In the beginning the Prophet Satoshi brought us Bitcoin. And the cryptogeeks and libertarians looked upon it, and said lo, we smile upon this, for it is good, and decentralized, and solves the Byzantine Generals Problem.
In fault-tolerant computer systems, and in particular distributed computing systems, Byzantine fault tolerance is the characteristic of a system that tolerates the class of failures known as the Byzantine Generals' Problem, which is a generalized version of the Two Generals' Problem
And then came the Prophet Vitalik, bearing Ethereum; and lo, it was even better.
Maybe.
What is Ethereum? It’s a combination of a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, and a vast decentralized computer. You already know Bitcoin is a currency whose transactions are secured by the immense computing power of its distributed network of “miners,” rather than any central entity. But you may not appreciate that every Bitcoin transaction is actually a program written in the Bitcoin scripting language — aka a “smart contract.”
Bitcoin’s contractual language is quite limited, by design. Bitcoin is programmable money … with a highly restrictive programming language.
Now this new made-up-magical-money thing is even more complicated? Why should I care?”
Think of it as a kind of corporation incorporated only on the Ethereum blockchain, whose laws consist entirely of those defined by its contract code. A corporation that appears to be a means of investing in the future … without having any concrete idea exactly what that future is yet. For many people, that kind of investment is a holy grail.
Donald McIntyre · Denver, Colorado
Bitcoin is like a pocket calculator compared to Ethereum, it is only natural for developers to start spending more resources to build on a blockchain with much better smart contract capability.
