, etc.possible with smart products programmed on the Ethereum blockchain.
Let’s take something like Airbnb: Accommodations could become entirely automated using smart objects (such as smart lockers) which are programmable on Ethereum and would work with one click of a smartphone.uPort
uPort is an open-source, user-friendly system to establish a global, unified, and sovereign identity system for people, businesses, organizations, devices, and bots.
Imagine a use-case where you are receiving your parcel from a DHL or FedEx drone which is built on an Ethereum smart contract.
It will hand over the package at your specified time and will verify your identity with the uPort’s blockchain.
What an incredible application that would be!!! SingularDTV
SingularDTV is the world’s first decentralized television series and royalty management platform.
In this system, entertainment rights and funds are distributed among the creators, writers, investors, crew, and actors without any fraud.
As this has no centralized party, the funds of any contributor cannot be confiscated.
All get paid as the execution and delivery of funds are coded into the smart contracts, and most importantly, there are no third parties involved.
The ecosystem is based on the Ethereum blockchain, and users use crypto tokens (known as Singles) to drive the DTV ecosystem.EtherTweet
This is a microblogging service running on the Ethereum blockchain.
It is a microblogging site like Twitter (which also allows up to 160 characters), but it is entirely decentralized, running on the Ethereum blockchain.
Content is shared, created, and removed without any censorship as it simply runs off of the blockchain.Publishers can earn Ether if their content is upvoted.Bitcoin vs.
Ethereum
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Bitcoin is digital money.The Bitcoin blockchain only stores and handles all past transactions since the very start of its network.
This ensures easy accounting and transfer of value (i.e.money).
But the Ethereum blockchain, apart from handling accounts and transactions, also stores programming logic.
Here’s an example: On the 8 th of May, transfer $Y from A’s account to B’s account if A’s account has more than $X.If not, don’t transfer $Y to B’s account.
And these types of codes, once executed, are stored historically on the Ethereum blockchain forever.This helps to understand future decision-making processes.
Ethereum is different from Bitcoin mostly because with Ethereum, you can not only transfer money (i.e.Ether), you can execute smart contracts.
There are a lot of real-world scenarios where we trust third parties, middlemen, and escrow agents to enforce the transaction.
In this way, they all earn their cut.With Ethereum, such parties will become useless as the technology matures.Some of these are Uber (which I explained during the introduction of this article) , freelancing platforms like Upwork, Insurance Agents, Escrow agents, eBay, and Airbnb (to name a few).
If a replica of these above applications is made on the decentralized Ethereum platform, it will result in the following advantages and a positive disruption of each industry: Elimination of the possibility of a single point of failure or control.
Remove traction and make the process faster.Reduced cost as the middlemen will be removed.
And while Ethereum is fundamentally different from Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin are not competitors.They coexist and solve different types of problems in the real world and both open up a possibility for a new future.
Future of Ethereum: More Than Money
The future of Ethereum is not only bright as a digital currency, but also as a platform to run smart contracts and DApps.
It is accelerating the migration from a centralized economy to a decentralized, borderless, and permissionless global economy.
Decentralized applications would positively disrupt and change industries such as finance, entertainment, real estate, academia, insurance, healthcare, the public sector, and social media.
Just as the inventors of the internet had no idea that in a couple of decades social media and cloud computing applications would emerge, we don’t have any clue what sort of applications will eventually emerge out of the Ethereum blockchain.
After the DAO hack, the future looks promising for Ethereum.In terms of volume, Ethereum has already become the most traded cryptocurrency of 2017.
Shortly, the prices of Ethereum will probably rise.References
Ethereum is constantly growing and innovating.Whatever I have shared with you is only the tip of the iceberg.
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