What is Ethereum
Ethereum is a blockchain platform based on blockchain technology that allows anyone to build and use decentralized applications. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is open source and maintained by supporters from all over the world. Unlike Bitcoin, which only provides limited-function scripts, Ethereum provides a "Turing complete" virtual machine, called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), or EVM for short. Users can create smart contracts on the EVM ( Smart Contract). The universal currency in the Ethereum platform is Ether (Ether), or ETH for short. Ether can be used for transfer transactions between accounts or to pay for resources consumed by contracts running on the EVM.
Founder of Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin (Vitalik Buterin) was born in Russia on January 31, 1994, then moved to Canada and has dual citizenship of Russia and Canada. In 2011, through Bitcoin, he learned about blockchain and cryptocurrency technology and was deeply attracted by blockchain technology. In September 2011, as one of the co-founders, he founded a website designed to provide readers with timely and accurate blockchain-related information: Bitcoin Magazine.
For the next two and a half years, Butlin has been thinking about more innovative applications of blockchain technology, and finally released the Ethereum White Paper in September 2013 when he was only 19 years old.
Now, as the soul of Ethereum, he is leading the Ethereum team and is committed to the development and promotion of Ethereum.
Crowdfunding plan
In order to raise the funds needed to develop Ethereum, Butlin launched a crowdfunding. Different from general crowdfunding, this time crowdfunding only accepts Bitcoin as payment, and will use Ethereum's common currency, Ether, as a return after the official release of Ethereum. The brief situation of this crowdfunding is as follows:
Time: July 22, 2014-September 2, 2014, a total of 42 days.
Conversion ratio: Exchange 2000 ETH for every 1 BTC in the first 14 days. After that, the amount of ETH exchanged for 1 BTC every day will be reduced by 30 until 1337 ETH.
Distribution: 19.8% of the amount of ETH issued by crowdfunding will be owned by the Ethereum Foundation, that is to say, 1 / (1 + 19.8%) = 83.47% of the initial Ethereum issued will belong to the people participating in the crowdfunding, and the rest 16.53% of it is owned by the Ethereum Foundation.
The address used to receive crowdfunding bitcoins is: 36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2EogxLo2
This form of crowdfunding is generally referred to today as Initial Coin Offering (Initial Coin Offering), which is commonly referred to as ICO.
technical details
To successfully complete this crowdfunding, several problems must be solved:
Prove that the crowdfunding address is controlled by the Ethereum team
The crowdfunding process is open and transparent, how many BTC raised should be made public to everyone
It is necessary to be able to distribute Ether to the corresponding people participating in the crowdfunding in a timely and accurate manner
The Ethereum team spent a UTXO of this address on the day before the crowdfunding started, thus proving that they hold the private key of this address and proving that they are in control of this address. You can see this transaction here: 592eaf32d83a7db47321642c4b3837d38edfbe57910f4f6abd548e578f51f80a
