Other concepts

Since Ethereum is built on top of Bitcoin, many of the basic concepts were already discussed in Chapter 1Introduction to Blockchain Technology. For the rest of this subsection, we briefly cover a few of them with a focus on the key differences.

  • Consensus algorithms:
    • Like Bitcoin, PoW is its consensus algorithm. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum is working on switching to another consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Stake (PoS) to significantly improve performance with its next release tag of serenity.
  • Private blockchain:
    • In general, both Bitcoin and Ethereum are public blockchains since the network is open to anyone and a node can join freely.
    • Ethereum has variants on private chains. With private Ethereum, a node needs approval ...

Get Blockchain Quick Start Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.