Overview of blockchain and Ethereum

Here, we will provide a short overview of Ethereum and blockchain in general. We will have a little look under the hood so that you can get a better understanding of how Ethereum and blockchain make these great products—these great use cases that we've seen are possible.

Going from Bitcoin to Ethereum

Bitcoin was the first blockchain, but Bitcoin was only meant for payments. People started discovering that Bitcoin could be used for other scenarios; we call this Colored Coins. Bitcoin had a surprisingly open design and one guy, Vitalik Buterin, decided to start developing Ethereum on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. But, due to limitations in Bitcoin, Ethereum now has its own blockchain.

The following table shows the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum:

Bitcoin	Ethereum
Used for payments	Used for code and logic
It is a digital currency	It is a smart contract platform
Average block time/transaction processing time of 10 minutes	Average block time/transaction processing time of only 17.5 seconds
It is not Turing complete	It is Turing complete

Bitcoin and Ethereum are both blockchains. They both rely heavily on private/public-key cryptography, and even though Bitcoin is primarily a form of payment, both can be used to transfer value, although, with the Ethereum blockchain, value will be processed with logic. Both are completely immutable.

The following are the things to remember for blockchains:

• When something is in the blockchain, it's final. That means there's no rolling back of anything you do, so even with your code, you have to find special way to update it.
• Your private key is your digital identity, so don't lose it!
• Blockchain is not standalone; it's usually used in conjunction with other technologies, mostly frontend technology or backend technology.