What Ethereum is and it’s possible future
According to the Ethereum website, “Ethereum is a technology that’s home to digital money, global payments, and applications.” –Ethereum Website
To run your car you need fuel and to run your application on the Ethereum network/platform you need Ethereum Gas. Ethereum Gas is a unit that measures the amount of computational effort to execute some operation(s) on the Ethereum platform. This means for any and every operation that happens on the Ethereum platform, like a smart contract execution or a transaction, the operation requires some amount of gas to execute. The price of Gas is determined by supply and demand. Gas prices are small fractions of Ether called Gwei. Ether or ETH is the currency of Ethereum although both are used interchangeably, they are different. So, ETH is just a unit of Ethereum Gas.
According to the Ethereum documentation, “Ethereum Gas refers to the fee required to successfully conduct a transaction on Ethereum. In essence, gas fees are paid in Ethereum’s native currency, ether (ETH). Gas prices are denoted in Gwei, which itself is a denomination of ETH — each Gwei is equal to 0.000000001 ETH (10–9 ETH).”- Ethereum Documentation
- Create Your Own Cryptocurrency:
You can create your own token on the network and it will be compatible with any Ethereum wallet on the Ethereum blockchain. As a matter of fact some popular tokens have been created on the platform like the Brave Browser token, Basic Attention Token (BAT). - Create Smart Contracts:
Essentially the platform is running on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and it is used for running smart contracts. These smart contracts represent financial agreements such as swaps, or coupon-paying bonds or options contracts, they also represent social agreements, and all sorts of legal agreements. As a matter of fact the European Investment Bank (EIB) plans to issue a two-year 100-million euro digital bond by using Ethereums smart contracts, with the sale to be led by Goldman Sachs. That’s a huge application on the Ethereum network. To create your own smart contract, here is a good article by codeburst. - Create Decentralized Applications (DApps):
Okay, so this probably should go under smart contracts, but DApps are essentially a website plus one or more smart contracts.
As of 5/21/2021 ETH is worth about $2,456.77 per coin. This price is of course lower than the ETH’s peak price. Crazy enough if you had invested just $1 USD about 5 years ago in ETH, then you would have approximately $2,000 USD today and had you invested about $1,000 USD about 5 years ago then you would be a millionaire today as that investment would be worth about $2,000,000.00 USD today. But as the old English phrase goes “hindsight is 20/20” which basically means that you can look back at a situation or an event and have a clearer understanding of it and how things could have been done better. Although you can’t change your past, you can change your future.
An interesting application of ETH are NFTs which stand for Non-Fungible Tokens. Blockchains like Ethereum, Flow, and Tezos all have their own different standards when it comes to supporting NFTs. According to Wikipedia, a NFT is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs are inherently smart contracts.
NFTs have been used for art, video, audio, gaming, sports, fashion, music, and basically anything that is digital. Anyone can create an NFT and make royalties off of the sell of those NFTs… forever. The majority of the current NFTs are on the Ethereum platform. Many people seem to be using NFTs as a collectable like how you would collect a sports card, or a Pokemon card. NFTs became a $250 million dollar market in 2020 and I don’t see that number going down anytime soon.
I know NFTs sound great, but there are some concerns like storage. NFTs are not stored on the blockchain because of its size and the token of ownership basically points to a web address that has the digital asset, so this means that the asset is still subject to link death (which is when a hyperlink no longer points to its original targeted file).
The Ethereum 2.0 Network (Eth2) is the next upgrade on the Ethereum platform/blockchain. It was created to make Ethereum more scalable, more sustainable and more secure.
The new network will be proof-of-stake instead of the current proof of work. Which should improve its security against 51% attacks (meaning if someone controls 51% or more of the network then they can force fake changes on the blockchain). Staking or proof of stake will also be more sustainable, as it won’t be using computing power like proof of work. But their are arguments for and against both of these claims that I won’t go into here.
You can read more about Eth2 here.
So, do I think Ethereum is a good investment ? Absolutely ! With all of the development and improvements going on with this platform/blockchain as well as all of the applications, I see no reason why someone wouldn’t want to invest their time learning about this. But this of course is not financial advice, so be sure to do your own research before investing in anything.
ETH has definitely increased greatly in price over the years and has returned some good profits for many who have invested in it. Just so you know, it’s never to late to start investing. If you want to start an investment portfolio of your own, then sign up with WeBull using this link and get FREE stocks just for opening an account and funding it with an initial deposit of $100 or more! For a free stock trading app, I highly recommend it as they have helpful charts and tools for trading different assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies.
You can also use this link to get $10 worth of FREE bitcoin from BlockFi when you deposit $100 or more. BlockFi is a platform where you can get APYs just for holding crypto.
Thanks for reading this article I hope it was entertaining to you all! If you enjoyed this article and found it helpful please leave some claps to show your appreciation. Keep up the learning, and if you like finance, computer science, or programming please visit and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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