As of this week, I’ve been learning a lot about Ethereum. Ethereum is one of the most influential blockchain platforms in the world right now, and it is an open-source public blockchain platform with smart contract capabilities. In the Ethereum network, it provides a decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is single and standardized, and its state needs to be agreed by every user in the Ethereum network. Each node participating in the Ethernet network keeps a copy of the state of the EVM, and each user can also broadcast a request to the EVM to perform any computation, which is called a transaction request, and all transaction records and current state of the transaction request are stored on the blockchain. When the request is broadcasted, the remaining participants on the Ethereum network are involved in verifying, confirming, and performing the computation, which causes the change of the state of the Ethereum VM to propagate throughout the Ethereum network. Once a transaction request is verified as valid and added to the blockchain, it cannot be tampered with.
To complete a transaction on Ethereum, the transaction needs to be initiated by an externally held account to update the state of the Ethereum network. An externally held account is one that is operated and managed by a human rather than a smart contract. In the request transaction phase, the current request needs to be broadcast to the entire network, and in the next phase, the miner will execute the current transaction and propagate the change in state to the entire network. Gas refers to the amount of computational work required by miners to perform a specific operation on the Ethereum network, and since each Ethereum transaction requires computational resources to be executed, each transaction requires a fee, which is the gas fee. By charging for each computation executed on the network, it can effectively prevent participants from causing spam to the network.
I will continue to explore more about Ethereum and how to write programs using solidity.
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