Ethereum

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethereum
logo
symbol ETH, Ξ
Publishing year 2015
developer Vitalik Buterin , Gavin Wood , Jeffrey Wilcke
Blockchain 337 GB
Mining Ethash
Website www.ethereum.org
Ethereum

Ethereum logo 2014.svg
Basic data

developer Vitalik Buterin , Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilcke
Publishing year 2015
Current  version 1.7.3
( November 21, 2017 )
operating system Windows , Linux , macOS
programming language various
category Distributed system
License GPLv3 , LGPLv 3
German speaking Yes
www.ethereum.org

Ethereum is an open-source, distributed system that offers the creation, management and execution of decentralized programs or contracts ( smart contracts ) in its own blockchain . It thus represents a counter-draft to the classic client-server architecture .

Ethereum uses the internal crypto currency Ether (abbreviated with ETH , symbol: Ξ) as a means of payment for transaction processing, which is processed by participating computers.

As of August 2020, ether is the cryptocurrency with the second largest market capitalization after Bitcoin .

technology

Like Bitcoin , Ethereum is based on blockchain technology. In contrast to Bitcoin, Ethereum is not a pure cryptocurrency, but also a platform for so-called Dapps (decentralized apps), which consist of smart contracts . There are a variety of applications for smart contracts, including e-voting systems, virtual organizations, identity management and crowdfunding .

Ethereum is a distributed system whose participants ( Ethereum accounts or contracts ) use Ethereum's own peer-to-peer network to exchange data without a central server. All participants work with a common database, the Ethereum blockchain. To participate, you need an Ethereum client that synchronizes with the network before use, i.e. downloads and checks every transaction documented in the blockchain since the last synchronization. For the initial synchronization, some clients have a quick mode in which the entire blockchain does not have to be downloaded. Ethereum Wallet , MyCrypto , MyEtherWallet , HelioWallet , Parity , Freewallet and Exodus (multi-asset wallet for various cryptocurrencies) serve as wallets . So-called " light clients " make it possible to monitor the status of part of the entire Ethereum platform or to verify individual transactions with little capacity. However, as of October 2016, these are still in development.

Ethereum is currently still being created using a so-called proof-of-work algorithm, which is to be replaced by a proof-of-stake algorithm in the course of the development phases. If you want to actively participate in the production of Ethereum today (as of April 2017), you can do so via Ethereum mining. A special algorithm (Ethash) is executed on the CPU or GPU . In return, the Ethereum miners receive ether as a reward. In order to bundle their performance and thus increase the chances of a reward, the Ethereum miners join together in mining pools .

Ethereum consists of a number of components or concepts that are interlinked:

Nodes

A node is a computer that is part of the Ethereum network. This saves either an incomplete (light client) or a complete (full node) copy of the blockchain and updates it permanently. There are also so-called mining nodes that confirm transactions, i.e. mine .

Smart contracts

Smart contracts are programs that are automatically executed as soon as a sum specified in the contract has been transferred in ether. This means that there is no longer any need to (manually) check incoming payments, because the transfer starts the consideration specified in the program.

Every transaction is stored within the entire blockchain - i.e. on all devices connected to the network. The decentralized concept of the blockchain permanently checks the integrity of the entire database.

The smart contracts are mostly written in the Solidity programming language specially developed for Ethereum . They are then translated into bytecode and executed on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) . A virtual machine basically encapsulates a client environment from the host environment, i.e. the other applications on a computer. Ethereum's virtual machines were implemented in Ruby, Elixier, C ++, C #, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust, Erlang and soon also in WebAssembly.

Decentralized apps (DApps)

DApps are programs that are executed on the blockchain and thus on all nodes in parallel. The easiest way to think of a DApp is as a website. However, while classic websites areconnected to a central server and possibly databasesvia API , the DApp is connected to the blockchain via smart contracts. The DApp “buys” the “gas” - clearly a fuel - which is required for its execution on the blockchain via the smart contract using ether.

This is more expensive and slower than the traditional client-server model, but it has several advantages: On centralized servers, attackers can manipulate data. However, the decentralized concept of the blockchain permanently checks the integrity of the entire database. Decentralized apps are therefore fault-tolerant, unchangeable and do not suffer any connection interruptions.

Ether

Ether is the "currency" of the Ethereum network. However, the network allows any other currencies - so-called tokens - to be generated, which can then be traded for ether.

There are currently around 110.9 million ethers in circulation. With a market capitalization of around 19.17 billion euros (as of May 11, 2020), Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency system behind the Bitcoin network and ahead of Ripple. Again, it offers more features than a monetary system .

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization ( DAO , German decentralized autonomous organization ) is an organization whose management structure and rules are digitally and unchangeably laid down by a smart contract, which are executed decentrally (here through the Ethereum network) and therefore without conventional decision-making bodies such as one Board gets by.

The DAO

The DAO is the most famous DAO that has been implemented in the Ethereum blockchain so far. It wasdeveloped and publishedby the company Slock.it . Roughly summarized, the task of The DAO is to take ether (the standard cryptocurrency in Ethereum) by selling voting shares, to hold a decision-making body on the use of the collected ether and to transfer the collected ether accordingly. So it is an autonomous and automated investment firm. The DAO was uploaded to the blockchain in April 2016 and went through crowdfunding until May 28, 2016 (the cryptocurrency Ether was bought). The DAO tokens, whichentitle youto vote for thedecisions madein The DAO , can be traded on various crypto exchanges.

On June 17, 2016, a stranger made 3.6 million ethers unusable due to a bug in The DAO's smart contract . At the time, these were worth more than 65 million euros. A hard cleavage (English , hard fork ' ), which makes the attack reversed, was very controversial in the community, but was then decided in a vote. As a result of this hard split, the attacking DAO was deprived of the ethers ; this resulted in two blockchains, the original of which will be continued as Ethereum Classic ( ETC ). The Ethereum Foundation has decided on the basis of various metrics and the vote of the community to limit its development activities only to the split-off (or forked ) main blockchain (still called Ethereum ) and not to deal with Ethereum Classic .

Clients

There are several implementations of Ethereum clients, i.e. end-user application programs:

  • Geth, developed in Go
  • Parity, developed in Rust
  • Aleth, developed in C ++ (formerly Eth)
  • J. Ethereum, developed in Java
  • pyethapp, developed in Python
  • ethereumjs, developed in JavaScript
  • ethereumH, developed in Haskell
  • ruby-ethereum, developed in Ruby

ERC-721 / Non-Fungible Tokens

The Ethereum community has declared the ERC-721 protocol to be the standard for non-fungible tokens on Ethereum.

history

Ethereum was originally described in general by Vitalik Buterin in late 2013 in the whitepaper "Ethereum: A Next Generation Smart Contract & Decentralized Application Platform" and presented in January 2014 at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami. Gavin Wood, co-founder of the project, published the formal specification and design of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with the “Ethereum Yellow Paper” in April 2014 . The Ethereum network started operating in July 2015. Just seven months later, on February 29, 2016, the cryptocurrency Ether used in Ethereum reached a market capitalization of over 500 million US dollars. Another two weeks later, on March 12, 2016, this had already doubled and Ether was able to record a market capitalization of over a billion dollars. The development is supported by the Swiss Foundation Ethereum (Ethereum Foundation) directed.

Co-founder is the former Goldman Sachs manager Joseph Lubin , who develops applications for Ethereum with his New York company ConsenSys. He was CEO of Ethereum Switzerland GmbH (EthSuisse), which was founded in Switzerland in early 2014. Also in 2014 was the establishment of a Swiss Ethereum Foundation and non-profit organization, which started an Ethereum Bitcoin crowdfunding campaign to finance the costs of development , in which the first ethers produced were sold for Bitcoin, with a total of over 18 million US dollars -Dollars came together. In March 2017, research groups, startups and large companies and banks founded the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA).

Ethereum classic became the target of hackers in early 2019, who attacked the blockchain network and stole cryptocurrency worth around USD 1.5 million. They had apparently gained control over the mining network and reorganized the blockchain so that the units of the currency could be issued twice. The Coinbase trading center then stopped trading ethereum classic .

Development phases

In July 2015, the Ethereum beta named Ethereum Frontier was released. Ethereum Frontier was the basic framework for Ethereum, and the main functions were the implementation of a proof-of-work algorithm and distributed programs, so-called smart contracts .

In March 2016, the developers switched from the frontier phase to the next intermediate goal “Homestead”. Above all, Homestead made sure that Ethereum was safer to use as bugs were fixed.

The other main goals of the Ethereum developers are "Metropolis" and "Serenity". In the interim goal Metropolis, applications for the end user and thus a "mainstream phase" are to be created. Metropolis will end users using z. This is facilitated, for example, by light clients, which no longer have to download the entire Ethereum blockchain and thus relieve your own computer. Another innovation comes with the implementation of ZK-SNARKS, which enables completely anonymous transactions to be carried out in the public Ethereum network.

The ultimate goal of serenity is to switch from the proof-of-work algorithm to a proof-of-stake algorithm. Beacon chain and sharding will be fully executed in the second quarter of 2021.

Web links

Ethereum

Ethereum Classic

The DAO

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ api.github.com . (accessed November 21, 2017).
  2. ↑ Ethereum Go GitHub repository. Retrieved May 13, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b Ethereum simply explained. Retrieved November 19, 2017 .
  4. ^ A b c Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations. In: coinmarketcap.com. August 21, 2020, accessed on August 21, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Ethereum Project. Retrieved on October 3, 2016 (English): "YOU CAN BUILD: / A crowdfund to pre-sell a product / A crowdsale to sell virtual shares in a blockchain organization / […] A virtual organization where members vote on issues"
  6. ↑ Ethereum Clients (English)
  7. ↑ ethereum / go-ethereum. In: GitHub. Retrieved October 3, 2016 .
  8. ↑ MyCrypto (English)
  9. ↑ MyEtherWallet (English)
  10. ↑ HelioWallet (English)
  11. ↑ Parity Wallet
  12. ↑ Freewallet (English)
  13. ↑ Exodus Wallet (English)
  14. ↑ ethereum / wiki. In: GitHub. May 9, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 (English): “Note: The light client protocol is under development. [...] The purpose of the light client protocol is to allow users in low-capacity environments (embedded smart property environments, smartphones, browser extensions, some desktops, etc) to maintain a high-security assurance about the current state of some particular part of the Ethereum state or verify the execution of a transaction. "
  15. ↑ Ethereum Mining (German instructions). In: bitcoin-live.de. Retrieved April 1, 2017 .
  16. ↑ What are Ethereum Nodes And Sharding? In: Blockgeeks. October 16, 2017. Retrieved November 19, 2017 .
  17. ↑ Vogel Business Media GmbH & Co. KG: What is Ethereum and how does the ether work? ( dev-insider.de [accessed on November 19, 2017]).
  18. ↑ What is the Ethereum's virtual machine (EVM)? In: Ether.Exchange. January 13, 2020, accessed May 25, 2020 (American English).
  19. ↑ Slock.it (English)
  20. ↑ Whitepaper (English)
  21. ↑ Hannes Grassegger: The first company without people. Zeit Online, May 26, 2016, p. 1 , accessed on October 3, 2016 : “In the case of the DAO, the Slock.it founders devised a simple principle: First, interested parties can buy into the company by purchasing electronic tokens. This is how money gets into the company account, i.e. the fund. The tokens in turn represent voting rights. After a four-week token auction to collect money for the first time, the digital investment fund can decide what to do with the money collected. This is determined by the owners of the voting rights - in an electronic vote, similar to e-voting. The DAO is essentially a money-collecting machine plus a decision-making body. "
  22. ^ Kraken adds support for the Ethereum Standard DAO Framework. In: blog.kraken.com. May 25, 2016, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  23. ↑ ShapeShift.io on Twitter. May 29, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 (English): "In case you missed it, we have added #TheDAO [...] to the exchange."
  24. ↑ Axel Kannenberg: Cryptocurrency Ethereum: Crowdfunding project DAO robbed of millions. heise online, June 17, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 : "Apparently, attackers succeeded in diverting a large part of the DAO capital into a kind of subsidiary through an exploited bug and thus withdrawing access to others. [...] But the attackers cannot do anything with the money for the time being. "
  25. ↑ Exchange rate of the euro on June 17, 2016 to the US dollar. Retrieved October 3, 2016 : "1 euro = 1.1276 US dollars on June 17, 2016"
  26. ↑ After the DAO hack: Ethereum succeeds in the hard fork. In: Heise , on July 20, 2016
  27. ↑ Jeffrey Wilcke: To fork or not to fork. In: Ethereum Blog. Ethereum Foundation, July 15, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 (English): “The DAO, though not a product developed by the Ethereum Foundation, has been a hot topic as of late, both internally in the organization as well as within our community. The hard fork is a delicate topic and the way we see it, no decision is the right one. As this is not a decision that can be made by the foundation or any other single entity, we again turn towards the community to assess its wishes in order to provide the most appropriate protocol change. "
  28. ↑ Vote: TheDAO Hard Fork (English)
  29. ↑ Vitalik Buterin: Hard Fork Completed. In: Ethereum Blog. Ethereum Foundation, July 20, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 (English): "We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork."
  30. ↑ Vitalik Buterin: Onward from the Hard Fork. In: Ethereum Blog. Ethereum Foundation, July 26, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 (English): "The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision. Seeing the results of various metrics, including carbonvote, dapp and ecosystem infrastructure adoption, this means that we will focus our resources and attention on the chain which is now called ETH (ie. The fork chain). "
  31. ↑ go-ethereum homepage
  32. ↑ Parity product website
  33. ↑ Aleth - Ethereum C ++ client, tools and libraries - GitHub repository
  34. ↑ Ethereum C ++ Client GitHub repository
  35. ↑ Ethereum J homepage
  36. ↑ pyethapp GitHub repository
  37. ↑ ethereumjs homepage
  38. ↑ ethereum-client-haskell GitHub repository
  39. ↑ - janx / ruby-ethereum: A Ruby implementation of Ethereum.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / github.com  
  40. ↑ github.com
  41. ↑ coindesk.com
  42. ↑ "Ethereum: A Next Generation Smart Contract & Decentralized Application Platform"
  43. ↑ Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum: A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform. In: Bitcoin Magazine. January 23, 2014, accessed April 9, 2014 .
  44. ↑ Taylor Gerring: Cut and try: building a dream. (No longer available online.) In: Ethereum Blog. Ethereum Foundation, February 9, 2016, archived from the original on February 9, 2016 ; accessed on October 31, 2017 (English): "Last month marked the 2 year anniversary of Ethereum's public announcement at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida, USA. Amid much rumor and excitement, a sizeable crowd mobbed the young Vitalik Buterin after his on-stage announcement […]. [...] To frame things appropriately, consider that Ethereum was formally announced on January 25, 2014. "
  45. ↑ Gavin Wood: ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALIZED GENERALIZED TRANSACTION LEDGER. (PDF) Retrieved February 28, 2018 .
  46. ↑ Gavin Wood: Ethereum: A Secure Decentralized Generalized Transaction Ledger. In: Self published. April 6, 2014, accessed February 20, 2015 .
  47. ↑ Stephan Tual: Ethereum Launches. (No longer available online.) In: Ethereum Blog. Ethereum Foundation, July 30, 2015, archived from the original on August 5, 2015 ; accessed on October 31, 2017 : "A few minutes ago, many of you generated and loaded the Ethereum Genesis block, marking the inception of Frontier, the first Live release of the Ethereum project."
  48. ^ About the Ethereum Foundation. (No longer available online.) In: ethereum.org. July 30, 2015, archived from the original on April 5, 2016 ; Retrieved April 6, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ethereum.org
  49. ↑ Unnecessary gorillas, Interview with Lubin, Der Spiegel No. 28, 2018, pp. 72–73.
  50. ↑ "Cryptocurrency hackers steal $ 1.5m of ethereum classic in rare attack" The Independent of January 8, 2019.
  51. ↑ Homestead Release (English) - Ethereum Blog , February 29, 2016
  52. ↑ Metropolis is imminent | The changes and effects of the third timetable station. In: ethereum-kaufen.de. August 15, 2017. Retrieved August 27, 2017 .
  53. ↑ Ethereum Future: The Ethereum Roadmap. April 10, 2016, accessed on October 3, 2016 : “The last Ethereum phase is mainly concerned with mining. [...] A change from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. "
  54. ↑ Ana Alexandre: Ethereum wants to reduce emissions by 10 times by 2021. Cointelegraph, July 5, 2019, accessed June 11, 2020 .