Cryptography brings a power to this decentralized network that transfers data - digital store of value (like gold)- or peer to peer connected. Ethereum has an additional feature which, smart contracts. Smart contracts allow for agreements without centralized intermediaries. Self-executing sets of instructions, without third parties.

Smart contracts need real world data. Blockchain oracles bring data into blockchain or execute some type of external computation. Hybrid Smart contract combine on and off-chain (external computation). Chainlink is a decentralized modular oracle network.

Smart contracts are decentralized. They have transparency and flexibility and there are no shady things. They have high speed and efficiency. They have high security, and they are immutable. They remove of Counterparty Risk. Lastly, they allow for trust minimized agreements.

Block explorer is an application that allows us to view transactions that happen on a blockchain. Etherscan is one of them.

Gas Price: Gas is a unit of computational measure. The more computation a transaction uses the more gas you must pay for. Every transaction that happens on-chain pays a gas fee to node operators.

Transaction fee: It is paid blockchain miners and validators. Gas used x Gas price

Gas price can be higher, so your transaction comes to happen as soon as possible. The higher gas price the more chance to happen quickly.

HASH algorithm: A function that computes data into unique hash. Ethereum runs on Keccak256 hash function. Bitcoin runs on SHA 256. Hash is a unique fixed length string to identify a piece of data.

Mining is the process of finding the solution to the blockchain problem. Such as to find a has with four zeros at the beginning (shown as an example on a youtube video). Nodes get paid for mining blocks. Block is A list of transactions mined together.

Nonce: A “number used once” to find the “solution” to the blockchain problem. It is also used to define the transaction number for an account / address. Back to main page