Hi it's Keir Finlow-Bates here and today
I thought I would start a video series on Ethereum and other smart contract blockchain
systems, and this video series is inspired by a message and a diagram that I got from
Guillerme Maia a couple of days ago, and in that diagram he'd split Ethereum up into
three layers: layer one, layer two, layer three. So in the series I'm going to look at these
three layers in a bit more detail, but for today I'm just gonna give a quick summary about why
you would split it up into these layers, and what those layers actually are. So traditionally
therefore we look at layer 1 as the blockchain layer: that's the layer that allows a group of
different people or different nodes to come to a common view of the truth – common consensus
– as to the state of data at any given time, and blockchain was first introduced with Bitcoin,
where it was used for the transmission of value in the form of … bitcoin. In Ethereum the
blockchain layer is used for two purposes: it's used for the transmission of value in the
form of Ether (the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum system) and it's used for the
transmission of data.
And then there's one final interesting fact there, which is that in
computer science data can be "facts and figures" or it can be "code" – instructions that a
computer can then run. So that's the kind of leap. Bitcoin does have a sort of very simple scripting
system that is purely used in order to allow for different kinds of transactions involving the
transfer of value, i.e. bitcoins. In Ethereum the data when interpreted as code can provide
instructions for the transfer of value, or it can actually provide a whole load of other options,
allowing you to effectively create and modify data structures to serve all sorts of different
purposes, not just the transferal of these Ethers that i mentioned. So that's the foundation layer
– the blockchain layer – so it kind of forms the backbone or the spine of the system, and in
tomorrow's video I'll talk about layer two, which is described variously by people as being
the programming layer or the Solidity layer, but I think there's a bit more to it than that, so look
out for video number two shortly.
Bye for now!.
