Since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2008, the existence of digital currency has gradually been accepted by some people. People have also actively carried out the thinking and development of business applications based on Bitcoin. However, with the expansion of applications, people found that the design of Bitcoin is only suitable for virtual currency scenarios. Due to the existence of non-Turing completeness, the concept of accounts lacking state preservation, and the waste of resources and efficiency problems caused by the PoW mining mechanism, Not applicable in many blockchain application scenarios. People need a new blockchain-based smart contract development platform with Turing completeness, efficient consensus mechanism, and support for more application scenarios. Ethereum came into being in this situation.
The purpose of Ethereum is to integrate and improve concepts such as scripting, altcoins, and on-chain meta-protocols, enabling developers to create arbitrary consensus-based, scalable, standardized, Turing Complete, easy to develop and collaborative applications.
Ethereum is a general-purpose global blockchain that can manage the state of financial and non-financial applications. The novelty of Ethereum lies in its magical computer network, which enables a new type of software application, a truly decentralized application. Embed the trust logic into the applet and run it on the blockchain. Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum has established a new basic framework of cryptography technology, which makes it easier to develop applications on it, is friendly to light clients, and allows applications to share a viable economic environment and reliable blocks. chain security. Ethereum has inspired business and social innovation on a global scale, opening the door to unprecedented decentralized applications. In the long run, the changes it brings will affect the global economy and control structures.
Ethereum is a platform and programming language, including the digital currency Ether (Ether), and EtherScript (EtherScript) for building and publishing distributed applications.
There are many similarities between Ethereum and the well-known digital currency Bitcoin. Both are digital currencies and cannot be counterfeited, and both operate in a decentralized manner to ensure that the money supply is not controlled by one party. The other half of Ethereum's important feature is that it provides a complete programming language environment, sometimes called Ethereum Script. We all know that programming languages are what humans use to control the work of computers. Therefore, instructions written in any programming language are accurate and unambiguous to the computer. That is, there is no ambiguity about how a computer executes a piece of code. Under the same conditions, a piece of code will always be executed according to the established steps. It is this characteristic that is missing from existing human laws and contracts. Therefore, with the ether script, we can make a contract without ambiguity.
At the lowest level, Ethereum is a multi-layered, cryptography-based open source technology protocol. Its different functional modules are fully integrated by design, and as a whole, it is a comprehensive platform for creating and deploying decentralized applications. While Ethereum may seem like a hybrid of multiple interconnected open source projects, its evolution has been guided by clear goals so that the individual components fit together synergistically.
At the same time, Ethereum is also a perfect combination of blockchain and smart contracts. It is a complete solution for smart contracts. It is designed as a general decentralized platform with a complete set of tools that can extend its functions. A blockchain similar to Bitcoin is implemented with the support of network, encryption, HttpClient and other technologies. It achieves consensus through the workload proof mechanism, which is mined by miners, and realizes the synchronization of the blockchain through the formulation of new network protocols. Different from Bitcoin, smart contracts can be written arbitrarily on Ethereum, and powerful functions can be realized through smart contracts to realize the development of decentralized applications. Smart contracts deployed on Ethereum run on Ethereum-specific virtual machines and interact with the underlying blockchain through the Ethereum virtual machine and RPC interfaces.