What is Ethereum?
Ethereum is a revolutionary blockchain-based distributed smart contract platform. It provides a decentralised virtual machine that can execute p2p (peer-to-peer) smart contracts using ether.
- General White Paper, Technical Yellow Paper (pdf)
- Ethereum the world computer (video)
- Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum introduction at Devcon 1 (video)
- Joseph Lubin’s interview on building decentralized applications (video)
- BBC explains Ethereum (video)
- Techcrunch on Ethereum (video)
- ELI5 attempts, this one is pretty good 🙂
Where do I start?
You want to start by getting yourself set up with a wallet. You have a number of choices:
- Download the Mist Wallet
- Download the Parity Wallet
- Download the Harmony Wallet
- Install the MetaMask Chrome extension
- Use the client-side MyEtherWallet generator
- Secure your keys with Ledger Nano S or Trezor hardware wallets
Under the Ethereum Hood
Get Ether, write smart contracts, build DApps, and dive into Ethereum:
- Read a beginner’s guide to Ethereum (by Coinbase)
- Get the current week’s news in Ethereum or the DApp Daily
- Find out how to buy Ether or compute your GPU’s mining profitability
- Build your own crypto-currency with Ethereum
- Raise funds from friends without a third party
- Build a democracy on the blockchain
- Build your first DApp in ten steps
- Monitor the network status (mirror) and the gas price market
- Read the documentation (for Homestead)
- Check out some DApps, that run on Ethereum
- Learn Solidity, an Ethereum smart contract language
- Browse the Ethereum Ecosystem Business Directory
- Ask questions at Ethereum Stack Exchange
- Live chat with Ethereum developer teams on Gitter
- Join the Ethereum community chat on Discord
- Check out Ethereum Meetups in your area
More in-depth Knowledge:
The annual Ethereum Developer Conference (Devcon):
- Devcon 0 (Berlin, 2014) talks and videos
- Devcon 1 (London, 2015) talks and videos
- Devcon 2 (Shanghai, 2016) talks and videos
- Devcon 3 (Cancún, 2017) website and registration
Other conferences, workshops, meetups, or tutorials:
- European Ethereum Development Conference (EDCON)
- London Ethereum (meetup)
- Berlin Ethereum (meetup)
- Ethereum Core Developer Meetings (call)
- Building Ethereum DApps using Solidity (tutorial)
List of protocol updates and hard-forks:
- Olympic pre-release (Testnet, Chain #0 – May 9, 2015)
- Frontier public release (Ethereum Genesis, Chain #1 – July 30, 2015)
- Homestead (Block #1,150,000 – March 14, 2016)
- DAO Fork (Block #1,920,000 – July 20, 2016)
- Blog post, opposition at r/EthereumClassic
- DoS Fork (Block #2,463,000 – October 18, 2016)
- Spurious Dragon (Block #2,675,000 – November 22, 2016)
- Metropolis will be scheduled end of June, 2017 (to be announced)
- Serenity to be announced (2018)
List of public testnets:
- Olympic, pre-release public test network with ID #0 (replaced by Morden)
- Morden, Fontier-based public test network with ID #2 (replaced by Ropsten)
- Ropsten, Homestead-based public test network with ID #3 (recently revived)
- ConsenSys, Proof-of-Work public test network
- Kovan, Proof-of-Authority public test network (Parity only)
- Rinkeby, Proof-of-Authority public test network (Geth only)
