Ethereum - ilya-khadykin/notes-outdated GitHub Wiki

Ethereum is a project of alternative judicial system (or related system) with contracts.

Advantages of Ethereum:

• user authentication using cryptographic signatures;
• completely configurable logic of transactions and changing states;
• resistance to DDoS;
• there is no single point of network failure;
• history of transactions is stored in a decentralized distributed database (blockchain)

Basic Concepts

Blockchain

Blockchain is a decentralized distributed database which stores information about all transactions in the system. This information is stored in a chain of blocks, each block can contain information about several transactions. Each block is dependent on the other block.

Blockchain can mean many things depending on context:

• system architecture (technology itself);
• distributed decentralized and trusted registry;
• protocol;
• database which copies are stored on computers participating in the system;
• peer-to-peer network in which all participants are equal and communicate with each other in certain order often stimulated by economic benefits.

Node

Node is a computer on which system client is installed. It verifies transactions and saves them in blockchain. Full node stores headers of all transactions in the system starting from the first one in the very beginning. The work is being done to create a lightweight client which can work without full copy of blockchain.

Miner

Miner is a node that not only stores full history of transactions, but also process transaction in the system and computes new blocks. To create new blocks miners have to solve computation intensive mathematical problem of finding a new hash which should satisfy certain conditions. For finding new hashes miner is rewarded by system tokens ("ether"). It stimulates participants maintain stable function of the system. Mining statistics can be found on http://ethernodes.org/