Fragments of the book, The Infinite Machine. How an Army of Crypto-Hackers is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum, written by Camila Russo.
Mooning
As with previous generations of internet-based revolutions, it’s hard to keep that vision pure and pristine. All too often, it gets murky, muddled, and messed up in the face of reality. Visionaries like Vitalik dream of traveling to the moon and beyond, frequently underestimating the gravitational pull that mundane forces like human ambition, greed, and fear can exert. It turns out that revolutionizing financial systems may be easier than overcoming human frailty. There is no app (or dapp) for that yet, though undoubtedly some tech genius somewhere is working on that right now too.
The First Responders
His first choice had to be mathematics. He had already devoted years to it. To him, math was truly beautiful. He looked at all the fields of science and saw that physicists, biologists, and chemists come up with some sort of hypothesis, they prove it, and then a hundred years later somebody comes in and creates an improved model. They pretty much forget everything that was done in the past. It becomes a footnote, and he didn’t want to be a footnote. Mathematics is the only field, he noticed, where laws are thousands of years old. He loved that proximity to immortality: once you prove something, it’s proven forever.
The Announcement
“Ethereum, instead of having features, tries to be simple. We don’t have features, we have the programming language”, he said, his words picking up speed. “Out of this one single Lego brick of cryptocurrency, you can make pretty much everything”.
The White-Shoe Lawyers
He saw decentralized networks as a tool to build the next version of the internet, or Web 3. Web 1 is the internet of the 1990s, before user-generated content, indexed search, and social media platforms. It lived exclusively in desktop computers. Web 2 is the internet as we know it today, with user-generated content, streaming video and music, and location-based services. It thrives on mobile devices. Web 3 was first coined in a 2066 New York Times article referring to a third-generation internet. This new internet is made up of concepts including the “semantic web”, or a web of data that can be processed by machines, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining. When algorithms decide what to recommend someone should purchase on Amazon, that’s a glimpse of Web 3.
Takeoff
“Ethereum is not something that’s centrally launched, but instead emerges from consensus”, Stephan Tual wrote in a July 22 blog post explaining the steps for developers who wanted to join the main network.
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Jeff Scott Ward was one of the first hires. The 2008 financial crisis had broken out while he was at school, studying graphic design at Queens College. He struggled to find a work and took a low-paying coding job upon graduating. He felt like he’d been robbed of his future while greedy corporations and banks had gotten out of the whole mess unscathed. He thought, “I didn’t do this, my generation did not do this. This situation we’re in, where we can’t get a better life than our parents, its unbelievably unfair”.
The Fork
Because of Ethereum’s balance account model, a hard fork would be different than a Bitcoin hard fork. To change the Bitcoin blockchain, the entire network history would have to be rolled back to the point in contention. In Ethereum, no transactions are rolled back. Instead, the specific contentious account balance is modified. Some argued that this made a hard fork less intrusive, while others said the ability of developers to arbitrarily tweak the blockchain at will made it worse.