The history of the development of blockchain is actually the history of three men.
The blockchain has been in development for 10 years. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed the birth of many star projects, and we have seen a lot of projects fail. It may need more than three days to introduce all the projects that have appeared in the past 10 years.
Therefore, the theme of the sixth class of the [Blockchain Lecture] is “a brief history of blockchains”, and we divide these 10 years into three eras, from the digital currency of the 1.0 era to the smart contract of the 2.0 era, and then to the 3.0 era, the imagination of the comprehensive application of blockchain technology. In this way, everyone can establish a cognitive framework quickly for the development history of the blockchain.
01 Blockchain 1.0 Era: Bitcoin + Altcoins
In November 2008, Nakamoto published a paper entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", which first proposed the concept of the blockchain. Then in January 2009, he used his first version of the software to dig up the first block of Bitcoin, the genesis block, and won the first batch of mining awards. The bitcoin era has begun.
Just like all new things, Bitcoin was not admitted at the beginning. For a long time, Bitcoin was seen as a cheap toy. For example, on some websites, people used Bitcoin as a virtual currency for entertainment (similar to the tokens of some entertainment websites today).
The turnaround occurred in May 2010, when a programmer in Florida in the United States spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizza coupons worth $25 and used them to buy two pizzas for takeaway.
After the "pizza day", Bitcoin was used by more and more people for real payment scenarios, and the use of Bitcoin become more widespread. More and more people accept it, and the value of Bitcoin is beginning to show. As bitcoin can only be produced quantitatively, and after repeated trading, the price is getting higher and higher.
Bitcoin's continued rising trend has directly attracted many speculators or competitors. They have introduced new digital currencies by copying and modifying a small portion of the bitcoin code. From 2011 to the present, at least hundreds of them have appeared. Later, we collectively referred to the digital currency of these fake bitcoins as Altcoins, among which the most famous ones are Litecoin, Dash, and Dogecoin.
02 Blockchain 2.0 Era: Ethereum turned out
As a blockchain network, Bitcoin is limited to trading between users, so it cannot serve as a basic platform for application development.
Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin (known as V God) saw the potential of blockchain technology and the limitations of the Bitcoin network. He proposed that the Bitcoin core team increased the functionality o the Bitcoin network, but was rejected.
Time has changed. The young Russian boy (only 19 years old by then) was not frustrated by the rejection of the proposal, but turned to develop a platform to realize his own ideas. And this platform is Ethereum.
The biggest difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is the information recorded on the blockchain. In addition to trading information, Vitalik proposes to record smart contracts in the blockchain to achieve more complex functions. (For an understanding of smart contracts, see the account history article "With a smart contract, reminding friends to pay back the money is no longer awkward")
At the end of 2013, Vitalik released the white paper of the first edition of Ethereum and convened a group of developers who recognized the concept of Vitalik to start the project. In July of the following year, Ethereum opened a 42-day pre-sale of Ethereum for a total of more than 30,000 bitcoins. Next, passing the test, going online and to the exchange, and the value of the currency rising, the whole process is just as smooth.
But life has ups and downs, a heavy blow to Ethereum came in June 2016. At that time, The DAO, a well-known project of Ethereum, was hacked and lost worth more than 60 million US dollars ETH. Subsequently, the Ethereum team “recovered” the hackers to steal assets by means of rollback. However, some community members believed that the basic spirit of the blockchain could not be rolled back and could not be tampered with, so they still insisting on maintaining the old chain. From then on, Ethereum split out two independent blockchain projects– Ethre Square (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC), based on different consensus concepts.
Although experienced a fork, Ethereum quickly recovered. A game called "CryptoKitties" was built on the Ethereum. As soon as its release, it quickly whipped up a cat whirlwind in the world of cryptocurrency, stimulating a large number of developers to develop commercial applications on Ethereum. At that time, Ethereum is the limelight.
03 Blockchain 3.0 Era: EOS emerges
Like Vitalik, there is another guy who has been beaten by the Bitcoin team. He is Daniel Larimer (BM, bytemaster), the founder of the EOS, the star of the blockchain world.
In 2009, BM is also preparing to show up in the blockchain. After studying bitcoin, BM raised some bitcoin problems and wanted to improve. As a result, Bitcoin founder Nakamoto replied to him "If You don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."
How can this be tolerated? so BM began to create its own blockchain project, which is the BitShares (bit stock) released in 2013, which achieves the block speed beyond Bitcoin under the blessing of the DPOS consensus algorithm; but what BM wants to do are far beyond that, and creating a non-organized, non-violent free world and guaranteeing freedom of life and property are his ultimate missions.
So Steem was born. It was a blockchain database that supported community building and social interaction through cryptocurrency rewards. But because of its narrow focus on functionality, BM eventually left, and he decided to create a new system on his own. This new system is EOS.
EOS can be regarded as a summary of BM's understanding of blockchain technology. By introducing a new blockchain framework design, it is possible to process millions of transactions per second and users can use it for free, meeting the high frequency requirements of more dApps, thus to speed up the process of blockchain technology to achieve full application.
The two major problems solved by EOS: high transaction costs and low trading frequency are precisely the two points that Ethereum are currently being criticized by users. This is often the focus of the debate between BM and Vitalik in maintaining their superiority in the public chain.
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See, isn’t the history of blockchain development actually the history of three men, i.e. Nakamoto Satoshi, Vitalik and BM? Although it is impossible to foresee who will laugh at the end, what we can foresee is that the blockchain technology they use will create a miracle in the future.
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