In my previous post, we’ve gone over the high-level structure of blockchain and its attributes. This post covers Ethereum and explore how blockchain can be used not only for money transfer but also application development.

More Than Money

The idea behind Ethereum was proposed by Vitalik Buterin. He wanted to apply the idea of decentralization to build applications with a central authority in control. He first proposed to add a scripting language to Bitcoin but was later rejected. Later, Dr. Gavin Wood released the Ethereum yellow paper, covering the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) which is capable of executing smart contracts on the network.

Similar to blockchain, all computers across the Ethereum network have a full copy (ledger) of the application code and data. That means the platform can provide services at any time, without censorship or third-part interferences (however, this doesn’t necessarily mean extreme scalability nor low application response time).

Ethereum Architecture

To understand the high-level architecture of Ethereum, we compare it with the traditional client/server architecture. I really like Zastrin’s illustration.

Here is how a traditional client/server architecture looks like:

The main point is that the web application is deployed on centralized platforms or hosting...