It’s important to realize that our financial information, passwords and personal data is usually stored online on some server pertaining to large companies and businesses. The challenge we are dealing with right now is that those companies can access our data whenever they want. What we need to do is to find a way to store our data secure and that’s where Ethereum comes into play.
Ethereum is designed with the idea of helping people keep data in a decentralized system that’s fully autonomous and which no one controls. The great thing about having such a system is that there’s no point of failure, you don’t have to worry about it getting damaged or someone hacking it or turning it off. That’s what really sets Ethereum apart, the fact that that it’s decentralized and you can access all of its features without security problems.
Background
The idea behind Ethereum was published in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin in late 2013. Then around 30 people wanted to discuss with him about the project and how something like this would work. The project was announced next year, and then the team decided to have a crowdsale of Ether. That’s the native token used by the Ethereum network and the idea was to fund the development.
What made Ethereum unique at that time was the fact that it was able trade more than just simple cryptocurrencies. The crowdfunding campaign mentioned earlier managed to generate more than $18 million to fund the project. In 2015 there was the first live release of Ethereum, which was named Frontier at that time. It was a huge success, a lot of people believed on the platform and nowadays you will notice there are hundreds of developers attached to the project.
The development team behind Ethereum wants to create this platform as a solution for those situations where the blockchain doesn’t have a specialized system that it can use. There were some challenges related to Ethereum, for example in 2016 around $50 million in Ether was stolen by an anonymous hacker and a lot of people started to question just how secure the platform really is. This was a low point in the history of Ethereum, but it’s safe to say that they improved the security and there were no severe issues like that since then.
Other than that, it’s important to realize that Ethereum is dealing with price fluctuations just like any other cryptocurrency. It’s interesting to see how everything comes together here and how incredible Ethereum really is at this time. It’s certainly interesting to note that there are 2 Ethereum blockchains, the regular Ethereum and the Ethereum classic.
While Ethereum is a rather young platform, it still has lots of merits and incredible ideas. It’s very interesting, it pushes the boundaries with innovation and value, and it definitely brings in front a very good attention to detail. Plus, the promises related to grow, value and success really go to show just how amazing this platform has the potential to be in the long run!