I first drafted the Ethereum whitepaper on a cold day in San Francisco in November. This is the culmination of months of thinking and often frustrating work into an area we have come to call “Cryptocurrency 2.0” – in short, the Bitcoin blockchain for more than money. In the months leading up to Ethereum’s development, I had the privilege of working closely with several projects seeking to implement colored coins, smart assets, and various types of decentralized exchanges. At the time, I was intrigued by the enormous potential this technology could bring. This is because we are acutely aware that there are many major issues still plaguing the Bitcoin ecosystem, including fraudulent services, unreliable exchanges, and lack of security. This will not happen due to Bitcoin’s unique decentralized properties. Rather, these problems are a result of the fact that centralization still remains where it could potentially be eliminated very easily.
But what I soon realized was the sheer difficulty facing many of these projects and the often ugly technical hacks required to make them work. And if you look at the problem carefully, the cause becomes clear. This is fragmentation. Each individual project attempted to implement its own blockchain or metalayer on top of Bitcoin, resulting in significant duplication of effort and resulting loss of interoperability. Eventually, I realized that the key to solving this problem once and for all was a simple insight first conceived by the field of computer science in 1935. That is, there is no need to build separate infrastructure for each individual function and implementation; Rather, it is possible to create a Turing-complete programming language and allow anyone to implement any mathematically definable function using that language. This is how our computers work and this is how web browsers work. And with Ethereum, this is how our cryptocurrency works.
From that moment on, Ethereum has progressed greatly over the past two months. The Ethereum team has expanded to include dozens of developers, including Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke, lead developers of the C++ and Go implementations respectively, as well as dozens of other incredibly talented individuals, including Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Mihai Alisie. . Unfortunately there are too many to mention. Many of them have come to understand the project deeply enough to explain Ethereum better than I can. We currently have over 15 people actively working on our C++ and Go implementation in our developer chatroom, which is already surprisingly close to having all the features needed to run on testnet. In addition to our development efforts, our marketing and community support teams have dozens of people working globally, developing the non-technical infrastructure needed to make the Ethereum ecosystem a robust and robust community. And now, at this stage, we have made the joint decision that we are ready to make our organization more public than ever before.
What is Ethereum?
Simply put, Ethereum is a next-generation crypto ledger that seeks to support numerous advanced features, including user-issued currencies, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, and even what the company believes to be the first proper implementation of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), or Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). (DAC). But this is not what makes Ethereum special. Rather, what makes Ethereum special is the way it does this. Rather than trying to specifically support each individual type of functionality as a function, Ethereum includes a built-in Turing-complete scripting language that allows you to code functions directly through a mechanism called a “contract.” A contract is like an autonomous agent that executes a specific piece of code each time a transaction is sent, which can modify the contract’s internal data storage or transmit the transaction. Advanced contracts can also modify their own code.
A simple example of a contract is a basic name registration system that allows users to register names with their addresses. This contract does not transmit transactions. Its sole purpose is to build a database that other nodes can query. Our high-level written contract CLL (C-like language) (or perhaps more accurately a Python-like language) is:
tx.value < block.basefee * 200: stop if contract.storage(tx.data(0)) or tx.data(0) < 100 contract.storage(tx.data(0)) = tx.data (1 )
And there it is. Five lines of code running simultaneously on thousands of nodes around the world marks the beginning of a solution to a key problem in cryptography: human-friendly authentication. It is important to point out that when the original version of the Ethereum scripting code was designed, name registration was not in mind. Rather, the fact that this is possible appears to be an emergent property of Turing completeness. I hope this gives you an idea of exactly what Ethereum makes possible. For more applications with code, see: white book. Some examples include:
- User-issued currency / “Color Coin”
- Decentralized Exchange
- Financial contracts, including leveraged trading and hedging
- crop insurance
- Savings wallet with withdrawal limits
- P2P gambling
- Decentralized Dropbox-style data storage
- Decentralized Autonomous Organization
Now you know why we’re excited.
Who is Ethereum
The core Ethereum team includes four members:
| Vitalik Buterin | Vitalik Buterin first joined the Bitcoin community in March 2011, and co-founded Bitcoin Magazine with Mihai Alisie in September 2011. He entered the University of Waterloo to study computer science in 2012, and decided to leave Waterloo in 2013 to pursue his career. I work full time on the Bitcoin project through the global Bitcoin community. Vitalik is responsible for various Bitcoin projects, including: PBitcoin Tool, Fork of BitcoinJSand multisignature.info; Now he is back in Canada and focusing on his work on Ethereum. |
| Mihai Alisi | Mihai Alisie’s first foray into the Bitcoin community was with Bitcoin Magazine in September 2011. From the first issue sent from his living room in Romania to today, Bitcoin Magazine bears Mihai’s mark and has grown as he has grown with the magazine. Starting with a team of people with no experience in the publishing industry, we now distribute physical magazines to Barnes & Noble bookstores across the United States and internationally. Mihai is also involved in an innovative online e-commerce startup known as Egora. |
| Anthony DiLorio | Anthony Di Iorio is a founding member, board member and executive director. Canadian Bitcoin Alliancefounder Toronto Bitcoin Meetup GroupPartner/Founder of various Bitcoin startups and initiatives, including an in-browser Bitcoin wallet Cryptokit, CoinTalkToronto-based Bitcoin hub and co-working spacebitcoin decentralization, Bitcoin Across AmericaGlobal Bitcoin Alliance. |
| Charles Hoskinson | Charles Hoskinson is an entrepreneur and cryptographer actively involved in ventures in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He founded both the Bitcoin Education Project and Invictus Innovations before accepting his current role as a core developer of the Ethereum project. He studied analytic number theory at Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Charles is known for his love of economics, horology, and MOOCs, along with his passion for chess and strategy games. |
We also have a great team of developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and evangelists.
- Dr. Gavin Wood: Core C++ developer
- Obscura cycle: CoreGo developer
- Dr. Emanuele Costa: Quantitative analyst; scrum master
- joseph rubin: Software Engineering, Quantitative Analyst
- Eric Lombroso: Software Designer
- Max K: developer
- Jonathan Mohan: Media, Marketing and Evangelism (BitcoinNYC)
- Wendell Davis: Strategic Partner and Branding (Hive Wallet)
- Anthony D’Onofrio: Logo, branding, web development (Hive Wallet)
- Taylor Gehring: Web Development
- paul snow: Language development, software development
- Chris Odom: Strategic partner, developer (publicly traded)
- Jerry Liu and Bin Lu: Chinese Strategy and Translation (http://www.8btc.com/ethereum)
- Hai Nguyen: Accounting
- Amir Shetrit: Business Development (Color Coin)
- steve dark: Developer (KryptoKit)
- Kyle Kurbegovic: Media (Coin Talk)
from now on
I will personally be presenting at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami on January 25-26. An Ether pre-sale will begin shortly thereafter on February 1st, when anyone can get some of the initially pre-allocated Ether (Ethereum’s internal currency) at a ratio of 1000-2000 Ether for 1 BTC. go to http://fund.ethereum.org. The pre-sale will run throughout February and March, with early funders receiving higher rewards. Anyone who sends money in the first seven days will receive the full 2000 Ether, on the eighth day they will receive 1980 Ether, on the ninth day they will receive 1960 Ether, and so on, until the base rate of 1000 Ether per BTC is maintained for the final three days. It continues. Pre-sale.
We can develop a fully functional and robust Ethereum client with just 500 BTC funds at current rates. Native implementations in Go, C++, and Python are already approaching testnet quality. But we’re trying to go much further than that. Ethereum is not “just another altcoin.” This is a new path for cryptocurrency, and ultimately for P2P protocols as a whole. To achieve this, we can invest a lot of money in recruiting top talent to improve the security and scalability of the Ethereum network itself, as well as introducing peer-to-peer-to-peer (P2P) with other cryptocurrencies. We want to support the strong Ethereum ecosystem. – Colleagues carry out projects within our group. We’re already in good conversations with KryptoKit, Humint, and OpenTransactions, and are also interested in working with other groups like Tahoe-LAFS, Bitmessage, and Bitcloud.
All of these projects could potentially benefit from integrating with the Ethereum blockchain in some way because the layer is so common. Due to Turing completeness, Ethereum contracts can be configured to incentivize almost anything, even completely non-financial uses such as public key registration, which has very broad benefits for any decentralized crypto product that wants to include, for example: social network. All of these projects will add great value to the Ethereum ecosystem, and the Ethereum ecosystem will add great value to them. We don’t want to compete with any organization. We plan to work together.
During the fundraiser we will be working hard on development. We will soon be launching a centralized testnet, a server on which anyone can drive contracts and transactions, followed by a decentralized testnet to test networking features and mining algorithms. We will also be holding contests similar to those used to determine the algorithms for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2005 and SHA3 in 2013. The contest invites researchers from universities around the world to compete to develop the best professional hardware possible. It offers resistant, centralization resistant and fair mining algorithms and also explores alternatives such as Proof of Stake, Proof of Burn and Proof of Excellence. Additional details on this will be released in February.
Finally, to foster community development, we plan to create public community hubs and incubators, tentatively called “holons,” in cities around the world. The first Holon will be based inside Bitcoin Decentral in Toronto, and much of Ethereum’s development will take place there. If you are seriously interested in becoming actively involved in Ethereum, please consider visiting us next month. Other cities we are investigating include San Francisco, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, and some cities in Asia. This part of the project is still in the early stages of development, with more details expected to be released next month.
For now, feel free to check out these resources:
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/ethereum