This promise is still not kept. The Ethereum Network, which is developing and growing day by day, cannot provide the necessary attention and work today. Vitalik Buterin’s dream and promise is “We will create an environment like Google Play and developers will be able to freely share their applications with people on this infrastructure. “We have a long way to go to utopia and this road seems a bit bumpy.

Many applications have been developed on the Ethereum network. The most well-known of these was the Crypto Collectable application called “Crypto Kittens”. Many different applications like this have been created in the system, but very few have received sufficient attention. The main reason for not reaching the sufficient level of interest in the system is the lack of sufficient ease of use and cheapness.
People still see the blockchain world as an incomprehensible and wonderfully difficult world, and in fact, it’s the same for people on the internet. So where does the main difference come from? After a person opens his internet browser, he can do most of the work he wants without any special knowledge. Even if he doesn’t know what’s going on behind and how packets are handled, he doesn’t care. In the Blockchain world, we still tell people how this system works so that Blockchain technology can develop. Confronting many terms that are incredibly confusing to people, it makes people afraid of this technology.

Ethereum is getting more useful and optimized with each new update.

First of all, it is useful to go over the 4 important updates in the short history of Ethereum and understand how we got to today.

When the Ethereum Project was first implemented in 2015, it was announced that there would be 4 important updates and each update would be included in the system with a group of EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal). EIPs are proposals developed for direct inclusion in the Ethereum network. These proposals are written for developments that will or should occur in the Ethereum network, and the accepted ones will be implemented in the next hard fork / update. For example, the current version, Constantinapole, consists of 4 EIPs. The main purpose of EIPs is to solve security, privacy and scalability problems.

The Olympic version was the last prototype version of Ethereum. In order to solve the problems in this version and switch to the live network, a bug bounty program was organized on the Olympic Network with a total reward of 25,000 Ether. After the completion of the Bug Bounty process, the Ethereum Network went online with Frontier and started to be developed live.

The first live leg of the Ethereum development process is Frontier, and this version is the first live Ethereum version released in 2015. Frontier enabled its users to do Ether Mining on the PoW infrastructure, and to develop Dapps and tools connected to these Dapps on the new platform. Due to certain problems, Frontier was getting updates via soft forks almost every week, and this was not very pleasing to the users.

The second step of the Ethereum development process was the Homestead version released in March 2016. The Homestead version enabled the Ethereum Network to be fully implemented, and also made many improvements to Trancaction times. In addition, the logic of development over EIP came to life with this version.
The 3rd pillar of Ethereum development was Metropolis, but this version was split into 2 phases due to development difficulties and the spectacular rise of the market.

The first of these stages was the Byzantium update released in October 2017. First of all, there was a more secure, fast and stable network under this update. Two other characteristics that make this update stand out are more predictable Gas Prices and payment methods where privacy is prioritized with Zk-Snark, where Zero Knowledge protocol is implemented. In the Byzantium update, the “Difficulty Bomb” add-on was also introduced. With this new feature, mining would cease to be profitable over time and the foundations of PoS would be laid.

The second phase, Constantinapol, was the most talked about and the most delayed update. You can read the detailed article I wrote about this update by clicking here. According to the original plans, this update was to go live in December 2018, but due to some glitches, it was released on February 28, 2019 at block 7,280,000. Since there is a detailed article about this update, I will end this part without further ado and move on to the other part for the 4th main update, the Ethereum 2.0 Serenity update, which is the main topic of this article series.

In the next article, we will continue with Ethereum 2.0 Serenity Part 3: Serenity.

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PoW:

Bitcoin: P2P Electronic Cash System is a consensus model that has entered our lives with the WhitePaper written by Satoshi Nakamato. It is a demonstration that there is no random node formation in P2P networks that do not have a trust relationship (Distrusted Relation) between nodes.

The underlying idea actually goes back to the late 90s and early 2000s. Based on the need for effort/strength/time to get a job done, and the first linked examples can eliminate solving a small, processor-solvable puzzle on every mail sent, to prevent spam mail. Thanks to this puzzle, tens of thousands of mailboxes would not be spammed as a single repository, but it would create a problem for the user when sending an individual or group mail. This idea never materialized because the technological infrastructure was insufficient in this regard and it was a huge problem for the passengers who sent legal mail for advertising.

Fluid PoW gives us a hash puzzle and the difficulty of this puzzle is changed every 2016 blocks as a group with the total power in the system. This puzzle can only be solved with a system we call brute force, based on trying all the basic possible components, and it is based on basic luck. The more numbers you can try at the same time, the more puzzles you have the chance to solve. Due to these outputs, people are entering the system with more and more power and the total power in the system is constantly increasing. Currently, the total power consumed to run the Bitcoin network has been made more than the annual electricity consumption of a small European school like Belgium. This situation rightly revolts environmentalists.

PoS

It is a consensus model developed by a dear friend of ours named Vitalik Buterin, who “trying” to do the same work as PoW without so much waste. It would not be wrong to say that it is based on Capitalism 🙂 . In this system, a person’s being a miner and receiving the reward is related to how much he owns that cryptocurrency. For example, let me have 1000 Ether and Ali have 10 Ether. When we both want to mine and generate income on the Ethereum 2.0 network, my probability of being selected is 100 times higher than that of Ali. The main reason why I call this system capitalist is that while it makes the rich richer, the poor don’t get much.

But as you can imagine, almost no energy is consumed for this process and it does not spend the world’s limited resources like Bitcoin PoW.

EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)

Before defining the EVM, it would be more accurate to define the VM first. Virtual Machine (Virtual Machine) is a program that acts like a computer inside our computer, but without the risk of accessing and damaging the files on your computer. They are mainly used to test operating systems, open suspicious files and create backups of operating systems.
EVM, on the other hand, is a Virtual Machine where the Ethereum Network runs on nodes in the systems. It executes the byte-code versions of the Smart Contracts written on the Ethereum network and enables them to work on the Ethereum network.

Smart Contract (Smart Contracts)

To summarize smart contracts in a single sentence, “They are contract-based codes that run on the Ethereum network and are compiled by the EVM. “Smart contracts are also the cornerstone of the Ethereum Network. Thanks to Smart Contracts, we can write our own ICOs, conclude contracts with Companies, Fundraise, make conditional money transfers. Other usage areas are; you can design payment transactions and games in the infrastructure of Gambling / Betting sites, you can write projects that change in-game assets in Online Games.

I will upload the next article, Ethereum 2.0 Serenity Part 2: History of Ethereum, as soon as possible.

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