Wall Observer/Research ETH/BTC - Ethereum price movement tracking & discussion

In case anyone was wondering how exactly Ether will be used on the Ethereum platform: lets peek under the covers...in order to power the decentralised web, Ethereum cannot possibly rely on any centralised authority (because that authority could manipulate the database). Instead, every node that participates on the network holds a copy of a decentralised database, which they audit.

The network nodes process the code that is being executed in the database and come into agreement as to what the correct state of the database is through a vote. Majority always win the vote, and nodes are incentivised to do this verification work. Voting takes place at regular particular intervals, on average every 12.7 seconds.

Contracts are triggered and executed when users or other contracts call them.

If you were thinking that this necessary approach presents limits in terms of processing speed, you’d be correct. The total processing power of the Ethereum network, regardless of the number of nodes that forms it, is equal to a single smartphone from 1999. This means that you’re not going to want to store megabytes of data on the Ethereum network, or render 3d graphics. There are of course workarounds to this, including our upcoming storage solution called Swarm and our secure messaging protocol, Whisper, both companion technologies to Ethereum.

It also means that because computing power is limited, it has to be measured carefully so that no single actor can commit evil deeds such as running infinite loops on all the world’s Ethereum nodes. This unit of measure is called ‘gas’.

Gas comes into play when you try to make a contract do something. You ‘call’ a function of the contract, which then executes the code in that function. It could be validating an escrow, or ‘like’ a friend on a decentralised social app, or transfer an amount of contract-specific token to another user, etc. Anything.

In order to execute this function, the contract will need gas, just like your car does. So, as part of the function call, you specify how much ‘gas’ you want to send to the contract, and how much you’re willing to pay for that gas (priced in ether, Ethereum’s fuel and unit of account).

The different operations a contract can support are priced differently. One execution cycle cost one gas for example. Others, like writing to storage, cost considerably more (because storage is a very scarce resource).

If you send too much gas to the contract, and it doesn’t use all of it, it is refunded to you. If you send too little, the contract stops and rolls back (just like your car when it’s ‘out of gas’).

How gas is priced depends on the global consensus of the community. It’s therefore likely operations that have the best-priced gas will be executed first on the network, and the rest a bit later.

With that said...I could see the resting price sitting at $5-10 USD in the near future. Not much higher as the only reason it could go that high is speculators holding ETH or companies like Microsoft and independent developers hording ETH for their DAPP development projects.