More than any other, Ethereum is a developer’s blockchain, built by developers for developers (link)
There’s little opportunity for “bike-shedding,” an expression that means holding up development by arguing over minor details such as how to build the bicycle shed at the back of a nuclear power station (link)
The founders worked for years, building and refining the vision. And on July 30, 2015, the first Ethereum block was mined. The world’s computer started serving the world. (link)
Ethereum’s purpose is not primarily to be a digital currency payment network. While the digital currency ether is both integral to and necessary for the operation of Ethereum, ether is intended as a utility currency to pay for use of the Ethereum platform as the world computer. (link)
Solidity offers a special type of function called a function modifier. (link)
Nevertheless, as you will see, the most widely used language for smart contracts (Solidity) is imperative. (link)
That operation costs “negative gas,” (link)
However, a contract can be “deleted,” (link)
Transactions are atomic, (link)
is also worth noting that smart contracts are not executed “in parallel” (link)
Contracts never run “on their own” or “in the background.” (link)
Importantly, contracts only run if they are called by a transaction. (link)
In this book, we use the term “smart contracts” to refer to immutable computer programs that run deterministically in the context of an Ethereum Virtual Machine as part of the Ethereum network protocol—i.e., on the decentralized Ethereum world computer. (link)
you can convert it to decimal on the command line with a little bash-fu: $ echo $((0x430e23400))
18000000000 (link)
These upgrades also cleaned up the blockchain by removing some 20 million empty accounts created by spam transactions. (link)
Vikram: [Does this mean that it's possible to alter the blockchain?]
These upgrades also cleaned up the blockchain by removing some 20 million empty accounts created by spam transactions. (link)
Quick Glossary (link)
from (link)
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In the contract’s initialization (constructor) function we set the totalSupply to be equal to _initial_supply (link)
Vikram: [Why underscore at the end?]
Wikipedia says: “In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable.” (link)
For example, multiplying two large prime numbers together is trivial. But given the product of two large primes, it is very difficult to find the prime factors (a problem called prime factorization). (link)