ELI5 ethereum
But it does a lot more than that. Imagine walking up to a car, depositing $2000 into an Ethereum account, and suddenly when you wave your phone over the handle, the door opens. You get in, conduct your business, and when you get out you withdraw your money, minus cost for gas, insurance, etc. All of this done anonymously, and perfectly securely, without anybody trusting anybody else to deliver the goods.
Money exists so that people who don't trust each other can conduct business together. In order for that business to happen, there needs to be something in the middle that they both trust. Traditionally, that "something in the middle" has been a bank and/or government. Contracts are the same way - in order for two parties to overcome their individual distrust, they both had to trust something bigger in between. Bitcoin uses math and distributed computing to make that "something in the middle" a faceless, anonymous crowd while maintaining the trust. Unfortunately there are problems with the math and distributed computing that is already crippling the ability of Bitcoin to be "something in the middle" for more than the lunatic fringe that is already using it. Still more unfortunately, the people who are helping to shape Bitcoin aren't cooperating very well and the trust is eroding somewhat. Ethereum is an idea similar to Bitcoin, but there are no design flaws that will eventually lead to the problems Bitcoin has right now. Because of this, the techno-nerds who like the idea of cryptocurrency for what it means for innovation prefer Ethereum. There has been substantial excitement this week over the sour grapes departure of one of the main Bitcoin developers, which has caused Ethereum to go up in value by about 150%. And yes, you can mine it but because it is a more clever protocol, it puts a substantial load on your GPU. Therefore, archetypal BTC miners won't work.
Just did a test run with Shapeshift. 0. Buy some BTC on an exchange. Apparently, if you are not already part of an exchange, buy some BTC on localbitcoins. They have an awesome guide here. 1. Create an address on MyEtherWallet. 1b. Go to https://www.myetherwallet.com/#generate-wallet 1c. Open up a text document. Type a password into the document. Save the document. Copy and Paste the password into the password field. 1d. Click Generate. 1e. Where you typed out password down, also save your address, private key (encrypted), private key (unencrypted.) Save it again. 1f. Download the encrypted and unencrypted .json files. Save these in the folder with your ether password document. 2. Go to Shapeshit.io. Select BTC on the left and ETHER on the right. Note the limit / minimums on the BTC side (right now they're Deposit Limit: 2.5285 BTC Minimum: 0.00012962 BTC). 3. Go back to MyEtherWallet (if you still have it open) or your text document and copy your ADDRESS. It should look like 0x7cb57b5a97eabe94205c07890be4c1ad31e486a8. Paste this address into the ETH side under "Your Payment Address". Include the 0x. Double check it. Check the "I agree to terms box". Click "START". 4. You will now have a DEPOSIT ADDRESS and a WITHDRAW ADDRESS. Take a screenshot of this page. Click the status button. Leave this open. Check the address again to make sure you control it and have all the information to that address (private key or .json and password.) 5. This is where I don't know what to do. I assume you somehow move your BTC from the exchange. You basically want to send whatever BTC you bought to the DEPOSIT ADDRESS shapeshit gave you. 6. Wait. 7. It should confirm. You can also look at https://etherchain.org/account/0x7cb57b5a97eabe94205c07890be4c1ad31e486a8 -- change the URL to be your address. At some point, Ether will appear there. 8. Remember that folder we made with the text document and json files? These should be kept in at least 2 places. I personally have them on my computer, on dropbox, on a flash drive at my parents house, and printed out here. I've got a lot of Ether though so I'm fucking paranoid as shit. --- Original Comment: As far as I can tell, the easiest way right now is to buy some BTC on an exchange (kraken or poloniex), then you use Shapeshift.io to change the Bitcoin into Ether. Correction: the easiest way is to buy bitcoins via localbitcoins.com. Create a new Ether wallet instantly using my awesome tool MyEtherWallet.com. I believe mk walked others through it, maybe he can type up a step-by-step. I haven't bought since the presale. There are also a ton of reddit threads. Save everything MyEtherWallet spits out at you (and shapeshift and the like) and keep it safely on your hard drive, in cloud storage (ie: dropbox), and physically on a piece of paper. Wait a while, then sell, and buy a house. I traded in all my BTC (save for a random donation link that still has like .02 BTC) in for Ether in August 2014 during the presale. I am a very happy camper these past couple days. So is my friend:
The easiest way to buy right now, IMO is to use Coinbase, or Circle to buy BTC and then buy ETH with that. On Kraken you can buy ETH with USD or BTC. If you are not on Kraken, you can buy ETH with BTC by using shapeshift.io. I just use a paper wallet to store my ETH. If you have BTC, to buy ETH with shapeshift.io: 1. At https://myetherwallet.com create and print a paper wallet. Keep that screen open, because you'll want to copy the public address (aka public key). 2. At https://shapeshift.io select deposit BTC, receive ETH. 3. Add the public key of your paper ETH wallet in the receive address. Click start. 4. Send BTC to the deposit address given by shapeshift (from Coinbase, Circle, or wherever you have it.) That should do it. Keep your paper wallet safe. Have two copies in two different places.
Yep, as soon as Kraken verifies me I'm getting in the game. Thanks to you, kleinbl00, b_b, and especially insomniasexx for all the cc advice in this thread.
Easiest way is to go to kraken.com and exchange some real coin for cryptocoin. I've grown quite frustrated with coinbase because they're shady fucks but so far so good on kraken. You can also play games with paper wallets. insomniasexx and a friend coded up something called myetherwallet that will give you a magic number. Put some real money into kraken or coinbase and then send it to that address and you now have a slip of paper that corresponds to the magic hex address where your abstract money lives.