DEV Community: Nishidh Shekhawat

Features of the Ethereum BlockChain and difference from Bitcoin

Nishidh Shekhawat — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 18:05:29 +0000

What is Ethereum (ETH)?

Ethereum is an open platform that enables developers to build and deploy decentralized applications such as smart contracts and other complex legal and financial applications. You can think of Ethereum as a programmable Bitcoin where developers can use the underlying blockchain to create markets, shared ledgers, digital organizations, and other endless possibilities that need immutable data and agreements, all without the need for a middleman. Released in 2015, Ethereum is the brainchild of the prodigious Vitalik Buterin, who saw the potential uses of Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology as the next steps in furthering the expansion of the blockchain community. Ethereum is now currently the cryptocurrency with the second highest coin market cap and is expected by some to surpass Bitcoin as both a valued investment and as the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.

The Ethereum Blockchain

Ethereum is based on Bitcoin's protocol and its Blockchain design but is tweaked so that applications beyond money systems can be supported.

Smart Contracts on Ethereum Blockchain

Smart contracts are applications that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This is a decentralized “world computer” where the computing power is provided by all those Ethereum nodes. Any nodes providing computing power are paid for that resource in Ether tokens.

Ethereum Virtual Machine

If you’ve tried developing a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, or have been in the space for a while, you might have come across the term “EVM”, short for Ethereum Virtual Machine. Virtual machines are essentially creating a level of abstraction between the executing code and the executing machine. This layer is needed to improve the portability of software, as well as to make sure applications are separated from each other, and separated from their host.

Decentralized Applications (DAPPS) on Ethereum Blockchain

A decentralized application (DApp, dApp, Dapp, or dapp) is a computer application that runs on a distributed computing system. DApps have been popularized by distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as the Ethereum Blockchain, where DApps are often referred to as smart contracts.

Ether (ETH)

Ether is the solution to the issue of payment—a digital asset-bearer like a bond or other security. You can call it the cryptocurrency of the ethereum network. ... According to ethereum.org, it should be considered as fuel for the apps on the decentralized ethereum network.

Economics of Ethereum Gas

The Ethereum blockchain requires Ethereum gas to keep itself running in the same way that a car needs gasoline to keep the lights on. All transactions on the Ethereum network cost a certain amount of gas, depending on the current demand for gas and the size and speed of the contract one is trying to execute. In this sense, running transactions over the Ethereum network is like driving a car; if you do not use enough gas, the transaction will not find its way from one party to another.

How is Ethereum BlockChain different from Bitcoin

While both the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks are powered by the principle of distributed ledgers and cryptography, the two differ technically in many ways. For example, transactions on the Ethereum network may contain executable code, while data affixed to Bitcoin network transactions are generally only for keeping notes. Other differences include block time (an ether transaction is confirmed in seconds compared to minutes for bitcoin) and the algorithms that they run on (Ethereum uses ethash while Bitcoin uses SHA-256).

More importantly, though, the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks are different with respect to their overall aims. While bitcoin was created as an alternative to national currencies and thus aspires to be a medium of exchange and a store of value, Ethereum was intended as a platform to facilitate immutable, programmatic contracts, and applications via its own currency.

BTC and ETH are both digital currencies, but the primary purpose of ether is not to establish itself as an alternative monetary system, but rather to facilitate and monetize the operation of the Ethereum smart contract and decentralized application (dapp) platform.

Ethereum is another use-case for a blockchain that supports the Bitcoin network, and theoretically should not really compete with Bitcoin. However, the popularity of ether has pushed it into competition with all cryptocurrencies, especially from the perspective of traders. For most of its history since the mid-2015 launch, ether has been close behind bitcoin on rankings of the top cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Explaining Blockchain Technology to Layman

Nishidh Shekhawat — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 05:02:19 +0000

Imagine two friends living far away and would like to transfer money using blockchain technology

The blockchain is a decentralized system of secure and trusted distributed databases

Which records and shares the transaction details across many nodes(computers) so that the data is not modified

Note: Blockchain was introduced to timestamp digital documents and prevent tampering of records.

In simple terms, a chain of blocks that contain information is called blockchain

When a transaction occurs, its related information is recorded into a block

What is Blockchain technology?

Blockchain is a distributed database of immutable records called blocks, which are secured using cryptography.

Note: Once the data is recorded in a blockchain, it cannot be modified.

What is a block?

A block is a record book which contains the details of transaction data. It consists of,

Hash of previous block: It holds the hash value of the previous block.
Transaction data: It contains the details of several transactions. Nonce: A nonce is a random value which is used to vary the value of hash.
Hash: A hash is a alphanumeric value which is used to identify a block.

Blockchain is revolutionizing the World

Decentralised computing:

The leasing out of CPU or storage in return for rewards issued in the form of a token.

Finance:

Instant and secure payments without the need for any financial institution.

Citizenship:

Identification information can be stored on the blockchain

Smart contracts:

A contract where execution is guaranteed once certain criteria has been met. This occurs without the need for a third party.

Advertising:

Advertisers can connect with users who have a keen interest in their products and services, and in return, reward the user with tokens.

Medical:

A blockchain for health records, which speeds up applications and medical procedures

Explaining Machine Learning to My Grandma

Nishidh Shekhawat — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 05:14:25 +0000

In order to do this, I won’t get too technical, but I will get in-depth into the topic and explain it in simple terms

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves.

Similar to humans, machine learning allows machines to learn from past experience to solve problems in the future.

How exactly do machines learn?

Machine learning algorithms learn from data to solve problems that are too complex to solve with conventional programming, there’s a lot of math and algorithms involved to help produce the desired results.

Machine learning uses many techniques some of them are :

Supervised learning - which trains a model/ on known input and output data so that it can predict future outputs.
Unsupervised learning - which finds hidden patterns or intrinsic structures in input data.
Semi-supervised machine learning - which falls somewhere in between supervised and unsupervised learning, since they use both labeled and unlabeled data for training
Reinforcement machine learning - which interacts with its environment by producing actions and discovers errors or rewards.

Neural Networks - Computer like a Brain!

Neural networks are the most popular way to get a computer to mimic a human brain.

Technology and the brain are very closely related in these days. Modern computer applications take into account the features of human brains to solve a problem.
A human brain functions through a network of neurons — or nerve cells — that interact with each other to communicate and process information based on which we see, hear, move, think, make decisions and generally function. The central nervous system and its network of neurons are at the heart of all the activity that happens in the body.

The Neural Network is constructed from 3 type of layers:

Input layer — initial data for the neural network.
Hidden layers — intermediate layer between input and output layer and place where all the computation is done.
Output layer — produce the result for given inputs. Each layer influences the next Deep learning is the name we use for “stacked neural networks”; that is, networks composed of several layers.

There are several kinds of artificial neural networks (ANN), some of them are:

Feedforward Neural Network (Artificial Neuron) - One of the simplest form of ANN.
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) - are applied in techniques like signal processing and image classification technique.
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN),Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) - found in text to speech (TTS) conversion models.
Modular Neural Network - have a collection of different networks working independently and contributing towards the output.

Why is machine learning important?

The importance of Machine Learning is deep-rooted in our day to day lives over the past few years, that we fail to identify them, like :

The heavily hyped, self-driving cars? The essence of machine learning.
Online recommendation offers such as those from Amazon and Netflix? Machine learning applications for everyday life.

Moving forward the application of Machine Learning is going to increase and as the data becomes more and more available, computational processing becomes cheaper and data storage become even more affordable, the ability to produce sound and highly accurate Machine Learning models would also be very conducive.