How To Buy Ethereum USA (ETH)

Ethereum Price USD

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Ethereum (ETH)

Price

$ 1,850.58

What is Ethereum?

Nowadays, even people who are cryptocurrency illiterate know what the name Bitcoin stands for – the first and most popular digital coin to date. The same can’t be said of the second most prominent crypto asset, Ethereum, which although highly innovative, has attracted surprisingly less attention from the public.

So, why is it worth getting to know Ethereum?

First of all, it’s more than just another digital coin! Ethereum is an open-source platform launched in 2015, the brainchild of Russian-Canadian software engineer Vitalik Buterin. When the platform went viral, Buterin was only 21 years old!

His initial idea wasn’t to design a coin that was to compete against and topple Bitcoin. He wanted to show how the blockchain technology that was first developed with Bitcoin, can be used for more than just making online payments. He devised a new decentralized network and introduced its native currency ether (ETH). These coins can be spent and exchanged for other coins (same as bitcoins) or clients can use them to pay for Ethereum services like smart contracts and DApps.

The newly-introduced DApps or decentralized applications are Ethereum’s effort to replace the outdated client-server relationship model used by traditional applications. These apps have one central authority in charge of the platform that has ultimate control over the information collected by the app database.

For example, Facebook has more than two billion users worldwide and therefore has a huge database that’s stored on a server, and can easily sell this information to market companies. To prevent such things, Ethereum suggests storing the database on a blockchain, a digital ledger that stores data permanently and publicly. The blockchain is located on a multi-node network that can only be disrupted by external factors if they manage to overtake more than half of all the nodes.

Smart Contracts

A few years back, before smart contracts were introduced by Ethereum, the only way for you to sign a contract with another party was to use the help of an intermediary, i.e. a lawyer or a notary. This meant spending precious time dealing with paperwork and extra cash to cover for their services.

Thanks to Ethereum and its advanced blockchain technology, you now have the option to turn your contract into computer code and store it on the blockchain where it will remain publicly accessible. The code will include predetermined conditions to which everyone had agreed and that have to be met before the contract is executed automatically. This way, no one can be tricked and no condition can be sidestepped by either of the involved parties.

Once you set these conditions and translate them into codes, neither you nor any central authority or a third party will be able to change them, nor contribute with their biased tendencies in any way. Such entities will need to gain control over half of the multi-node network which is considered impossible.

Smart contracts are definitely the future for businesses, as they can help them drastically lower their administrative costs and save time on supervising operational processes (e.g. supply chains). Moreover, there’s no better way to avoid frauds and ensure transparency when recording property ownership, or even school and medical records for research purposes or to be viewed privately.

Who Created Ethereum?

Ethereum was created by Vitalik Buterin, a Moscow native whose family emigrated to Canada when he was six years old. His father, a computer scientist himself, was the one to introduce young Vitalik to Bitcoin and the world of crypto. His interest in the blockchain technology started to develop gradually, as he became more and more active in bitcoin chat forums.

In 2011, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and became its leading writer. He wrote for other crypto magazines and soon became an editor for Ledger. He wrote the whitepaper for Ethereum in 2013 and was awarded the Peter Theil fellowship in the following year. He used those $100,000 to bring his revolutionary idea for a decentralized platform to fruition.

Ethereum’s currency ether became the second most popular digital coin in the world and it’s currently worth around $280. The platform itself continues to leverage the blockchain potential for future inventions.

Cons of Ethereum

So far we’ve focused on the advantages of using Ethereum but we mustn’t overlook some of its drawbacks as well. As you already know, the platform and its blockchain are used for a variety of services, from completing money transactions and trading cryptocurrencies, to generating smart contracts, DApps, and building new tokens altogether.

The range of services, together with the platform’s current aim to switch from using the proof of work consensus method to the more advanced proof of stake method, inevitably slows down and overwhelms the whole network. Some people fear this could potentially result in Ethereum’s breakdown.

Another inconvenience is that Ethereum uses its own programming language, Solidity. The majority of developers aren’t familiar with this language which can lead to serious errors when writing the codes. Due to the irreversible nature of the blockchain, such mistakes could take forever to get fixed.

Ride The Wave

In the long run, Ethereum might challenge the usefulness and efficiency of some of the largest industries in the world by showing how their power can quickly shift to the masses.

If you want to stand a chance of making a profit, we advise you to keep your eyes wide open for the newest Ethereum inventions on the market. Try to be among the first ones to know of any applications to be built on its network. One such app is the original Unstoppable Domains that provide users with a domain for a decentralized website so as not to depend on any hosting providers.

Let’s wait and see what the future has in store for Ethereum!

We hope this article proved to be informative for you and made you think of Ethereum’s technology as highly promising. If you want to know how to buy Ethereum in Australia, or maybe buy Ethereum in Canada, feel free to check out our guides!