Goldman Sachs endorses Ethereum? Tell you about Ethereum's past and present

We know that Ethereum is the 2.0 version of blockchain. Project parties can build their own DApps on Ethereum. Technically, this provides convenience to various project parties to a certain extent. At the same time, Ethereum has also popularized the project financing method of token issuance. Since 2017, ICO has been hot, and major project parties have adopted Ethereum's ERC 20 token standard to issue their own tokens and use it as a profit model for the project. These are the factors that support Ethereum ETH to become the world's second largest digital currency by market value.

However, with the launch of more and more public chain projects and the controversy over Ethereum's performance, the function of Ethereum itself has been neglected, and more attention has been paid to its use to issue coins. With the ETH market going down, panic seems to have reached its peak.

Yingfu Investment summarized the Ethereum projects that sold more than 10,000 in 30 days, as shown in the following table:

Of course, to understand Ethereum, we have to mention a person, he is the founder of Ethereum - Vitalik Buterin, a young genius.

The Birth of Ethereum

In 1999, Russian computer engineer Dmitry Buterin became a tech entrepreneur in Moscow and moved his family to Canada. Around 2011, Dmitry introduced Bitcoin to his 17-year-old son Vitalik. Vitalik then became a programmer involved in the Bitcoin community. He once advocated to Bitcoin core developers that the Bitcoin platform should have a more complete programming language for people to develop programs, but they did not agree, so he decided to develop a new platform for this purpose. Vitalik believes that many programs can use principles similar to Bitcoin to achieve further development.

Vitalik wrote the Ethereum White Paper in 2013, which explained the goal of building a decentralized program. Then in 2014, he raised funds for development through public fundraising on the Internet, and investors used Bitcoin to buy Ethereum from the foundation. Apart from the disappeared Satoshi Nakamoto, Vitalik is the most authoritative figure in the blockchain field. Later, people called him V God. The Ethereum he created changed the world and pushed the blockchain from 1.0 to 2.0.

What is Ethereum?

So what is Ethereum? In simple terms, Ethereum is an open source public blockchain platform with smart contract functions. Similarly, Ethereum also has its digital token, which is Ether (ETH). Ether is also regarded as "Bitcoin 2.0". Like other digital currencies, Ether can be bought and sold on trading platforms such as Winful Investment.

Let’s give a visual example to help everyone understand what Ethereum is.

1. Suppose we want to build a big house today. If we do it from scratch, we should produce cement and steel by ourselves, and then build the house after all the materials are produced. However, that would be very troublesome. Ethereum is equivalent to helping us make all the material modules. We only need to assemble the doors, windows and other modules based on Ethereum, and then we can build the house.

2. Let's assume that we want to build a website today. If we start from scratch, then we need to develop each module from scratch. Ethereum is equivalent to developing all modules such as login module, payment module, e-commerce module, community module, etc. in advance. We only need to carry out secondary development based on Ethereum. The login module includes WeChat login, Weibo login, account and password login, password retrieval, recharge password, etc. It is all ready. We don't need to redevelop them one by one, we can just call them directly.

Ethereum’s development history and major events

At the end of 2013, Vitalik Buterin released the first version of the Ethereum white paper and called on a group of developers who recognized the concept of Ethereum to launch the project.

July 2014

Ethereum launched a 42-day pre-sale of ether, raising more than 30,000 bitcoins. Then, the whole process of testing, launching, listing on exchanges, and currency value appreciation was as smooth as a cheat.

2015

In July 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was launched and has been continuously upgraded. According to the white paper, the development of the Ethereum network is divided into four stages. The Ethereum team gave each stage a literary name, namely Frontier, Home, Metropolis, Tranquility, and

1. Frontier

Frontier is the first phase of the Ethereum network, which lasted from July 2015 to March 2016. This phase is the initial stage of the Ethereum network. In this phase, there is only a command line interface, no graphical interface, and it is mainly suitable for developers.

2. Homestead

On March 14, 2016, Ethereum entered the Homeland stage. Compared with the Frontier stage, the operation of the Ethereum network is more stable, and the security and reliability are improved. In this stage, the usability of Ethereum is greatly improved, and ordinary users can also experience and use Ethereum conveniently. The Ethereum graphical interface wallet was produced in this stage.

3. Metropolis

The third phase of the Ethereum network is Metropolis. The Metropolis phase is divided into two small upgrades, Byzantium and Constantinople. Both upgrades are hard forks.

The Byzantium version was upgraded on October 16, 2017. This upgrade mainly includes 5 Ethereum improvement proposals, which enable faster and safer transactions on Ethereum and make Ethereum's smart contracts suitable for commercial transactions. At the same time, the difficulty of mining was increased, and the block reward was reduced from 5ETH to 3ETH.

The Constantinople version upgrade was scheduled for March 1, 2019. The upgrade was originally scheduled for mid-2018, but was postponed several times for various reasons. It was originally expected that the consensus algorithm would be converted from PoW to a PoW/PoS hybrid consensus algorithm, but this was not actually achieved.

Although the goals planned in the roadmap were not achieved, this upgrade also brought some changes to Ethereum. This upgrade includes 5 Ethereum improvement proposals. The main changes after the upgrade include: the block reward is further reduced from 3ETH to 2ETH, the difficulty bomb is postponed for 12 months, and the shift instruction is added to the Ethereum virtual machine.

The Constantinople upgrade is complete, marking the end of the Ethereum Metropolis phase.

4. Serenity

The fourth phase of Ethereum is the Serenity Phase, which is the last milestone in the Ethereum roadmap and the release time is to be determined. In the Serenity Phase, Ethereum will completely switch from PoW to PoS, and Ethereum will also enter the 2.0 phase.

Interested friends can also take a look at the "Research on Market Fluctuations Caused by Historical Forks of Ethereum" report released by Gate.io compiled by Yingfu Investment. It is very detailed and comprehensive, and the conclusions are basically the same: it will probably rise first and then fall!

Of course, in addition to understanding the rise and fall of this random walk event, everyone can also learn some information about the historical forks of Ethereum through this report. Yingfu Investment believes that this report is still worth reading.

June 2016

But life is not always smooth sailing, and Ethereum suffered a heavy blow in June 2016. At that time, Ethereum's well-known project The DAO was hacked and lost more than 60 million US dollars worth of ETH. The Ethereum team then "recovered" the stolen funds by rolling back, but some community members believed that this violated the basic spirit of blockchain that it cannot be rolled back or tampered with, and still insisted on maintaining the old chain. Since then, two independent blockchain projects have been split - Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, corresponding to different consensus concepts.

2017

In 2017, a game called “Ethereum Cats” was built on Ethereum. As soon as it went online, it quickly created a cat-raising craze in the cryptocurrency world and inspired a large number of developers to develop commercial applications on Ethereum.

2018

The entire blockchain industry is developing rapidly, and the market is very optimistic about the future prospects of digital currency or cryptocurrency. The price of Ethereum has reached an all-time high of 11,009 yuan, and its market value ranks second only to Bitcoin. Overall, Ethereum currently occupies half of the underlying blockchain application market.

2019

On March 1, 2019, Beijing time, Ethereum completed the Constantinople/Saint Petersburg upgrade, which marked the completion of the third phase in the Ethereum roadmap and is moving towards the final fourth phase.

The Future of Ethereum

It is said that 2018 is the year of blockchain implementation. In the future business world, most companies will put their business processes into enterprise blockchain. Suppose your company's contracting party wants to maintain data cooperation with you. But they don't want to use your data facilities, but want to use other similar tools instead. At this time, you can easily and quickly build a new blockchain for data sharing between the two parties.

For a long time, we have been accustomed to the "centralized" operation of society and top-down command and control, but we should and can create a better world. In the near future, every aspect of our lives will be transformed and subverted by blockchain.

With the help of Ethereum, we can create more "decentralized" tools and technologies. These tools can not only make our economy more prosperous, but also transform our culture and political system, so that more people can be qualified to share information, culture and power, and make our society more fair and democratic.

Yingfu Investment believes that the physical assets of human society are shifting to virtual assets, which is a great historical dimension. In the face of great opportunities, you can't see it, you can't understand it, and if you see it, it's too late. This wealth movement is at the cognitive level. Those who dare to participate, learn, and act will eventually benefit from this stage.
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