Article | Moke
There is no shortage of programmers who want to change the world with code.
I’ve long wanted to write about Dr. Gavin Wood, ethereum’s veritable “invisible brain,” but there was little news or coverage about him because he kept a low profile. Compared with Vitalik, a prodigy who often attends the world’s major blockchain summits, Dr. Gavin seems low-key and mysterious. But Gavin Wood is no stranger to anyone who knows how ethereum projects have evolved. Vitalik initiated the Ethereum project, conceived the white paper and completed the first draft, and conducted the crowdfunding for Ethereum (now called an ICO), but it wasn’t until Gavin joined the ethereum project that the technical implementation of Ethereum took off. Dr. Gavin laid the technical foundation for Ethereum.
The Yellow Book of god
The Ethereum project’s groundbreaking foundation, the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM, was defined by Dr. Gavin in his Ethereum Yellow Book, It can be seen that the Ethereum Yellow Book is as important to Ethereum as Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” is to the germination of British capitalism and Marx’s “Das Kapital” is to the socialist tide. Although the original idea of Ethereum came from Vitalik, it was Dr. Gavin who designed and planned a large part of the protocol details of Ethereum, as a 20-year-old was still technically limited in the implementation and implementation of technical details. It was said that when Ethereum ran into Edge Case boundary issues, both VB and Geth were unable to solve the problem, and Gavin took the lead in the final decision.
So what exactly is an Ethereum virtual machine as defined in Ethereum and Gavin’s Ethereum Yellow Book?
Ethererum: Is an open decentralized blockchain autonomous system, more specifically, a programmable blockchain system. Anyone can build and use decentralized applications, known as DApps, that run on ethereum.
Ethereum Virtual Machine: EVM can execute code of arbitrary algorithmic complexity. Developers can create applications to run on EVM using Solidity, which is syntactically similar to JavaScript and Python.
In short, the Ethereum virtual machine and the “smart contracts” on top of it are a major innovation and killer of the Ethereum system.
Gavin first heard about bitcoin in 2011 and, like many of the main characters in the story, was not initially interested in it. According to Gavin, bitcoin was an experiment that focused too much on the form of blockchain currency rather than the technology behind it. But when he revisited the landmark experiment in 2013, he became fascinated with blockchain technology, ushering in a new era for Gavin and Vitalik — Vatalik was introduced to him through a friend. Gavin wrote on his personal page about the encounter:
And Ethereum has dominated my life since.
Gavin then embarked on a coding journey by a talented programmer, working on a series of projects including an early C++ version of ethereum, an ethereum Python prototype demo, and an official Geth client based on the Go language. For two years Gavin led ethereum’s prototyping, system development, and final release test. In the past two years, the talented programmer, who graduated from the Computer science department of The University of York in the UK with a master’s degree and a PhD, has been quietly tapping away at code, but thus leaving a strong mark in blockchain history.
Out of Ethereum and out of trouble
Subsequently, Gavin Wood left Ethereum for a variety of reasons that are unknown, but it was heard that there were disagreements among the team members about the future direction and internal conflicts. After all, the ctos who lay the groundwork for Ethereum’s underlying technology are highly paid, and ethereum COO Stephan Taul is said to have expressed strong dissatisfaction with his high salary when he left. The real reason Gavin left may not be clear, but Gavin left to create one of the most well-known Ethereum clients in the world: Parity. Parity, written in Rust, as anyone who has used it knows, at one point came close to cornered the market for Ethernet wallets. Gavin was the first person to write an ethereum client in Rust, which was several times more powerful than Geth and C++ clients.
It is said that on the eve of the ethereum DevCon2.0 development conference, hackers launched an attack using the vulnerability of Geth, leading to the collapse of all Geth clients. In addition, ethereum was attacked by a large amount of spam information. Only Parity survived due to Gavin’s excellent architectural design, while Geth performed poorly. Through this battle, Parity became famous, and the ore pool nodes switched to Parity one after another, thus basically establishing its position in the Ethereum system.
In the competition with Geth, The Parity development team led by Gavin knew the weaknesses of Ethereum very well. Then, in the era of ICO explosion in 2017, Gavin started to take a “chaotic road”, successively supporting and participating in many development projects as a consultant. However, there is also a “black pot” — many of the platform’s project tokens cannot escape the curse of violent fluctuations and have served as consultants for Ambrosus, Omise, Melonport, Grid Singularity and other projects. Therefore, he dabbles in the project praise or criticism, and even blame its regardless of identity, casual platform suspicion.
Third generation blockchain
In 2015 Gavin made his third move, announcing at the Parity Tech Conference that he was launching the Polkadot project, or what we call the third generation blockchain, which addresses cross-chain communication and data delivery. After two years of theoretical research and project preparation, the ICO program will be officially launched on October 15, 2017. (Note: ICO, abbreviated as Initial Coin Offering, stands for Initial Coin Offering, derived from the concept of Initial public Offering in the stock market. It is a financing behavior in which blockchain projects issue tokens for the first time and raise bitcoin, Ethereum and other common digital currencies as development funds.)
So what exactly is broken chain, and how or why does Polkadot do it?
Official definition: Polkadot is a heterogeneous multichain technology. Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi-chain technology.
To put it simply, most of the existing blockchains are independent networks, not interconnected. What Polkadot wants to do is to use its protocol and cross-chain technology to connect these separate blockchains and communicate and transfer data to each other.
Isn’t it a bit abstract? Let’s take an example: like our operating system, you can use Apple system, you can use Windows system, or you can use IOS system, you can use Android system, but through the Internet protocol or mobile network to communicate with each other and transfer data. Gavin has devised a protocol for relay and parallelism to deal with this problem: For example, when a node on the IOTA protocol needs to transfer a piece of data to the Ethereum network, it first connects to Polkadot’s network through one of Polkadot’s Bridges. Then through a RelayChain to find the appropriate ParaChains for processing, and then through validation to process the information.
There are two parallel networks. For example, IOTA and Ethereum are two parallel networks. When your lights fail and need to be replaced, your lights are connected to the smart home’s Internet of Things network. So in the event of a broken light bulb, the iot network passes this information to the Ethereum smart contract network via the Polkadot network intermediary and executes a “smart contract for new lights”, which transfers information from the IOTA network to the Ethereum network and ultimately executes a smart contract.
It’s important to note that while many blockchain networks have previously only implemented virtual world information transfer, Polkadot has implemented data reading from the real world. This is an important innovation beyond Ethereum. It’s not easy for public chains to withstand large-scale deployments around the world like Ethereum, a computer architecture that runs all applications.
So Polkadot solves two core problems, one is interconnection and the other is extension, and extension is achieved through interconnection, which is essentially a problem.
One god compared Polkadot to Cosmos (note: Cosmos is also a blockchain project that supports multiple chains) :
“Polkadot beat Cosmos. Because Cosmos only supports value transfer, at least not extending Ethereum, Polkadot supports cross-chain intermodulation of smart contracts. So, in theory, dApps on Ethereum could be made into separate chains and connected via Polkadot, which would eliminate the need for ethereum scalability. Cosmos is a cross-chain transfer of the value of the coin itself, much the same as other cross-chain projects.”
The principles of Polkadot are not covered here, but those who are interested can go to the Polkadot website: www.polkadot.network
Since the vision of this project is so big, is there any chance for us to participate or invest in it? Maybe this is the next Ethereum. The answer is yes. If you are Chinese or American, however, you are sorry to say that Polkadot does not accept American or Chinese investors. Of course, this is related to the supervision of ICO in the two countries, which is also a helpless move. Polkadot’s global ICO will start on October 15, 2017 at 18pm and will take the form of a Dutch auction.
Gavin has given Polkadot at least a two-year development period, meaning that even if you invest in the project, it will take at least two years to see results. This and May 2017, the breeding of the group of magic dance ICO scenery formed a sharp contrast, clearly means that we only play with long-term value investors, can not afford to wait or do not disturb us silently development, the team also listed 14 risk tips participants in the official website. In fact, this is the attitude of the blockchain development team.
Will Gavin continue the legacy of Ethereum and Parity in two years?
This article is originally written by Jinniu Finance, reprinted please indicate the source.
