What is Ethereum? Mastering Ethereum for smart contract security

Dr. Gupta
2 min readFeb 1, 2023

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What is Ethereum Everything you need to know?

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
  1. Ethereum : open source, globally decentralized computing infrastructure, executes programs called smart contract
  2. Ether Coin purpose: not to be a digital currency payment network, utility currency to pay for use of the Ethereum platform as the world computer.
  3. Blockchain Characteristics : open , public, global, decentralized, neutral, censorship-resistant
  4. The Birth of Ethereum: Vitalik started in late 2013 and published yellow paper later Dr. Gavin joined and together launched the Ethereum in July 30,2015 ; the Frontier Block #0
  5. Ethereum Components:
  6. P2P network: run on ETH mainnet, addressable on TCP 30303, runs protocol DEVp2p
  7. consensus rules: general agreement has been reached
  8. transactions: network messages includes; sender, recipient, value and data payload
  9. state machine: processed by EVM, executes bytecode, EVM programs called smart contracts, written in solidity and compiled to bytecode for execution on EVM
  10. Data structures: ETH state stored locally on each node as database, contains the transactions & system state, serialized hashed data aka merkle patricia Tree
  11. Consensus algorithm: started with Nakamoto consensus moving to PoS codename Casper
  12. Economic security: currently PoW algorithm called Ethash, will drop and move to PoS
  13. Clients : Go-Ethereum (Geth) and Parity
  14. Turing Complete: Eth execute stored program in EVM, read and write data to memory UTM, can compute any algorithm with finite memory
  15. The gas : Turing completeness Halting Problem solution, EVM executes smart contract with a predetermined cost in units of gas, gas consumed by computation exceeds gas available in transaction EVM terminates execution prevents “infinite loops”- DoS attack
  16. gas only be bought with ether, ether sent along a transaction, purchase gas with acceptable gas price which is not fixed, computation is executed, unused gas is refunded back to sender of transaction
  17. DApp: smart contract + web user interface
  18. web3 : born by DApps, swarm P2P storage , whisper P2P messaging service

Mastering Ethereum by Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Dr. Gavin Wood (O’Reilly). Copyright 2019 The Ethereum Book LLC and Gavin Wood, 978–1–491–97194–9.”

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Dr. Gupta

ll Insomniac Doctor loves Terminal || #Security_Researcher #DayTrader || Learn and Earn || #Web3_Doctor || Rookie Smart Contract Dev & Security Researcher ||