Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 143

Ethereum may be one of the most complex blockchains ever built. It has several of its own Turing-complete programming languages (full-functioning programming languages that allow developers to create any application). These new programming languages closely resemble popular programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. The Ethereum protocol can do just about anything that your regular programming languages can do. The exception is that the code is written to the Ethereum blockchain and has the added benefits and security that come with that. If you can imagine a software project, it can be built on Ethereum.

The Ethereum ecosystem is currently the best place to build decentralized applications. It has lovely documentation and user-friendly interfaces that get you up and running quickly. Rapid development time, security for small applications, and the ability for applications to easily interact with one another are key characteristics of this system.

The Turing-complete programming languages are the main feature that makes the Ethereum blockchain vastly more potent than the Bitcoin blockchain for building new programs. Ethereum’s scripting language makes programs like Twitter applications possible in a few lines of code, as well as extremely secure.

Smart contracts, like the one you create in Chapter 3 of this minibook, can also be built on Ethereum. (You can find out even more about smart contracts in Book 4, Chapters 7 and 8.) The Ethereum protocol has opened up a whole new genre of applications. You can take just about any business, government, or organization’s processes and build a digital representation of it inside of Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum’s platform is being used to manage digital assets (a new class of asset that lives online and may represent a whole digital asset such as a Bitcoin token or a digital representation of a real-world asset such as corn commodities), financial instruments (like mortgage-backed securities), records of ownership of assets such as land, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Ethereum has also sparked a major global fundraising effort by start-ups that used the ERC token standard to raise capital to build their innovations. Ethereum has opened a new way of organizing business, nonprofit, and government. It has made it possible to hold, share, and trade value without ever meeting the other party or using a third party to facilitate. The code does the work.