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Can someone explain in short what is it and what it does? It 'looks' exciting, but in excitement I cannot understand its full purpose.
by z3phyr 13y ago
Can someone explain in short what is it and what it does? It 'looks' exciting, but in excitement I cannot understand its full purpose.
- kylebrown 13y agoThe vision is that its a new platform for implementing crypto "contracts". The most basic contract is a simple send transaction. Multi-sig (m-of-n) addresses are another type of contract. Decentralized lotteries (think satoshidice 2.0) are another, and so on. In bitcoin, such contracts are implemented in "bitcoin script" - an assembly-like programming language with opcodes such as PUSH, POP, and CHECKSIG. So currently, if you want to write a bitcoin contract, you would have to hand-write it in this assembly language. Ethereum is a vision to provide a higher-level language for implementing contracts - ECLL (Ethereum C-Like Language) - which compiles down to the assembly-like opcode instructions of "ethereum script". It will supposedly also have more flexible ways to store data/state (in bitcoin script, a contract's state is encoded as spendable or unspendable inputs and outputs). In bitcoin, the central abstraction is the transaction: tx inputs and outputs are your memory address references. In ethereum, the central abstraction is the higher-level contract: your inputs and outputs are variables, and the ECCL compiler does the memory management and assembly opcodes.