All great innovations are driven by the need to fix problems, and this is true of Bitcoin and Ethereum. When a group of early pioneers recognized the significant implications of the underlying technology behind the Bitcoin system, they began exploring and expanding the application of digital currency beyond simple payments and transfers.
Developers were presented with two choices. The first option was to build on top of the Bitcoin protocol. However, the Bitcoin network itself had many limitations. Even to this day, the system remained inflexible to a great extent. Building new applications in different domains based on limited variables and transaction types made it difficult to fully leverage its advantages as a public blockchain.
The second option was building a new blockchain network different from Bitcoin. This wasn't as simple as tweaking code parameters like in the case of Litecoin or Dogecoin. It required creating a new infrastructure, a distinct blockchain network from scratch.
In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin, an enthusiast of Bitcoin, who is now famously known as "the V God" in the crypto community, published the Ethereum Whitepaper. Shortly after, Gavin Wood, who is now the founder of Polkadot, joined as a co-founder of Ethereum.
The founders of Ethereum envisioned it as a universal computing platform that would provide a secure and programmable environment for other developers. They aimed to eliminate the need for developers to build their own consensus algorithms, peer-to-peer networks, and other fundamental protocols. Instead, developers could directly build the decentralized applications they desired on the Ethereum platform.
Ethereum's founding team spent over a year transforming the theoretical concept of Ethereum into reality. On July 30, 2015, the first Ethereum block was successfully mined, marking the official launch of Ethereum and the beginning of its journey to become a global computer.
Bitcoin's emergence is considered a technological solution to address centralized trust issues, providing specific solutions to specific problems. It is a well-developed decentralized financial distribution and payment network.
On the other hand, Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain designed for building various applications. It provides all developers with a secure and programmable development environment, reducing the workload and technical barriers associated with low-level development. The concept of smart contracts is the most important aspect that sets Ethereum apart from Bitcoin.
Smart contracts on Ethereum can be understood as programs running in a deterministic manner on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that cannot be changed. Once a smart contract is successfully deployed, its code cannot be modified.
Smart contracts are only executed when they are called by a transaction. When there are no transactions calling the smart contract, it remains in a waiting state and does not have any "background automatic execution."
To better understand smart contracts, you can think of them as ATM machines. Once an ATM machine is manufactured, its function cannot be altered. It only starts working when you insert a bank card and enter a withdrawal command. It does not operate automatically without any user input. Although the term "smart" is used in smart contracts, they do not possess the level of intelligence associated with artificial intelligence.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is at the core of the Ethereum protocol and its specific operations. It is a computational engine used to deploy and execute smart contracts. In the Ethereum ecosystem, almost all status update operations, except for user-controlled transfer transactions involving private keys, are executed by the EVM.
The software applications we often use on our smartphones are called apps, while applications built on blockchain are called DApps. The "D" stands for decentralization.
Compared to traditional centralized architectures, DApps have the following advantages:
Code Transparency: The open-source code is publicly available on the network, and code does not lie. Anyone can inspect the code. However, this also gives hackers an opportunity. If there are vulnerabilities in your code, you stand to lose a significant amount of assets.
Censorship Resistance: Once a DApp is successfully deployed, it operates without any interference. There is no entity on the network that can prevent users from submitting transactions, deploying DApps, or accessing data on the blockchain.
The early development of Ethereum was divided into four major phases: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. Currently, Ethereum has entered its final phase, marked by the transition of its consensus algorithm from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).
At the ETHCC conference in Paris last year, Vitalik Buterin announced that Ethereum developers would go through five long-term phases: The Merge, The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.
The first phase, The Merge, has already been completed, with the mainnet of Ethereum merging with the Beacon Chain and undergoing an upgrade in mid-April this year in Shanghai. Validators' staked ETH can now be withdrawn. After the completion of these five key phases, Ethereum is expected to achieve a throughput of 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). This will lay the foundation for the widespread commercial use of blockchain technology in the future.
The development of Ethereum has not been without challenges. Even today, the decision to execute a hard fork in the case of The DAO incident is still a topic worth discussing.
The DAO was one of the earliest projects in Ethereum's token experiment. Participants needed to exchange ETH for DAO tokens and then vote on projects in need of funding. After earning profits, they could exchange DAO tokens back into ETH.
In response to the losses incurred, the Ethereum community opted for a hard fork to protect the security of assets and recover the stolen funds. However, a faction within the ecosystem believed that this action contradicted the immutability principle of blockchain and continued working on the original chain. The original chain is now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC), while the new chain resulting from the hard fork is the current Ethereum we know.
This year marks Ethereum's 10th anniversary, and it has rightfully earned its place as the king of the world computer and public blockchains. Looking back at Ethereum's 10-year journey, it has led us into the era of blockchain 2.0 and continues to be at the forefront of industry development and evolution.
This is a new era of exploration, where we have witnessed another leap in human cognition and imagination. As one of the brightest gems of this era, Ethereum will be firmly engraved at the forefront of the entire history of blockchain.