Cover of The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum

by Camila Russo

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Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum:

The inventors of JavaScript never intended for someone to build Gmail, or Facebook or Bitcoin wallets on top of it. We don’t know what people will build on top of Ethereum, but the idea is that they will be decentralized and unstoppable applications.
Who could I turn to? Around that time, a colleague in another office told me about some weird digital currency called Bitcoin, which Argentines were using to get around this problem. I decided to write about it. The people I talked with for my article had been living with some form of inflation and/or currency controls all their lives and so had their parents. They understood right away how significant it was to be able to buy a currency that’s not controlled by anyone and, therefore, can’t be stopped or seized. Its issuance rate was dictated by algorithms and computer code, not by the whims of politicians and central bankers.
Serenity would allow Ethereum to become “the world computer” as it was meant to be, “not a smart phone from 1999 that can process 15 transactions per second and maybe potentially play snake,” Vitalik said. Serenity will be “even more decentralized than today,” and have “hopefully about 1,000 times higher scalability.” He didn’t set a date for the launch of Serenity, but reassured the assembled that it was “really no longer so far away.
In March 2011, the community gained a new member. Vitalik Buterin was seventeen years old, and his first post on the BitcoinTalk forum said: On the subject of economics, I could write about the concept like the social taboos around money and the practical inconvenience of paying anything less than about $5 with conventional tools like credit cards or PayPal ( . . . ) and how Bitcoin offers a way to fix this.5
Satoshi Nakamoto left a message in the first Bitcoin block ever mined, which read: The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
When a transaction is executed, it is broadcast to all the computers in the network for them to update their ledgers. Transactions are bunched together to form a block of data, and once that block runs out of space (1 megabyte right now), computers race to solve a complex mathematical puzzle to verify the transactions, seal the block, and record it on their ledgers.
Another issue to address in peer-to-peer, pseudonymous systems was Sybil attacks. Just as coins can be replicated in a digital world, so can identities. This is a problem in a network of equal peers because an attacker could create a large number of pseudonymous identities to gain a disproportionately large influence. Researchers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor made the first break toward solving these problems when they invented the “proof-of-work” concept in 1993. Proof-of-work is aimed at deterring attacks or spam in a network by requiring the users of the service to do some work, so that it would be economically inviable to create useless or malicious data.
Ethereum isn’t only a network for its digital currency, ether. It’s meant to be the base layer for developers to build whatever application they can dream of, including issuing their own coin.
My intention is that anyone, anywhere, will be able to pick this up, without prior knowledge of blockchain technology, and be captivated by a fascinating story: an idealistic hero, his band of misfits, and the challenges they face to make their incredibly ambitious dream a reality. By the final pages, I hope you will have learned more about this dream, about how this army of hackers is building an alternative to the way the world works right now, that is, concentrated in the hands of a few powerful entities. They’re seeking to put that power into the hands of individuals, so that people can have greater control over the things they own, from assets to data, and more freedom to use those things in the ways they choose—that’s what I meant when I said cryptocurrencies are about revolution.
All the while, traditional banks can take as long as a week and charge as much as $50 for an international money transfer; they can refuse service to businesses they disagree with or simply defraud clients, and governments can devalue local currencies with reckless printing of new money to finance spending, or they can ban foreign currency purchases and limit withdrawals.
Ethereum wasn’t just another Bitcoin project. It was the most ambitious cryptocurrency project since Bitcoin.
In the case of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, digital coins are only created through a network of computers, which must expend inordinately large amounts of energy to confirm transactions (that is, “mining” coins); receiving coins is a reward granted to those who use their computers to do that work.
Once the nodes agree that the seal is valid, the block is recorded and linked to the previous block using the accepted hash, forming a chain of blocks, thus the name “blockchain.
And then there were those who genuinely wanted to create world-changing applications using blockchain technology.
I felt like Alice following the White Rabbit into a world of impossible dreams: banking without banks, breeding digital cats, self-organizing companies with no CEOs, and talk of flying to the moon.
Later that month, when Ethereans were getting ready for yet another upgrade, called Istanbul, Vitalik pointed out that the code changes for the hard fork “happened with *zero* involvement from The Great Dictator™.
Vitalik was actively trying to diminish his role in the Ethereum community. He didn’t want to be seen as a larger-than-life, charismatic leader. Instead he wanted to gradually blend into the background and become one of many researchers focusing on proof-of-stake and scaling solutions, so that the network didn’t need him for its survival.
There was also Dfinity, Stellar, Tron, NEO, Steem, Loom, Waves, Tezos, and others, vying to become the dominating decentralized applications platform, or at least the preferred platform for a specific use case. Ethereum developers and fans would scoff at most of them, pointing out how they compromise on security, decentralization, or both to increase throughput.
He took Aeron and most of the C++ developers with him and created a whole new Ethereum client on the more cutting-edge Rust language.
He could geek out about cryptography and decentralization with them and make nerdy math jokes and they would get the punch line.
The first time I learned about Bitcoin was in 2013. I was living in Buenos Aires, reporting on the Argentine market for Bloomberg News. But I was more than reporting about it; I was also living it. As I wrote about double-digit inflation, the pesos I earned for those stories quickly depreciated. I started exchanging my salary to dollars as soon as I got it, until one day the president woke up and said, Nope! You can’t do that anymore.
Peer-to-peer networks interconnect equally privileged nodes with each other, allowing users to share and transfer data without the need of a centralized administrative entity. Systems using this architecture are resilient against censorship, attacks, and manipulation. Just like the mythological Hydra, there’s no one head that you can cut off to kill it, and it gets stronger after each attack.
government is bad because it’s a monopoly more than for any other reason. You can think of the world as a free market anarchy where all the land is legitimately owned by 193 landowners that allow you to live on the land under certain conditions.

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