
Decentralising the Internet: Ethereum
Post By Saksham Garg on 03-April-2016
After the phenomenal success of Bitcoins, no other cryptocurrency has been able to catch up with it. Well, up until now. Enter Ethereum. Apart from being a virtual currency, it also paves way for establishing online markets and have transactions carried out with the help of smart contracts and blockchains. Ethereum was created and developed by a 21 year old Vitalik Buterin in August 2015 after he dropped out of Waterloo University.
Ethereum provides a way to move information from one place to another more swiftly. It aims to remove the role of middlemen in such transactions, thereby saving time as well as money. The system is built using blockchains, such that each member of the blockchain keeps a check of the data being transferred, rather than a single authority. This will indeed bypass banks and other middlemen thus making the process faster and cheaper and causing a decentralisation of the internet.
Although it has gained enormous popularity, especially among tech giants Microsoft and IBM, there is still a lot of speculation about its security. Experts believe that due to its excessively complicated structure, Ethereum might be prone to more attacks. It’s still too soon to say if it will ever catch up to Bitcoin or fade away, but one thing is for sure, Ethereum has definitely created a new era of cyptocurrency which that is here to stay.