The World Of Cryptocurrency Is Dominated By The Entity Which Started It All: Bitcoin

The world of cryptocurrency is dominated by the entity which started it all: Bitcoin. It is the oldest, most valuable, and [


Can Bitcoin Scale for the World?]Can Bitcoin Scale for the World? be bought through exchanges or digital wallets
What is Ethereum?Ethereum is a network founded in 2015 by Russian-born Canadian Vitalik Buterin, who also started Bitcoin Magazine as a teenager and had written the white paper on it two years earlier.
Like Bitcoin, currently with a market capitalisation of over £452.4billion, Ethereum is decentralised, so it does not require a central bank or financial institution to issue it.
Both use blockchains, the digital ledger technology where transactions are recorded and validated using a peer-to-peer network of computers rather than a single organisation.
What are the main differences with Bitcoin?Simon Peters, a cryptocurrency analyst at eToro, says Bitcoin has a single goal: 'To become a global decentralised digital currency' that can be used as a form of payment in shops and accepted by businesses.
Ethereum on the other hand is a decentralised computer platform. Ether is the technology's actual currency and can be purchased through both centralised and decentralised exchanges, or digital wallets.
Ethereum hosts 'decentralised applications' or Dapps, where people can use Ether to pay for services such as finance, social media, and gaming. 
Bitcoin is a much larger virtual currency than Ethereum, with a market cap of £452.4billion
What can Ethereum be used for?A primary function of Ethereum is as a host of 'smart contracts.' Running on the platform's blockchain, they resemble regular contracts, but lack middlemen like lawyers to oversee them.
Take an example of someone seeking to raise money for an animal welfare charity. On a crowdfunding website like Kickstarter, they would set a fundraising target and hope people donate enough money to hit that goal. When the target is hit, Kickstarter then pays out.
With a smart contract, there is no third-party facilitator whom the fundraiser and the donors trust to pay out once the target is reached. Instead, a payout is made automatically once the target is achieved.
This is all enabled by the Ethereum Virtual Machine, something cryptocurrency firm Coinbase describes as 'like a giant, global computer made up of many individual computers running the Ethereum software' that allows programmers to operate the smart contracts.
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox money" data-version="2" id="mol-180a1e50-5654-11eb-bf8f-9dd438f0b43d" website Bitcoin: Number two crypto Ethereum is climbing faster