I am reading Mastering Ethereum, and I plan to write weekly posts about what I read in the book.
In the beginning of the book, in a chapter called
The Birth of Ethereum , something caught my attention:
For projects that needed more freedom and flexibility while staying on-chain, a new blockchain was the only option. But that meant a lot of work: bootstrapping all the infrastructure elements, exhaustive testing, etc.
Towards the end of 2013, Vitalik Buterin, a young programmer and Bitcoin enthusiast, started thinking about further extending the capabilities of Bitcoin and Mastercoin (an overlay protocol that extended Bitcoin to offer rudimentary smart contracts). In October of 2013, Vitalik proposed a more generalized approach to the Mastercoin team, one that allowed flexible and scriptable (but not Turing complete) contracts to replace the specialized contract language of Mastercoin. While the Mastercoin team was impressed, this proposal was too radical a change to fit into their development roadmap.
In December 2013, Vitalik started sharing a white paper which outlined the idea behind Ethereum: a Turing-complete, general-purpose blockchain. A few dozen people saw this early draft and offered feedback, helping Vitalik evolve the proposal.
This is when he met Gavin Wood, a C++ coder who became Ethereum Co-Founder.
For those who doesn´t know, Turing-complete means that anything can be programmable without limitation (different than BTC language).
I was intrigued by this Mastercoin. What happened to this project? It is not in coinmarketcap. Was it rebranded?
I find very interesting to imagine Vitalik Buterin going to different companies proposing his ideas, until he finally decided to build his own blockchain and company.
I will keep making posts like this. So, do you think is it better to post in the serious discussion or in the Altcoin spam discussion?
