Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of fraud or third party interference.
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain. It means that developers can build applications on Ethereum.
These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.
The Ethereum blockchain tracks the state of every account, and all state transitions on the Ethereum blockchain are transfers of value and information between accounts.
All accounts have addresses which are used to send and receive transactions. Ethereum addresses are composed of the prefix “0x”, a common identifier for hexadecimal, concatenated with the rightmost 20 bytes of the Keccak-256 hash (big endian) of the ECDSA public key (the curve used is the so-called secp256k1, the same as Bitcoin).
In hexadecimal, 2 digits represent a byte, meaning addresses contain 40 hexadecimal digits. One example is 0xb794F5eA0ba39494cE839613fffBA74279579268, which represents the address for the contract representing the Ethereum Foundation treasury.
Accounts can be divided into two types: externally owned accounts (EOAs), and contract accounts. Both types of account can send transactions and have balance.
NOTE: WARNING: Ethereum tokens come in many different forms and can vary in value and quantity. It is important to thoroughly research the specific token you are interested in to understand the total number of tokens available, as well as their value. Investing in any type of cryptocurrency carries a significant degree of risk, so be sure to do your own due diligence before making any investment decisions.
An externally owned account has an ECDSA public-private key pair associated with it and stores data about transaction sent from and to it. A contract account, on the other hand, doesn’t have its own private key pair; instead it has bytecode that is executed by the network to perform its functions.
Contracts are like autonomous agents living on the Ethereum network, able to send messages to each other as well as doing computations and storing data on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Contracts are written in programming languages like Solidity or Vyper which can be compiled into bytecode that runs on Ethereum’s virtual machine.
The total supply of ETH is infinite because ETH is not a physical commodity like gold or oil which have a finite supply. The total supply of ETH comes from two sources: newly mined ETH and transaction fees collected by miners who confirm transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The block reward paid to miners is 5 ETH per block plus transaction fees paid by senders.
The transaction fees go to miners who confirm transactions on the Ethereum blockchain and they vary depending on how congested the network is. When there are more transactions than can fit into one block, users are willing to pay higher fees in order for their transactions to be included in the next block mined by miners.
The total supply of ETH will increase over time as more blocks are mined and new ETH is created through mining rewards paid to miners. However, this increase in supply will happen at a decreasing rate because after every millionth block mined (approximately every 4 years), the block reward paid to miners will be reduced by 50%.
This reduction in mining rewards ensures thatETH issuance follows an inflationary schedule whereby approximately 18 million ETH will be mined every year for eternity until around 2140 when approximately 100 million ETH will have been mined in total.
As you can see, there is no set amount of ETH tokens because new ETH tokens are created through mining rewards paid to miners who confirm transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The total supply of ETH will increase over time but at a decreasing rate until around 2140 when approximately 100 million ETH will have been mined in total.
8 Related Question Answers Found
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of fraud or third party interference. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum platform. It is used to pay for gas, a unit of computation used in transactions and other state transitions.
As of September 18, 2020, there were 10,363 Ethereum validators. This number has been steadily increasing since Ethereum launched in 2015. The vast majority of these validators are running on the Ethereum mainnet, but there are also a significant number of validators running on Ethereum testnets and private networks.
As of July 24, 2016, there were 5.6 million Ethereum addresses with a balance of Ether.1 Each address is associated with a unique private key, which is used to sign transactions.
2 Thus, there are at least 5.6 million Ethereum private keys in existence. It’s impossible to know the exact number of Ethereum private keys because it’s not possible to know how many addresses have been generated but never used. It’s also possible that some people have generated multiple addresses and/or private keys.
As of March 2018, there were a total of three Ethereum ATMs in operation worldwide. Two of these were located in the United States, and the other was in Canada. As Ethereum becomes more popular, it is likely that the number of ATMs will grow.
Ethereum tokens are digital assets that are built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. There are a variety of Ethereum tokens, each with its own unique purpose and use case. The most well-known Ethereum token is probably Ether (ETH), which is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain.
An Ethereum token is a digital asset that is used to represent ownership or a utility within a decentralized application (DApp) built on the Ethereum blockchain. Tokens are issued through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), which is a way for DApp developers to raise funds to build their applications. Each token has a specific purpose and can be used in different ways within the DApp.
As of July 2018, there are approximately 32 million Ethereum holders. This number has grown significantly since the early days of Ethereum, when there were only a few thousand holders. The growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, coupled with the rise in the price of ETH, has led to more and more people buying and holding Ethereum.
As of September 2018, there are over 27,000 Ethereum nodes active around the world, with the vast majority of them (24,000) located in the US. The number of nodes is constantly increasing as more people begin to run them. Each node represents a single point of failure for the network and so the more nodes there are, the more resilient the network becomes.
