The World’s Largest Computer: The Story of Ethereum
We have been saying thousands of machines connected to each other for a long time. These machines work independently, creating systems that cannot be broken or bent, or changed backward within systems that are not connected to a single secure location. This is accepted in the world in terms of money and its digital transfer, which is the area where trust is most needed.
Of course, these thousands of interconnected machines have other powers besides such a large common ledger and record keeping. The name of the system that set out to use these powers is Ethereum. To put it very roughly, Ethereum claims to be the world’s largest computer to which thousands of machines are connected. We will look at the details, but Ethereum has an interesting story, it is worth mentioning briefly.
Ethereum is reducing electricity consumption by 99 percent with “Merge”
Vitalik Buterin: an 18-year-old genius
A few years after the emergence of Bitcoin, the father of a family who immigrated to Canada from Russia in 2011 told his 17-year-old son about Satoshi’s work and Bitcoin. Fascinated by his father’s words, this young man named Vitalik Buterin suddenly finds himself in this world. First, they set up a magazine called Bitcoin Magazine with their friends. He is highly influential with his talents in technology, writing, and math. According to the rumor, this young man, who has the ability to multiply three-digit numbers in his mind at twice the speed of a normal person, shows his talents on the global platform by winning the Bronze medal at the International Information Olympics at the age of 18.
Why is Ethereum leading the way in decentralized finance?
Buterin, by making improvements to Bitcoin, tries to pass many other functions (such as sending non-monetary assets and creating digital contracts) to this system apart from Bitcoin transfer. However, this is very difficult. Because Bitcoin is designed to do one job (that is, send money) well in terms of its feature, the only issue on its developers’ minds is “How do we make Bitcoin more reliable against external threats?”, innovation is not among their priorities (and still is, this is what they’re most proud of: Bitcoin hasn’t stumbled once since 2009 and couldn’t be “hacked”. they are wandering around.) Buterin has a vision of a world computer that can do much more than just a calculator-like function that keeps track of transactions in which money moves from one place to another.
The emergence of Ethereum
In 2013, Buterin introduced Ethereum with 15 fellow software developers. But there is only one concept design yet — it’s still early for a product that can make money or get an investment. Just then, Peter Thiel (who knows; co-founder of PayPal and the first person to make a deposit on Facebook) gives them a $100,000 scholarship. They say getting this scholarship is harder than getting into the best universities in America. Of course, not only that, Buterin also receives the World Technology Award with Ethereum in 2014. That year, Elon Musk in the Energy category, the famous Walter Isaacson in the Media field, and Buterin in the Technology field will be the other recipients of this award.
DeFi is inspired by the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin
Rewards do not fill your stomach, investment is needed
While Peter Thiel’s fellowship helped the team move forward in creating a more mature product, it wasn’t enough. In September 2014, they collect money with an interesting method. They say that “we collect 2,000 Ether = 1 Bitcoin in the first two weeks, then this figure will gradually decrease, the last ones will receive 1,337 Ether=1 Bitcoin”. It is a method that has not been tried before because they do not collect dollars or Euros as we know it, they collect Bitcoin! Bitcoin was little known back then. It is not subject to any regulation. But there isn’t a company for sale anyway — what are you going to do? It’s a complicated process but relatively comfortable. They set up a foundation in Switzerland and sell through this foundation, collecting 18.5 million US dollars with the money of that time. That’s an average of $0.31 for one ether.
Decentralized Finance, Smart Contracts, and Blockchain
It should be noted that all of the money collected above will be spent on the awards and salaries to be given to the developers, as well as the projects related to the Ethereum and Crypto world that will be supported by the Ethereum Foundation. In addition to the ether sold in this way, a tenth of this amount is reserved for the founders. So, instead of the company founders owning most of the company, which we talked about in our previous articles, in this new model, it has been replaced by owning a small portion of the ether sold to raise money. This is also an innovation.
This is the story of Ethereum, the world’s larget computer. Would you like to be part of it? Trade on Venice Swap.
