The No. 1 crypto to buy, if I had to choose, is ethereum.
I’ll tell you why I think it has such incredible potential. But please. Do
your own due diligence. As I’ll explain in the next Series, you shouldn’t
jump into any of these currencies without understanding what you’re buying.
Cryptocurrencies have a purpose. Politically, they are built to help you
gain independence of your life from institutional whim. You can cut out the
middlemen. Someone in Brazil can pay someone in Switzerland without
having to get permission from someone (or something) in New York City.
And furthermore, they’re just the natural evolution of money. An evolution,
as mentioned, theism to humanism to data-ism.
Bitcoin is the first sketch. We’re going to find in the coming years that
cryptocurrencies can do much more than just disrupt traditional banking
— they have the potential to change the face of every industry on Earth.
And I believe ethereum will lead the way.
ETHEREUM IS “BITCOIN 2.0”
Many ethereum fans call it “bitcoin 2.0.”
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of ethereum, doesn’t like it. He says it’s
like, “calling a smartphone a pocket calculator 2.0.”
Henning Diedrich, author of Ethereum, says it’s as wrong as calling
“a calculator factor a calculator 2.0, because one can program something
like bitcoin on top of ethereum.”
SMART CONTRACTS
Nick Szabo, an interdisciplinary legal scholar, is the father of smart contracts.
He wrote about them in the mid-’90s. Way before bitcoin. Way
before ethereum. I trust his definition of smart contracts:
“A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including
protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.”
The simplest form of a “smart contract” in cryptocurrency is a transaction
on the bitcoin blockchain.
• James owes Jerry money in the form of bitcoin
• James uses bitcoin code to send a transaction
• Jerry receives bitcoin transaction code per agreement
• Code contract is fulfilled.
But smart contracts can go much further than that.
For example, with the help of these “smart contracts,” according to
Vitalik Buterin, “Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and
trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges,
crowd-funding intellectual property and even smart property thanks to hardware
integration.”
THOUSANDS OF USE CASES
That said, there are thousands of potential use cases for ethereum.
Decentralized apps (dapps) could eat the world, run from the ethereum
network. Think about Airbnb and Uber, which have already revolutionized
their respective industries being run 100% P2P. Meaning, no middlemen to
speak of.
Imagine, too, YouTube and Facebook becoming P2P, where the users
get paid to show ads rather than a central commander sucking out all the
value. (Digital plantations.)
Think:
Contracts… assets… shareholder agreements… prediction markets…
voting systems… domain registries… Peer-to-peer finance… derivatives…
hedging… insurance… Escrows… decentralized storefronts (censorship-resistant)…
smart property… decentralized exchanges… savings accounts… wills…
intellectualproperty…
ETHER TOKENS ARE THE FUEL FOR THE NETWORK
Without going too deep into the weeds, ethereum tokens are the “gas”
fueling the ethereum network, an ecosystem of distributed applications.
It’s a way to incentivize developers to build efficient, clean apps
(wasteful code costs more ether) and that people are compensated for
helping to run the network.
The more applications built on the ethereum network, the more valuable
ethereum becomes. It’s the network effect on steroids.
And it just takes one killer dapp to make the ethereum network worth
it. But I think there will be many.
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How would you compare Ethereum to Litecoin?
I've been an ethereum proponent but it also has it's obstacles just like any other cryptocurrency but especially in terms of scalability since its smart contracts are on-block. I actually just wrote an article about another crypto you should check out as well called Aeternity
Thank u for sharing!
Good post !
Keep it up!!!
@cryptoinvestinfo
Thanks for stopping by.