On the Unstoppable Computer

Ethereum as a system is a global computational resource. It is a computer that is so resilient, that it will never shut off, never be rebooted and never stop running. For this resilience, there is a price, a ‘value’ price, and this value currently is measured in dollars. You can trade dollars for Ethereum tokens and these tokens can be used as ‘gas’ on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is used to execute the programs on this machine.

These tasks, or contracts as they are called, are simply programs, but they are programs that are run for every node on that comprises the Ethereum network. These contracts are transaction based, and every transaction is recorded to a ledger and this ledger is persisted across all of the nodes in the network. Each transaction has a cost both for it’s size and for its execution time, but arbitrary computations can be executed on this machine, given the Turing Completeness of it’s scripting language.

Currently, the execution of programs on this machine is quite expensive, in terms of both time and money. But, the results of these computations are solid. They are permanent. Barring the destruction of modern society, every transaction that has been computed by the Ethereum network, every program, will be recorded from today until the end of time, or at least until the end of the Ethereum network, whichever comes first.

With it’s economic incentives to both store information permanently and execute the computations of the network as a miner, the network will be persistent for quite some time. This gives it a durability that no mainframe can boast; this is a machine that will never go down. It is infinite, in both it’s space and it’s computational power, given enough time and, today, monetary resources. There are great opportunities in reducing the amount of ‘gas’ that is required to execute the transactions, with this gas value eventually turning into real world costs such as for electricity and the hardware used to mine the operations.

The architecture of Ethereum is such that of a global supercomputer, although it is slow and clunky and much like the ENIAC, difficult to program correctly. But those computations are persistent and last forever; such history, if chosen to be made is valuable for the blockchain is the new Stone Tablet of our society. And, much like those tablets were initially used to account for crops, we today are using them to account for value, the abstract form of what was being counted in the crops. As we move forward with these records of value and truth, we will see the importance of what we have created.

Our memory machines are complete; we have created a system with infinite, reliable, permanent transactional storage that is agreed upon by consensus, cryptography and computation. We have a system that gives back the means of production and verification to those that choose to participate. We have built something that can last the test of time.

Now we just have to make it fast and cheap.