Satoshi Nakamoto’s introduction of Bitcoin in 2009 revolutionized the concept of money and currency, presenting a groundbreaking example of a digital asset without intrinsic value or centralized control. While Bitcoin’s creation was a momentous development, the true significance of the experiment lies in its underlying blockchain technology, which serves as a tool for distributed consensus. As the spotlight shifts to this aspect, attention is drawn to the diverse range of applications that blockchain offers beyond being a mere digital currency.
Apart from its role as a digital currency, blockchain technology opens up a world of possibilities. One common alternative application involves the use of on-blockchain digital assets, known as colored coins, to represent custom currencies and financial instruments. This feature allows for greater flexibility and customization in financial transactions.
Furthermore, blockchain’s potential extends to smart property, where ownership of physical devices can be recorded and verified on the blockchain. This innovation brings increased transparency and security to asset ownership, enabling more efficient management of tangible properties.
Non-fungible assets, such as domain names, can also find their place on the blockchain. Projects like Namecoin explore the idea of utilizing blockchain technology to create decentralized domain name registration systems, ensuring secure and tamper-resistant ownership records.
One of the most exciting prospects of blockchain is the concept of smart contracts. With Ethereum, a blockchain platform, users can harness a built-in, fully-fledged Turing-complete programming language to create “contracts.” These contracts encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing for the implementation of complex rules and logic within the blockchain itself. This opens the door to a vast array of possibilities, from automated financial agreements to supply chain management and beyond.
Moreover, blockchain technology has the potential to pave the way for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). These entities operate based on pre-defined rules and are governed by the consensus of their members. By leveraging blockchain, DAOs can streamline decision-making processes and eliminate the need for centralized authorities.
In essence, Ethereum aims to be a trailblazer in the blockchain realm by providing a versatile platform equipped with a powerful programming language. Users can now create an array of sophisticated systems and applications, previously unimaginable, by writing a few lines of code. The possibilities seem limitless, and as blockchain technology continues to evolve, it holds the potential to reshape industries and societies on a global scale.
ETHERIUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER EIP-150 REVISION
Introduction:
With ubiquitous internet connections in most places of the world, global information transmission has become incredibly cheap. Technology-rooted movements like Bitcoin have demonstrated, through the power of the default, consensus mechanisms and voluntary respect of the social contract that it is possible to use the internet to make a decentralised value-transfer system, shared across the world and virtually free to use. This system can be said to be a very specialised version of a cryptographically secure, transaction-based state machine. Follow-up systems such as Namecoin adapted this original “currency application” of the technology into other applications albeit rather simplistic ones. Etherium is a project which attempts to build the generalised technology; technology on which all transactionbased state machine concepts may be built. Moreover it aims to provide to the end-developer a tightly integrated end-to-end system for building software on a hitherto unexplored compute paradigm in the mainstream: a trustful object messaging compute framework.
Etherium White Paper pdf:
Ethereum Whitepaper