Ethereum Blockchain App Platform

    Ethereum, an open source public blockchain based distributed computing platform for running smart contracts. A smart contract is an application that will run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference, this is possible thanks to its' distributed nature. In other words Ethereum provides a trust-less platform where the rules are unbreakable and data is fully encrypted.

    Before getting deeper into what Ethereum is, lets first address one of the problems Ethereum and other blockchain technologies are capable of solving.

    Today, our personal data, passwords and financial information are all largely stored on other people's computers – in clouds and servers owned by companies like Amazon, Facebook, or Google. The credit agency Equifax was hacked recently, a hacker was able to access their server and copy off the database containing the credit history for nearly every american. Again an entire database containing every american's social security number, name, address, job, etc.etc... has been stolen and access to it is being sold online for criminals to buy.

The Equifax Data Breach: What to Do | Consumer Information

    Given enough time all centralized system will be penetrated and that is a big problem, there is a single point of failure. It only takes one angry employee or that one machine that didn't get the security patch and entire systems can be compromised. With Bbockchain technology this can be prevented by removing trust from a central system or group of people and putting that trust into a system that is the combination of proven technologies applied in a new way. The particular combination of three technologies, the Internet, private key cryptography(OpenSSL and PGP) and a protocol governing incentivization (the rules in place that keep the participants honest by rewarding honesty and punishing cheaters).

    There's a pretty good chance that any centralized website/application can be compromised by a hacker or government which will then gain unwelcome access to your files without your knowledge, by influencing or attacking a centralized third-party service – meaning they can steal, leak or change important information.

    With centralized vs decentralized systems the difference that makes blockchain technology so useful is that it is an innovation in information registration and distribution that eliminates the need for a trusted party to facilitate the digital relationships. The work of securing digital relationships is implicit, supplied by the elegant, simple, yet robust network architecture of blockchain technology itself.

    With Ethereum we have a blockchain system running apps called smart contracts, it is basically an operating system on the internet that anyone can write an application for. The centralized systems like data-centers are replaced by thousands of nodes(computers) run by volunteers from across the globe thus forming a world computer. The nodes can run modest hardware such as a decent laptop, and at the moment the primary requirements are a good internet connect some hard-drive space to operate.

    Running a node is not required to be able to interact with the platform. Running a node does provide the highest level of security though, as you are able to verify transactions on the network with 100% certainty. The node software also available with a GUI application and supports generating a wallet to ether and Ethereum based tokens and browsing Ðapps (decentralized applications). A user does not get rewarded ether for running a node at the moment only miners get rewarded for their contribution to the system.

    By running the Ethereum platform (a geth node) you are storing and transmitting the database of entries to other people running the software in a fashion similar to BitTorrent, in fact the creator of the BitTorrent protocol has been working on blockchain technology. The messages that are being transmitted consist of user transactions and the blocks that have been mined. Each block contains all the transactions that have been validated by miners for that blocks time period. There are currently over twenty-thousand nodes currently running globally all sharing the Ethereum blockchain, found this out by checking: ethernodes.org.

   Running a node is simple and at the time of writing consumes about 70GB of storage. The a couple different implementations of the Ethereum protocol,  there is a java version, c++ version and a go version. The go version is the called geth and is the recommended implementation to use. After it's installed just leave it running in the background.

    To interact with the Ethereum platform install Mist which is the tool of choice to browse and use Ðapps from a PC. Can also access the Ethereum platform from the Brave web broswser and google Chrome with the plugin Meta-Mask.

    It is possible to use a mobile device to interact with Ethereum with the toshi app released on android and ios. Have personally used toshi to interact with a Ðex (decentralized exchange) which is a Ðapps that let's users trade different coins and it worked pretty well, did not have any issues. These other coins are mostly going to be used to interact with the given blockchain utility that they provide.

Download the installer for the wallet or the browser Mist which includes the wallet from github.

https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
Download toshi for Android
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.toshi
Download toshi for iphones
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toshi-ethereum/id1278383455?ls=1&mt=8

   Hope this is enough information to pique your interest. When time allows will be writing about more Open Source blockchain technologies.