Malware is a catch all term for any type of malicious software designed to harm or exploit any programmable device, service or network. Most threats are malicious and designed to make money by hijacking and controlling an individual’s computing and data usage.
Any kind of malware is evil and harmful to the end user but malicious software is more expensive to build than similar forms of legitimate software, since this and ransomware are two of the most dangerous software online, so having the right protection for this is essential if you want to have your computer safe and clean. Software vendors are constantly working to create more advanced and realistic malware to ensure they can push the market further and maintain their place as the most trusted source for developer software. This may be one way to secure the computer from being used by the computer manufacturer to push their own products.
One of the most interesting products to emerge from the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems is Ethereum’s Solidity, a programming language for development of smart contracts. Solidity is meant to become the front-end language of decentralized applications, while the Ethereum blockchain is designed to underpin all such applications.
The most impressive thing about Ethereum is its innovative and unique underlying logic. The technology is called Liquid (in memory). Solidity is a Turing complete language which includes a basic contract language (like Python for Java) along with a formal verification language to validate the contracts. The language is a lot easier to work with than most systems and can be applied to several fields, including computer security, marketing and design. As more applications are built on Ethereum, more contracts will need to be built and trusted. The scripting language of Solidity is a simple subset of Haskell and thus allows for full customization, i.e. real time multi-sig verification and control over smart contracts. For the purposes of this post, I will only discuss its capabilities and some basic functions for the purposes of this post.
Solidity’s features include:
Solidity is a functional programming language that allows a contract to be built, updated and monitored.
Solidity is a Turing complete programming language that allows one to write contracts that can interact with the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain.
With a full node the code can be transparently executed in parallel and executed without the need for a server.
Since Solidity is a programmable scripting language, it’s possible to program logic into the Solidity system to control the system.
This gives us a virtual machine that allows the implementation of complex functions from the scripting language with the same level of performance as programs written in the dynamic language C.
Solidity is a consistent and simple language that does not require much and is easy to understand.
Solidity is made up of three parts: the front-end language, the formal verification language and the back-end code, or the machine code.
Solidity’s language is a “pure” functional language which is a subset of Haskell. The purpose of Haskell is to make it easier to write efficient programs. The input to the language is called the specification and if all the specifications match the program will execute. In this language Solidity is similar to Python.
The syntax is simple with straightforward operators and semicolons. If you have little to no knowledge in functional programming, then you should not even consider learning Solidity or its programming language. However it is still important to learn basic syntax in the form of define statements, functions and variables.