They drove for 20 hours, and the whole way they talked about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, how it's going to change the world.
They talk about concept after concept, each crazier than the last. It's as if their brains are constantly being rocked by new ideas.
"Bitcoin-based development like mastercard can create so many possibilities. There are also completely separate blockchains emerging, such as Contracecoin and FUTURE Coin (NXT)." "Everyone wants to extend blockchain technology beyond peer-to-peer cash," Lewen said.
When they talked about Bulin's Ethereum White Paper, Donofrio spent some time reading it and said:
"So this thing wants to be the platform for all the tokens and blockchain applications we've been talking about, but it doesn't have specific features designed for various uses."
"Yes, it has a machine at its core." Joy said.
"Ethereum Virtual Machine." D 'Onofrio said, leafing through the white paper.
"Yes, it's Turing-complete and can handle any snippet of code you throw at it." Joy said.
Turing completeness is named after mathematician Alan Allen. Turing's concept of naming. A turing-complete machine can execute any code. Bitcoin has a script language that supports certain kinds of computing, but Ethereum's Turing-complete language is designed to support whatever programmers dream of and still operates in a decentralized fashion.
"The problem with turing-complete machines is that infinite loops can destroy them. For example, if you ask the computer to do X+X and keep adding as long as the result is less than five, you also tell the computer that X equals one. The computer will keep adding X until the machine crashes." Joy said.
"Oh, so it's vulnerable," Donofrio said.
Gail Carson levine respond: "yes, but the etheric fang encrypted with its internal currency" etheric currency "solved the problem. Each operation steps are cost, the user needs to take the etheric money paid. Every time you call the etheric fang perform a code, you also want to tell it, the etheric how much money are you most willing to pay. If it does not have enough money to carry out the program, the machine will stop working."
"So ether is not just a PEER-to-peer payment like Bitcoin, it's also used to make networks work?" Donofrio said.
"Yes, that's why Buterin calls it the" crypto fuel. "It's the fuel that makes the Ethereum network work." Joy said.
D 'Onofrio leaned back in his chair, his fingers to his temples, his brain shaking again.
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a proof-of-work blockchain, which means miners are rewarded with Ether for verifying transactions. The miner decided whether to deal with the deal for a fee. By separating fuel from ether, ethereum is meant to keep computing costs flat even as cryptocurrency prices fluctuate with supply and demand in the market.
For example, the computation cost of a transaction is 100 gas, and it always needs 100 gas, but the amount of Ether that the sender pays the miner to process the transaction is based on the market price of ether.
Gas is Ethereum's unit of "computation" required for a program to perform an action. When you execute the transaction, you have to pay the miner processing fee, which is calculated in gas and paid in "Ether")
Bitcoin and Ethereum account models, like wallets and passbooks
One notable difference between Ethereum and the Bitcoin blockchain is the way the ledger is recorded.
Bitcoin uses the "Unspent Transaction Output" (UTXO) model. Each bitcoin account balance is made up of unspent bitcoins left over from other transactions. A balance usually consists of many UTXOs, like a physical wallet, which may contain many bills and coins in denomination. To buy something with Bitcoin, you might have to use a combination of UTXO, just as you would buy something worth $12 with tens and five-dollar bills. The remaining three dollars of the deal will become a new UTXO.
Ethereum uses an "Account/Balance" model that tracks the total Balance, or "status," of each Account. While Bitcoin's UTXO model is similar to notes and coins, Ethereum's model is more like a debit account, with delicate control over the amount of money available, making it easier to execute more complex programs.
In his white paper, Buetlin said that hedging contracts, for example, are better suited to ethereum than bitcoin. For example, when A and B both invest $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, after 30 days, the instruction code will send $1,000 worth of bitcoin to A and the rest to B. Because UTXO can only be all-or-nothing.
But Ethereum has two kinds of accounts: an external owned account and a contract account. Externally owned accounts are controlled by people's private keys and contain no code. The contract account is controlled by code. Each time the contract account receives a message, the code is activated to read and write the message to internal storage, send other messages, or create a new contract.
This leads to another key difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin, what Bulin calls Ethereum's "first-class citizen," a programming language term that refers to the ability to Entities that create and pass as arguments to other functions or into a variable) - Contract accounts have the same rights as external accounts, and this feature makes it easier to use applications that automatically execute code. If the purpose of blockchain technology is to remove intermediaries, the concept is deeply embedded in ethereum's core.
Together they form a base layer: a blockchain built with Turing-complete programming language, which allows anyone to write smart contracts and distributed applications.
Some applications could be built on top of Ethereum, Mr. Buetlin wrote, such as digital currencies, hedge contracts, a domain name system and a reputation system, a collaborative filtering mechanism by which entities give opinions and ratings to each other to determine the rank and category of those entities.
EBay's reputation system, for example, records the ratings of each pair of users after each transaction), a shareholder-run company (a quorum of investors can decide where the money goes) and "could even become the foundation of a social network".
Another example is crop insurance. "How? It's very simple, based on weather data, not any price index" -- in other words, a decentralized trading market. The list goes on.
Buetlin wants to lay the groundwork so that any transaction you can imagine can operate in a PEER-to-peer, untampered, uncensored way.
He imagined a world computer that would take power back from arrogant corporations and governments and make the world more efficient and fair. The possibilities are endless.
"Other cryptocurrencies aim to increase complexity, as well as increase the number of 'features'." He wrote.
Ethereum went the other way, removing some features. Ethereum's protocol does not support multiple transactions, multiple input and output, hash codes, lockout times, or even many of the features that Bitcoin provides.
All the complexity comes from a turing-complete omnipotent combinatorial language that can be used to create any function that can be mathematically described.
Mr Butlin's excitement is palpable at the end of the paper.
"So we have a cryptocurrency protocol that has a very small library, but it does everything that any cryptocurrency can do." So concludes the white paper.