Last month commemorated the 2nd anniversary of Ethereum’s public revelation at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida, USA. Amidst considerable speculation and enthusiasm, a large assembly surrounded the young Vitalik Buterin following his on-stage declaration, interrogating the value and his intention to create such a system.
It can be challenging to fully grasp how much progress has been made in the past couple of years. At times, it appears as though the cryptoeconomic landscape evolves at such a breakneck pace that weekly news releases have become routine instead of the anomaly. Interest in the sector has surged for many commendable reasons, but none of that is particularly significant unless the fundamental technology is in place. As engaged observers, our role is to assist in bringing the concept of a world driven by blockchain into existence. With concepts enshrined in a white paper, the time for discussion had ended. Now was the moment to construct.
A retrospective
To set the scene accurately, note that Ethereum was officially announced on January 25, 2014. At that time, the price of Bitcoin had recently reached its peak and was around $800. Dogecoin was remarkably popular and had started raising funds to sponsor the Jamaican Bobsled Team. Alternative applications of “blockchain technology” encompassed Namecoin as a decentralized naming system resting atop a global key/value store. There was even an invention for untraceable messaging known as BitMessage. Merely a month earlier, researchers illustrated in a paper that block times under 1 second were achievable. In summary, it appeared there was nothing blockchains couldn’t accomplish.
Vitalik announcing Ethereum (Marc van der Chijs)
Although the transaction speed of Bitcoin represented a substantial advancement over traditional systems, it was apparent that further innovations could be achieved by exploring what this “blockchain” phenomenon truly was. During that period, there was significant discourse regarding so-called “blockchain bloat” and worries that additional applications built upon the Bitcoin protocol might pose challenges to scalability. Betting platforms had already faced criticism for generating numerous low-value transactions. A discontent was brewing within the bitcoin community that persists to this day.
Given all these potentials, how could a single protocol be configured to meet the diverse requirements? As a preliminary experiment, Bitcoin was swiftly increasing in value. What started as a cypherpunk aspiration had matured into an industry. Amendments to the core protocol jeopardized billions in value, and no clear governance existed for proposing and implementing changes. One method to gain acceptance was to achieve consensus surrounding a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP, for short) and submit the code through a “pull request” for public feedback. Making the necessary alterations to accommodate more generalized use would be, to say the least, a radical proposal.
Bootstrap
By April 2014, Dr. Gavin Wood released the Ethereum Yellow Paper, which would act as the technical guide and de-facto specification for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). From this perspective, Ethereum aimed to develop implementations that adhered to a specification rather than vice versa. Because Bitcoin as a protocol was dictated by the reference C++ implementation, any ports needed to replicate all logic in meticulous detail, including bugs. Today, the Bitcoin protocol is in a better position, with core consensus features separated from the GUI into a specific library. Moreover, clients such as BitcoinJ (a Java client, developed by Mike Hearn) and btcd (a Go client) have shifted the goalposts beyond a single system language.
In contrast, the Ethereum ecosystem currently boasts no fewer than 6 consensus implementations: C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, and Haskell. When a variance occurs due to either human or programming languages, a roundtable of client developers can compare outcomes and deliberate the implications of a specific interpretation to determine a clear course of action. Supported by automated and random testing, sometimes the cause of a consensus failure lay not in the code itself, but in the documentation. Nevertheless, the advantages of a specification-driven approach began to become evident, assisting in mitigating human error as we translated words into code.
Ethereum Yellow Paper
Alongside this initial development, several legal entities were created to establish a framework for coordinating the collective effort in constructing a decentralized DApp platform. Consequently, Stiftung Ethereum was founded in June 2014 in Zug, Switzerland. With all the documentation and agreements finalized, a crowdsale of Ether tokens took place in Summer 2014, based on a proposal established earlier that year. Within moments of the launch, thousands of bitcoins began streaming to a multisig Bitcoin address, with each acquisition marking its place in history as proponents of an ambitious vision. Embracing complete decentralization, no database was utilized, instead depending entirely on transactions as documented in the Bitcoin ledger. If Ethereum were to create anything, it would be upon the shoulders of giants.
Kickstart
As the Ethereum proof-of-concept (PoC) series advanced through the generous contributions of developers worldwide and the Ether Sale concluding towards the end of summer, the groundwork was prepared to realize the vision articulated by Vitalik just a few months earlier. Within less than a year, the legal and financial infrastructure was established to initiate full-scale development of a next-generation blockchain platform.
Almost immediately, the funds from the sale were utilized to settle accumulating legal obligations and also to compensate the months of developer efforts that had not yet received payment. Some had left their jobs without seeing a single satoshi in their Bitcoin wallets for half a year, as others grew anxious about providing for their families and managing their mortgages. Times were difficult for all involved.
Eventually, around September 2014,the vast majority of resources would be accessible to bolster the intricate engineering of state-of-the-art decentralization technology. Driven by a desire to enhance blockchains, Ethereum initiated an extensive recruitment campaign, luring developers from various fields to undertake the challenging task of fully developing what were merely initial concepts.
DEVCON0 group photograph (Wikipedia)
Just two months following, in November 2014, the bulk of the Ethereum project team congregated in Berlin for the inaugural Ethereum conference: DEVCON0. Even though many had communicated via Skype, this event marked the first in-person gathering for most project members. During this proto-conference, in a quaint yet stunning venue, developers took turns presenting their visions for the numerous protocols necessary to create “Web3”.
This was a crucial period for the project as the wider community eagerly anticipated more polished tools to start crafting their aspirations. Numerous versions of protocols and multiple implementations of any feature were yet to be established. To clarify this situation, it should be noted that Ethereum had merely achieved PoC7, and many concepts were scarcely more developed than theoretical ideas.
As a collective, we were only beginning to collaborate with one another, and the various tools and systems necessary for large-scale development had still to be established. As a project, we recognized the requirement for thorough testing and assessment to ascertain that each idea was functioning as anticipated. Without successful testing to validate the theory, the hypothesis was little more than a figment of imagination.
Heroic efforts
This situation continued for several months during the holiday season, with a surge of development happening early in 2015. Around this period, Jeff Wilcke convened the Go development team in Amsterdam to assess the software’s condition. Despite the earlier face-to-face meeting in Berlin a few months prior, this was the moment the Go-Ethereum team gathered and engaged with the first functioning Whisper DApp for in-office communication. Experiencing this nascent idea of what the future could offer was highly thrilling, yet it also revealed numerous vulnerabilities. This use of our own software became the pivotal point from which many working groups were formed to develop towards the Mist vision.
An early Mist prototype
At this stage, the bug bounty initiative was fully operational as we sought out the most serious bugs. As future users of the system, actively searching for issues derived significantly more value than hiding behind justifications. Given that we were developing consensus software, there was little tolerance for mistakes, and we even resorted to randomized fuzz testing to ensure that even unforeseen problems were addressed to the fullest extent possible.
As the software assessments advanced, the DevGrants initiative began to gain greater public visibility with the announcement of the Ethereum Embedded program, which made it remarkably easy to operate an Ethereum node on affordable Raspberry Pi devices. Concurrently, the teams concentrated on providing a stable, feature-rich command line interface (CLI) for developers to begin their projects. It would be only weeks before the eventual Olympic testnet was introduced, offering a significant platform for client patching and protocol enhancements.
As the collection of software and interfaces steadily progressed towards stability and developers’ confidence bolstered in what we were creating, whispers of a Frontier launch began to ripple through the community. Despite the enthusiasm to release frequently and promptly, the community supported the developers’ choice to prioritize the software’s security and stability, deferring to the software and security auditors regarding necessary changes before a widespread release.
Wild West
Ultimately, the most critical issues were resolved, and the Ethereum mainnet would debut the beta-like Frontier just months after many Ethereum developers first met each other. The commitment demonstrated by numerous developers would stand as a testament to the significance of the undertaking we embarked upon. It was July 2015, merely a year since the crowdsale, and Ethereum had a functional network. The term “vaporware” could no longer be assigned to this concept of Bitcoin 2.0—Ethereum had become a reality.
Network statistics dashboard
Following a well-deserved break during the summer after the relatively smooth launch of Frontier, the development teams honed the rough aspects of the software and began advancing towards better abstractions to more accurately depict what the future of Ethereum could entail. A new and improved Ethereum Wallet beta was introduced, built on a more resilient toolkit than the previous Qt versions. This strategic decision would yield considerable benefits later, as mobile builds became a top priority for the project.
With the growing interest beyond the core Ethereum community, it was time to extend our collective reach to help the wider world grasp the same concepts that many early adopters had. After a brief delay, DEVCON1 was announced to be held in London, England, for one week in November 2015. Nearly 400 individuals gathered in this locale for an entire week, culminating in 80 talks and discussions about the Ethereum ecosystem.
Full house at DEVCON1
Adding to the enthusiasm, the community joyfully welcomed Nick Szabo, Imogen Heap, and representatives from IBM, Microsoft, and Deloitte. In contrast to other cryptocurrency conferences, there was minimal discussion regarding price or speculation. Rather, the concentration was firmly on constructing tools, standards, and a mutual understanding between technical experts and business professionals.
Homesteading
Leaping to the current moment, a robust network exists with an escalating volume of transactions, accompanied by numerous DApps starting to emerge. With assistance from Consensys, among many entities within the ecosystem, Ethereum is now readily deployable on Microsoft Azure and, thanks to Slock’s contributions, can also be set up on low-resource Ubuntu Core images. Considerable effort has been devoted to mobile developments for both the C++ and Go clients that will become increasingly vital as low-power gadgets take the place of standard desktops for all but the most resource-intensive tasks.
Ethereum Dapps explosion
Also swiftly advancing is the so-called “light client” functionality alongside state-pruning, both of which will enable resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and smartwatches to handle and store the blockchain. When combined with mobile builds efforts and Mist developments, the community is advancing Ethereum into new territories that previous cryptocurrencies have seldom explored.
We are currently on the verge of the Homestead hard fork, fine-tuning minor issues before launching what will be deemed the “stable” version of the network. Since the initial rollout of the Frontier network was significantly more stable than anticipated, relatively few modifications are being introduced for Homestead: a block difficulty adjustment, an addition of a new opcode, and several networking refinements.
Beyond the immediately planned updates, a bright horizon of developments awaits, including solutions for scalability and a transition from inefficient proof-of-work (PoW) to a more eco-friendly proof-of-stake (PoS). What started as a conceptual model in a single individual’s mind has transformed into an enormous amount of developer effort to realize that vision, which today exists thanks significantly to the active community with a constructive mindset focused on creating something meaningful. In 2015, Ethereum transitioned from concept to reality, underpinned by a burgeoning ecosystem pursuing something greater.
Dreaming forward
The core insight Vitalik articulated in his paper was how to generalize the decentralized transfer of value into an abstract state transition function, accommodating any application. Coupled with a peer-to-peer network, Ethereum endeavors to replicate everything Bitcoin achieves and more. Yet our journey isn’t finished, and much innovation remains to be discovered.
“Isn’t it remarkable that all these secrets have been safeguarded for so long just for us to uncover them.”
The inherent promise of upgrading Bitcoin was to demonstrate feasibility in a sidechain for an opportunity to reintegrate the functionality back into the reference client. This commitment has yet to be realized, resulting in an expansion of external experimentation. While much commotion has arisen regarding “the developer who left bitcoin“, it’s clear that the Bitcoin community is not defunct, nor is its intrinsic role as a scarce digital asset devoid of value. Satoshi is a visionary for understanding how to connect several technologies to forge a truth protocol that no one can explicitly command. However, the aspiration for Bitcoin to be the only revolutionary technology has long passed. We should instead accept our new reality and anticipate all the opportunities that this significant first endeavor has made possible.
