Ethereum Explained ft. Preethi Kasireddy

I know that some people argue that 'it's too early' has been used for too long, but I think crypto is.... Even when I got in deeper into space in the 2016, 2017 timeframe, when people would ask me, 'How long do you think this whole thing will take to play out?'—I thought it was, like, 2 to 5 decades.'

The best way, I found, to learn anything in the space is really just to get your hands dirty—get a Metamask wallet, try to transact on Uniswap, try to use Aave, try to buy an NFT, try to sell an NFT ... It'll just make things click a lot faster for you rather than trying to read and make sense of things. And then you can go back after you play around and read things, and those things will start to make more sense to you, and you'll want to dig deeper into it.

You know, the 2017 ICO boom, yeah, 99% of the ICOs were crazy ideas and way out there, but when you actually look at them, I think a lot of them were just bad timing, but many of them were actually good ideas.

Rollups are really the scalability solution that, for example, Vitalik and the Ethereum core community is really embracing. Vitalik, I think he appreciated Polygon, but he didn't view it as the ultimate solution for scaling Ethereum, It existed, it met the need at the time, but he thinks rollups and sharding, which is another Ethereum scalability solution, are going to be the ultimate solutions.

On web3, all the data is still stored on the blockchain, and then you have centralized players that exist that are serving users through the data that exists on the blockchain. With web2, the centralized players exist, and they have their own proprietary database.

When you write your code in Solidity, and then you create a smart contract, and when someone interacts with that smart contract, something has to run that code. Something has to process that logic that you're running. And so, the EVM is what actually processes the logic that exists in smart contracts or any kind of transaction.

Really what Ethereum did was it created a blockchain where not only can you send money... Now, with Ethereum, you can also do all other types of transactions besides just payments.

Whatever you can do in a regular computer, technically you should be able to do on Ethereum.

I do think social networks are probably on the fringe of happening on the blockchain.

The Ethereum blockchain stores smart contract code and it stores the data that's associated with all the accounts on the Ethereum blockchain.

Polygon is basically a sidechain for Ethereum. A sidechain is just basically an alternative blockchain that exists that can communicate with the Ethereum blockchain.