Second on the list of cryptocurrencies with the highest market value, ether is one of the most popular virtual currencies. He and his blockchain, Ethereum, have gained quite a lot of popularity in the community, but they also have their problems. Learn more about this cryptocurrency and its blockchain in the next paragraphs.
Table of Contents
How did Ethereum and ether come about?
The document presenting Ethereum was introduced in January 2014 by Gavin Wood, co-founder of the blockchain platform along with Vitalik Buterin, another co-founder currently active in the community. Together with Ethereum, the cryptocurrency ether was created to work with the various blockchain applications.
Ethereum and its cryptocurrency, ether, at first, have several similarities with bitcoin. The difference is that in the ether community the focus is more on the development of the Ethereum blockchain platform, and not so much on the growth and speculation of ether, the cryptocurrency that is platform fuel.
What’s Ethereum and ether for?
In this way, Ethereum is made to work with the various ideal blockchain applications that we have already explained here, such as smart contracts, crowdfunding, autonomous organization and other decentralized applications. Then the ether comes in to finance mining and pay, for example, smart contracts.
In the same way as bitcoin, transactions and all other applications are registered on the blockchain. To ensure that the records are true, users must mine the blocks with the classic proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism, offering their processing power to solve complicated cryptographic problems. Rewards are paid in ether.
However, the PoW mechanism is expected to change sometime in 2018 or 2019. A big problem with Ethereum today is scalability, since blockchain cannot process many transactions per second. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder, has already acknowledged that this is ethereum’s number one problem and is working on a fix, called Casper, which should introduce another consensus mechanism in Ethereum. But it’s going to take a while.
How to mine ether?
As there are many people mining ether, it is very common for users to enter a mining pool,in which several people come together to use the processing power of everyone to validate a block. Then the reward is divided appropriately for each. The best known tools are MinerGate, AntPool, and ViaBTC.
You can also do cloud mining,where you finance the hardware of a company that specializes in mining and then receive a percentage of what has been mined. As the name implies, you do not use your computer; what you paid for is used to invest in more equipment. The best known solutions are Genesis Mining, Eobot and ViaBTC.
How to buy ether
Although ether is the second largest cryptocurrency today, with a market value of over $310 billion, many exchange offices offer the purchase of ETH only with bitcoin (BTC) or dollar (USD). The largest are: Binance, OKEx, Bitfinex, GDAX and Poloniex.
Know the difference between Ether and Ethereum
Ethereum is the blockchain platform and Ether is the crypto-fuel or cryptocurrency that thrives over it. Only Ether can be bought & sold and not Ethereum. Ethererum has several applications but Ether only has one, which is to allow blockchain operations.
