At 16:26:28 on 30 July 2015, something happened that changed our digital world. It was the genesis block for Ethereum [here]:
It had a massive reward of 5 ETH. It followed the release of Bitcoin on 3 January 2009 [here]:
Ethereum aimed to overcome the weaknesses of Bitcoin, and which takes around 10 minutes for a block to be created, and uses Proof of Work (PoW). With PoW, a consensus is created with miners aiming to find the nonce value for a block, and then they are rewarded with minted coins. Unfortunately, it requires a great deal of miners to compete, and each of these uses GPUs, which guzzle energy. Ethereum brought a Proof of Stake (PoS), where miners are trusted based on the good work they have done in the past, and for staking funds into the network. This approach considerably enhanced the efficiency of the computations.
Basically, Ethereum adopted the usage of the ECDSA signature of Bitcoin, where someone has an elliptic curve key pair (a private key and a public key). Anyone can create their own…
