Ethereum inventor "V God" new book: Why is Ethereum the most important blockchain application?

The inventor of Ethereum is a Canadian born in 1994. His name is Vitalik Butlin, born in a small town on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia, and later immigrated to Canada.

In 2012, the 18-year-old co founded Bitcoin Magazine, and soon after, he co founded Ethereum with others. In 2015, Frontier was launched with partners, which was the first version of Ethereum's cryptocurrency protocol. With these achievements, he is also known as the 'V God'.

During his years of cultivating Ethereum, he persisted in writing related articles on his blog and was compiled into a book. Not long ago, CITIC Publishing House published a Chinese version of the book titled "Proof of Rights: The Birth of Ethereum and Blockchain Philosophy", with a doctoral supervisor in the research department of "Comparison" serving as the translator.

Figure | Book Cover of 'Proof of Rights: Birth and Blockchain Philosophy' (Source: Source Image)

As a translator, I believe that both "Xiao Bai" readers and professional readers can read this book. By reading this book, "Xiaobai" readers can gain a general understanding of what they know and think during the various stages of Ethereum's development, thereby better understanding Ethereum, the most important blockchain application. Professional readers can gain some inspirational insights and apply them to their own projects.

(Source: Pixabay)

Before reading this book, let's first understand the relationship between Ethereum and Bitcoin? What are the main similarities and differences between the two? What impact has Ethereum had on the development of Bitcoin since its launch?

It is reported that Ethereum and Bitcoin are the two major public chains in the current blockchain world. As mentioned in the book, he founded Ethereum after paying attention to the difficulty of blockchain expansion and its inability to serve as a decentralized basic application. Therefore, Ethereum is an inheritance and improvement of Bitcoin.

As a public chain, Ethereum and Bitcoin have many similarities, such as decentralization, openness, autonomy, etc. However, Bitcoin is more focused on financial applications, making it difficult to expand and integrate into other applications.

In contrast, Ethereum is mainly used as a decentralized application infrastructure, which can create many conditions for building an application ecosystem and expanding capacity on the chain.

For example, if Bitcoin is a financial app on a phone, Ethereum is similar to an app store. The launch of Ethereum has had two impacts on Bitcoin:

On the one hand, it is complementary because it proves that there is a lot of room for practical application of blockchain, which also increases the popularity of Bitcoin to a certain extent; On the other hand, it is substitutive. Previously, some people attempted to build an application ecosystem based on Bitcoin, but this responsibility later fell to Ethereum.

Proof of equity is a type of consensus mechanism that determines the ownership of accounting rights in blockchain. The principle of proof of equity is similar to a shareholding system, where the number of shares held by a shareholder in a company determines the right to speak. In blockchain using PoS mechanism, the right to speak is determined by equity pledge.

Unlike the proof-of-work mechanism adopted by Bitcoin, the demand for computing power of the proof of equity mechanism will be greatly reduced, and the transaction efficiency it can support will also be greatly increased.

What roles can blockchain and cryptocurrency play in the construction process of the online world? What role does the proof of rights mechanism play in it?

The existing internet is centered around large platform enterprises, and the ultimate ownership of content, data, and user identity lies in the hands of these platforms.

As a vision for the internet, Web3 aims to help users regain control of the network from large platforms. Based on blockchain, various decentralized applications can be constructed. In this way, there is no centralized platform that can control users anymore.

Cryptocurrency can be used more as an incentive in the future internet ecosystem, helping users build autonomous organizations without centralized controllers.

Of course, before blockchain and cryptocurrency take on these responsibilities, a prerequisite is that their operation must have the characteristics of low cost and high efficiency.

At present, the proof-of-work mechanism used by Bitcoin is obviously unable to provide support. In contrast, after the introduction of proof of equity, the above vision has a greater likelihood.

In the book 'Proof of Rights: The Birth of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchain', we consider the reshaping effects that digital intelligence technology, the new generation of the internet, and the metaverse may have on the economy.

Specifically, this will bring assistance at two levels:

On the level of "technology", many inspiring ideas have been proposed, such as using the Hubble tax to allocate public resources, and using quadratic financing to determine supported projects, all of which provide valuable inspiration for building a new network ecosystem.

On the level of "Dao", as an internet thinker, I have conducted a lot of in-depth thinking on the issues of Web2 and early blockchain. These reflections can help us better view various internet issues and seek solutions to them.

So, what kind of era will the Web 3.0 era be? What impact will it have on real life?

At present, the biggest change is still personal control over the internet. In the era of Web2, people have no say in their content, data, or even identity. In the era of Web3, users can use methods such as decentralized identity to ensure that they have their own identity.

Overall, blockchain is an important technology for implementing Web3. Of course, Web3 has more than just these technologies, as well as privacy computing and other technologies.

Nowadays, many people are willing to put Web3 and the metaverse together, but they say, "Personally, I disagree. In fact, the two are not necessarily related. For example, the representative works of the metaverse," Second Life "and" My World ", are both centralized and based on Web2. If we insist that the metaverse is Web3, then these are not part of the metaverse

Actually, in foreign countries, the metaverse and Web3 are two distinct concepts. Matthew Ball, the father of metaverse commerce, was the earliest person to popularize metaverse knowledge. He stated that the metaverse is a virtual world, emphasizing more on the concepts of VR and AR.

Web3 emphasizes user ownership of the network, and the two are fundamentally not the same concept. However, it is undeniable that many metaverse projects now use Web3 as their foundation and tokens as their motivation, which is why there is a crossover between these two concepts.

As for artificial intelligence, it is essentially a technology that can be used for both Web3 and Web2. However, there can also be many combinations of applications between these two. For example, in generative AI works, there is still significant controversy over the ownership of intellectual property of AI products. However, if Web3 related technologies are used, this problem can be solved to some extent.

Operation/layout: He Chenlong