"Popular Science" The Past and Present of Ethereum

Editor's Note: This article comes fromEditor's Note: This article comes fromAlpaca Blockchain

(ID: yangtuoqkl), Author: Brother Tuo, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

I still remember that when Tuo Ge first entered the currency circle, he first came into contact with Bitcoin. After he understood what Bitcoin is, he became very interested in Ethereum, which is known as blockchain 2.0. In the process of understanding Ethereum , It also raised a lot of questions, even questioning Ethereum, presumably students will also encounter these questions, it doesn’t matter, today Brother Tuo will take you into the past and present of Ethereum.

Ethereum is a decentralized platform for creating and running smart contracts. On this platform, all programs will run according to the pre-set method without downtime, censorship, fraud, third-party interference, etc. The young man brought it up the day after tomorrow. In his published article, he pointed out that Bitcoin’s blockchain has too few functions to build applications based on the Bitcoin system. He believes that some kind of program system that can be automatically traded and automatically executed as long as certain conditions are met should be built based on the blockchain. . This system is the smart contract system we often hear. Similar to Bitcoin, it is also an open source blockchain platform.

In order to support this system, Vitalik and his team sold their own currency on the Ethereum system, Ether, to the public between July and August 2014.

They carried out the so-called "mining" in advance, and after digging out a lot of ether coins, they conducted public sales when raising funds. At that time, they raised more than 30,000 bitcoins and sold a total of 11.9 million ether coins (about 13% of the total).

Ethereum is called Blockchain 2.0, and it was even considered to surpass Bitcoin at one time, which means that Ethereum is an upgraded version based on Bitcoin. The main reason is that Ethereum is a brand new and open blockchain A platform that allows anyone to build and use decentralized applications that run on blockchain technology. This has allowed the blockchain to be used in a wider range of fields. From a development perspective, after the official launch of the Ethereum project, it has made some major improvements on the basis of the Bitcoin blockchain, mainly in the following four points :

1. A more complete scripting system enables smart contracts to run on the blockchain. Smart contracts can be used in a wide range of fields, such as renting a house, buying a house, and other commercial fields. Taking renting a house as an example, you only need to agree on a time when renting a house, and the program will automatically transfer the money from the tenant’s account to the landlord’s account as soon as the time is up. It can avoid the occurrence of old behaviors, and can also greatly improve efficiency and save time.

2. Take the method of burning currency. The so-called burning currency refers to the need to call computing resources on the blockchain during the execution of smart contracts. These nodes that provide computing resources need to charge fees, and what they charge is Ethereum tokens. This is exactly the way Emergence allows program developers and investors to profit.

3. Unlike Bitcoin, the block generation time of a block in Ethereum is 12s, and the mining reward for each block is 5 ETH. At present, the consensus mechanism is the same as Bitcoin, which adopts the consensus mechanism of POW workload proof, but it will be converted to POS equity proof in the future.

4. The Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), which is the core of the Ethereum application platform, is the bytecode used to execute smart contracts. Developers can use other friendly programming languages ​​to create applications based on it.

Camel brother introduced here, everyone will think that Ethereum is still better than Bitcoin in terms of technical applications. However, the technology of Ethereum is not completely as everyone wishes, because the development of Ethereum also encountered a major disaster event - THE DAO incident.

DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) 

First of all, let me popularize a term:

It is a decentralized autonomous organization, DAO follows three basic laws:

1. Integrity mechanism;

2. Inviolable mechanism;

3. Self-protection and self-consistency.

Since DAO is so good, at the beginning of May 2016, someone built a DAO application on Ethereum, named THE DAO (meaning the mother of DAO). This was the first smart contract application on the Ethereum blockchain, and it was also the largest crowdfunding project at the time, raising a total of 12.7 million ETH, worth about $150 million at the time. So far, the progress of the incident was pretty good, but on June 17, 2016, a small hacker discovered a loophole in the code of THE DAO project and stole 3.6 million ether coins from the THE DAO project, worth 7 tens of millions of dollars.

This error does not come from Ethereum itself, but from applications built on Ethereum. But as a platform, Ethereum needs to take measures to deal with it. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik (V God), published an article on social platforms to roll back the stolen Ethereum, and got the support of most team members. The chain that was rolled back is ETH.

However, there are a few members of the Ethereum team who believe that transactions are irreversible, which is one of the basic characteristics of blocks. Although Vitalik (V god) rollback transactions has been agreed by most people, it has violated the irreversibility of the blockchain. Tampering with spirit while refusing to do a transaction rollback of stolen ether.

Students remember this is a knowledge point: Ethereum eventually forked into two chains: one is ETH that rolls back transactions, and the other is ETC that refuses to rollback transactions.

ETH: The community fund management is more flexible, there is Vitalik (V God) platform, and the development team is strong.

ETC: Persistence, always operating in accordance with the rules of the blockchain, but because of this, it is respected by many computer geeks.