Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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ETH 2.0 – Proof of Stake
In its current form, Ethereum cannot compete with Fiat systems such as VISA. Here we come to the advent of ETH 2.0 or Ethereum 2.0. Eth2 refers to a series of upgrades to the Ethereum platform that are currently being worked on. The three main objectives of these upgrades are increased scalability, security and sustainability.…
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Ethereum`s Limitations
The most significant limitation of Ethereum – like with Bitcoin – is its scalability, which, as with Bitcoin, is hard to achieve without sacrificing decentralisation or security, Fiat currency achieves security and scalability but sacrifices decentralisation to do so. In contrast, Bitcoin achieves decentralisation and security but sacrifices scalability to do so. At the moment…
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Ethereum Ecosystem and Innovations
Since 2013, many decentralised applications have been built on Ethereum. The surrounding Ethereum ecosystem has grown to a market cap of over $140 billion. Famous decentralised applications include digital art marketplace Foundation and browsers such as Brave that let you earn cryptocurrency from browsing the internet. More recently, Ethereum has powered the explosion of the…
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Ethereum`s Unique Characteristics and Ecosystem
So how does Ethereum achieve these objectives? Ethereum was designed as a blockchain with a built-in ‘Turing complete’ programming language – called Solidity – that can be used to create smart contracts. All that ‘Turing complete’ means is that Solidity is a programming language capable of programming for any hypothetical computation. Thus, in theory, any…
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What is Ethereum
Ethereum is a blockchain-based system where anyone can build and securely deploy any digital service without going through a formal, centralised approval process – such as getting an App added to Apple’s App Store. It is the brainchild of Vitalik Buterin, a Russian born computer programmer, who was an early Bitcoin advocate, but thought it…
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What you`ll learn:
What you’ll learn: The origins of Ethereum Ethereum’s unique characteristics & ecosystem Ethereum’s limitations The proposed transition to Proof of Stake
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Lightning Network – Bitcoin`s killer Application?
By enabling the transaction to occur through payment channels rather than on-chain, the lightning network offers a potential way for bitcoin to address its scalability problem. People have likened this to what fiat currency did for gold, arguing that the lightning network could be bitcoin’s ‘killer application’. The analogy works when you think about it,…
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Illustrating Lightning By Example
We can illustrate the Lightning Network through a simple example. Bob wants to buy a coffee from a cafe. Bob opens a payment channel with the Cafe and deposits some BTC to create a balance sheet between them. When Bob buys a coffee the Cafe issues an Invoice via QR code which Bob pay through…
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Lightning Network: Channels and Invoices
The Lightning Network is an example of Layer 2 bitcoin service. It is an off-chain approach first formally proposed in a paper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja in 2015. The technology uses micropayment channels to scale the bitcoin blockchain’s capability by processing transactions more efficiently. Micropayment channels are opened between two parties looking to conduct a…
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Separating the Layers
The idea of Layer 2 is to build protocols or secondary infrastructure (e.g. the Lightning Network) that can interact with a fundamental base blockchain (Layer 1 e.g Bitcoin) but not be restricted by its scale limitations. This is where we make a clear distinction between on-chain (Layer 1) and off-chain (Layer 2). Transactions described as…
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