I explained Ethereum to my brother

My brother is a smart boy. He’s interested in things like parties, cars, girls, etc. See, there’s nothing connected with software but I really wanted to share with him what I learned about blockchain, so he hasn’t so much choices than to listen to me.

Consider myself as a node from the blockchain. I have features — I have money, I can give and receive money, I can hold some info (for example how I want you to spend my money, so practically there are rules).

Lets say you are another node. You have features too and rules to follow. Everything will be good as we follow the rules we agreed to follow.

You wouldn’t go to the market if you don’t receive money from me because you’re stubborn but we’d call this — feature.

This thing — giving you money and receiving by you is a transaction. We form a chain.

But! You dropped some part of them, remember? That’s the so called Gas of Ethereum. Every transaction costs something. :)

So, what can be go wrong until this point?

That, my brother, is like 51% attack. We are two nodes and if you decide to lie I can’t guarantee you lied to me, so blockchain is crashed. However, blockchain works with a lot more nodes. Our network difficulty is not so difficult. The more blocks and more difficulty — the more trust. So in our case you can have all my money. It depends of our human trust and that’s not trustful, get it?

And lets say that the woman on the market is another node (we’ll name that woman Nelly). Lets say you get there. And you ask for popcorns. They have, so you buy. This is another transaction. From you to Nelly. With the money I gave you. You have memory and you hold information about the past transactions. :) Our blockchain is growing. Nice. Now you buy yourself a waffle.

What can go wrong at this point?

Less money — nothing to buy, that’s easy. The transaction with Nelly is not going to happen. The block with this transaction is not going to the blockchain. If there’s no popcorns you can lie to me again, but (!) if Nelly is my friend and she tells me about your lie, you burn, we work. The blockchain can’t be crashed. One is less than two, right?

When you buy yourself waffle is kind of reward for your effort. Blockchain has something about that nodes who work and put effort. And the cutest part is you’re not just a node. You’re a miner!

Now you’ll ask me if there’s some remainder of the whole sum — no. Lets say no, lets say I know how much popcorns and waffle costs (and I put some money for you to drop on the ground :)). Otherwise giving me the remainder means we talk about how Bitcoin works.

So where from this money came? I don’t have a work and I don’t earn money. Here the money we can say are Ethers — the cryptocurrency of Ethereum. And you see — Ethereum is like the world biggest computer!

But we relate on human trust (for me — to not change the rules, and for you — to follow them). See, human trust is a nasty thing. That’s my brother is where smart contracts comes in handle.

Related posts:

I have been exploring this world a little in the last few months and would like to share some nice stuff about the Rust API for Solana. It has been being a good starting point for me. This…

In the world before the fear we walked like lions. In a pride. Not any more. If you listen carefully you can hear the beating heart of loneliness.

Many people are concerned that rising costs may eat into their savings as inflation reaches its greatest level in three decades. As the cost of everything from microchips to bed linens rises, the…