Vitalik Buterin published a white paper that introduced Ethereum in 2013. The Ethereum platform was launched in 2015 by Buterin and Joe Lubin, who later founded the blockchain software company ConsenSys. The founders of Ethereum are said to be one of the earliest individuals who could decipher the possibilities of blockchain outside the realm of cryptocurrency.
The hard fork
The hard fork or split is quite a notable event in the history of the Ethereum blockchain. In 2016, some participants gained majority control of the blockchain to steal north of $50million USD worth of ETH, raised for the project DAO. The accepted solution by the majority of the Ethereum community was to reverse the theft by invalidating the existing Ethereum blockchain and accepting one with a revised history.
However, a small fraction of the community chose to maintain the original version of the Ethereum blockchain. Thus, the unaltered version of the network permanently split to become the ETC or the Ethereum Classic.
Today, the ether cryptocurrency is the second-largest in the world according to market value, right behind bitcoin in both market share and popularity.
Ethereum vs Bitcoin
Ethereum is often compared to Bitcoin. While the two cryptocurrencies do seem quite similar they are a number of differences between them.
Ethereum can be considered more efficient simply because it hosts an electronic and programmable network with a variety of applications. On the contrary, the bitcoin blockchain was created solely for the bitcoin cryptocurrency. So, basically, the Ethereum blockchain aims to truly capture the possibilities of blockchain but the bitcoin blockchain is only concerned with the cryptocurrency.
Another difference is that bitcoin has a limit. There can be at max 12 million bitcoins in the world, however, ETH has no such limit, although the time invested to mine one block does put a limit to how much ether can be mined in a year.
Talking about similarity, both Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains consume a lot of energy and use the proof of work protocol. Proof of work is a method that demands a lot of computing prowess to validate transactions and mine new coins. Ethereum however, is trying to operate using proof of stake, which is a validation technique that needs much less energy.
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