[Happy Music]
Ok, great, thank you.
So I heard people in the audience complaining in WeChat that I am too quiet so I'm gonna
try to keep it closer to my mouth this time around, we will see if it works.
Great, so this is one of the standard presentations I give when people want a quick overview of the entire Ethereum protocol.
So chances are that you will listen through this: you will catch some things, you won't catch other things
but at the very least you will understand what the broad structure is, and if there is any piece that you don't fully understand
we have quite a few materials online that tell you about the rest. We have our Github Wiki, the website
if you are a developer you can even read things like the yellow paper, and things like the AMC ethereum source code.
If you want to get like that deep in understanding of how the Ethereum protocol works, I highly recommend doing those things
If you have specific questions, I also highly recommend even going into some of our public channels. So, if you go to gitter.im/etherium for example...
you can actually, like literally just talk to our developers, who are like right there and you can ask questions where generally a fairly friendly community I hope
So Anyway, Etherium in 25 minutes. So first of all how did the project start.
So, project started back in 2013. At the time people were very interested in blockchains. back in 2011 there was a project called Namecoin which was trying to make a blockchain based on ? system
In 2013 there were projects called covered coins which were trying like digitize arbitrary digital assets or arbitrary assets and put them on the blockchain.
There were protocols called mastercoin that were trying to integrate all sorts of fairly complex features.
So, there is a consensus that you can do lots of different really cool things with bitcoin or with other blockchains.
So, project started back in 2013. At the time people were very interested in blockchains. People were looking at bitcoin.
People were excited about bitcoin. But people were also realizing that blockchains are useful for things other than just money.
Asset issue in crowd funding, title registration, lots and lots of stuff. The problem is most watching protocols were designed like this
bulky calculator, single-purpose device works reasonably well for if all you care about is adding and multiplying numbers but it does nothing else. And sure someone
with a computer science degree and with a good calculator will think how to hack it to play video game inside of it. But do you really want to do that?
So after this in 2013 there were people who were making protocols that look like this
So, Swiss army knife. Basically you come up with a list of 10 or 20 features you want to have, make a little tiny thing for each one of them, stick them together into a knife and there you go - that's your product or in this case, you know, that's
your blockchain. So, back at the end of 2013 there were lots of projects that looked like this. They just said: "Ok, you know
we want blockchains to be usable for asset issue and crowdfunding, bets prediction markets, identity registration, title registration. Pick a list of twenty different things, have a list of twenty different transaction types
and have a little piece of the protocol that supports each one. So, this is all well and good. The problem is what if you come up with your list of twenty applications,
publish your protocol. Then the next day some guy says: "Oh, look I discovered the 21st blockchain application.
So this is the Etherium way. [laughter, applause]
you buy it once and download immediately comes with 50 or 100 applications. If someone comes up with a new application, they write the code
So, so, why do we love smartphones so much? Basically because the smartphone is nice and generic
How I'm gonna fit it in?" And in 2013 this is exactly what started to happen.
they upload it to the google app play store
and if you want it to be accessible in China you can upload it to Huawei store as well and
then if anyone wants to use your application they don't need to buy a new phone, they don't need to buy a new hardware angle
you just download the app and get started immediately running it. Very simple.
And the cost of actually developing an application - all you have to do is write code.
You don't have to make your own hardware, you don"t have to have your own manufacturing, you don't have to have your own distribution