The block timing varies for the miners to generate a hash that meets the

required mining difficulty at the moment. The design produces a block

every 12 seconds as this is the fastest possible in the Ethereum network but

is substantially longer than the network latency. This design’s goal will

allow the network to propagate blocks as fast as possible without in any

way causing the miners to find a significant number of stale blocks.

ETH

In the year 2014, as a pre-mine effort for the crowd sale, ETH numbering

7 2 million were created, and a decision for future post crowd sale ETH

generation was made to cap the number at 25 %

of that year (i.e., 18m ETH)

to be mined per year in addition to the one-off approximately 7 2m ETH

already generated. For each block mined, five fresh ETH are created

currently, so if a block is mined every 14 seconds and there are 3 1.5 million

seconds in a year; it means 2.25 million blocks are mined per year. Thus,

the generation of ETH meets the commitment of less than 18m ETH to be

generated per year as with 2.25 m blocks at 5 ETH per block = 11.3 m ETH.

Smart contract

The protocols used within which the parties involved perform on the other

promises specified in a digital form is a smart contract. It is the computer

code, a self-operating program used to describe the facility of exchanging

money, content, property, shares, or assets of value that automatically

execute while running on the blockchain and is on the blockchain without

any possibility of censorship, downtime, fraud or third-party interference

when specific conditions are met, the smart contract runs exactly as it is

programmed to. Regulators can use this between parties written as code into

the blockchain. The individuals involved are anonymous, but the contract is

the public ledger. A triggering event like an expiration date and strike price

is hit, and the contract executes itself according to the coded terms.

Points to note:

1. To write smart contracts, Solidity is used as the language.

2. The smart contract is compiled to the low-level bytecode that runs in

the EVM.