Now that you already understand how each of the five forces shaping Bitcoin's technology work, we are ready to introduce Ethereum, the first Turing-complete blockchain platform. If you are not completely sure what Turing-complete means just yet, don't worry, we'll cover it in this chapter.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
As we mentioned in the previous chapters, Bitcoin planted the seed of blockchain technology and cryptoassets, and quickly started gathering a passionate and dedicated community of enthusiasts and supporters. A new movement was set in motion by the ingenious system Satoshi created. The momentum accelerated at an exponential rate and generated a snowball effect of innovation. Further technological disruption and breakthroughs in the blockchain space were imminent. These effects were reinforced by the open source nature of Bitcoin.
Many developers started experimenting with the Bitcoin code by creating alternative cryptoasset protocols. Such new alternative blockchains came to be referred as altcoins (given that they are an alternative to the original coin, Bitcoin). The following diagram shows the evolution of Bitcoin:
By far the greatest impact and most...
The idea of Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin who was 19 years old at the time. Vitalik was drawn into computer games initially, similar to many of his peers. His father, also a computer scientist, introduced him to Bitcoin, which Vitalik embraced and started exploring with enthusiasm. He co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and worked as a journalist there. He also collaborated on colored coin projects. You probably remember colored coins, which we covered in detail in the previous chapter about Bitcoin. They enable basic implementations of smart contracts and digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. Vitalik wanted to expand the concept of colored coins to enable larger, more flexible and powerful applications to run on the blockchain. When he faced resistance to his idea from Bitcoin core developers, he decided to launch his own...
If we want to understand Ethereum, probably the best starting point is to have a look at its whitepaper. So, let's see how its founders describe it, shall we?
The Ethereum whitepaper starts as follows:
At this point you are probably thinking—OMG! Another virtual thing! We had to get used to abstractions such as virtual currencies, virtual assets and now we are talking about virtual machines?! Well, we live in the digital information age, so virtual goods and virtual reality are going to be more and more present in our everyday life. So, it's useful to get comfortable with such concepts step-by-step. Virtual machines are a pretty abstract concept, so we'll try and tackle the difficult task of explaining it from several angles.
Virtual machines are not an entirely new idea in distributed computing. With the continued development of the World Wide...
In this chapter, we learned all about Ethereum and how it revolutionalized the internet. We learnt how Ethereum was invented and why. We also learned how Ethereum functions using EVMs to create decentralized applications.
We learned about the wide range of smart contracts and decentralized applications powered by EVMs. In the following chapters, we'll focus on some of the key innovations Ethereum has brought to the world.
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