A next generation blockchain
Blockchain technology is the technological basis of Bitcoin, first described by its mysterious author Satoshi
Nakamoto in his white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, published in 2008. While the use
of blockchains for more general uses was already discussed in the original paper, it was not until a few years later
that blockchain technology emerged as a generic term. A blockchain is a distributed computing architecture where
every network node executes and records the same transactions, which are grouped into blocks. Only one block
can be added at a time, and every block contains a mathematical proof that verifies that it follows in sequence
from the previous block. In this way, the blockchain’s “distributed database” is kept in consensus across the whole
network. Individual user interactions with the ledger (transactions) are secured by strong cryptography. Nodes
that maintain and verify the network are incentivized by mathematically enforced economic incentives coded into
the protocol.
In Bitcoin’s case the distributed database is conceived of as a table of account balances, a ledger, and transactions
are transfers of the bitcoin token to facilitate trustless finance between individuals. But as bitcoin began attracting
greater attention from developers and technologists, novel projects began to use the bitcoin network for purposes
other than transfers of value tokens. Many of these took the form of “alt coins” - separate blockchains with
cryptocurrencies of their own which improved on the original bitcoin protocol to add new features or capabilities.
In late 2013, Ethereum’s inventor Vitalik Buterin proposed that a single blockchain with the capability to be
reprogrammed to perform any arbitrarily complex computation could subsume these many other projects.
In 2014, Ethereum founders Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke began work on a next-generation
blockchain that had the ambitions to implement a general, fully trustless smart contract platform.
