User:Aliensyntax/Anarchitecture

Personal research and draft materials on the decentralized web 3.0 technology stack.

=Ethereum=

Ethereum is a public blockchain platform and new organizational principle featuring a computational cryptocurrency and Turing-complete programming environment.

It is the realization of a shared global consensus computer, a single fault-tolerant virtual machine, that serves to facilitate, verify, and enforce the operations of long-lived, stateful objects called accounts and contract-accounts.

Accounts provide persistent accounting and messaging for a valuable token called ether. Contract-accounts provide the further ability to run arbitrary code and replicate data in exchange for ether. More specifically, ether is dynamically traded against gas, an underlying network unit for measuring the expected real-world costs of different code executions and storage operations in the Ethereum network.

The computational resources needed to decide the outcomes of accounts and contract-accounts are thus constrained by economic factors. This is done to prevent various denial-of-service attacks caused by flooding the network with inefficient or malicious transaction requests. In this respect, ether can be further defined as a security mechanism and fairly intricate system of incentives to provide a workaround to the halting problem.

What these underpinnings enable is a distinctive crypto-economic formulation of the concept of a smart contract. A smart contract is "a set of promises agreed to in a 'meeting of the minds'", based on principles of observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability, and further specified in an algorithmic medium governed by protocols for ensuring the mutual-performance of promises between parties. In Ethereum, this is achieved via game-theoretic mechanisms, automation, radical transparency, strong cryptography, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain virtualization, transaction processing, and expressive scripting capabilities; essentially, a set of properties to construct, process, and execute the conditions, procedures, and other technical features of contracts, with the explicit purpose of providing guarantees of atomicity, consistency, immutability, non-repudiability, permanence, provenance, security, and synchronization for the communication and control of value in digital form.

Due to the serverless architecture, free open source and commons-oriented nature of Ethereum, it can be most accurately described as a decentralized system and unique instance of decentralized computing. Like many other blockchain technologies, Ethereum uses a globally executed singleton, i.e. a distributed virtual runtime environment, to coordinate the activities of every node in accordance with a unique consensus protocol, and thus it lacks a single point of failure. Stated differently, Ethereum is engineered to circumvent the need for censorship, centralized authority, hierarchical organization, and more broadly the social phenomenon of faith and/or trust in intermediaries. Along these lines, the Ethereum project can be understood to have a long-standing interest in equipping a very wide audience, particularly developers, with general tools for designing and deploying decentralized autonomous transactions, applications, and organizations into the computing fabric of peer-to-peer economic, social, and political systems.

Because of these functionalities, Ethereum is often characterized as a highly ambitious, complex, and disruptive engineering movement with multifarious and largely speculative consequences.

LEDE DRAFT v.0.1