Ethereum Whitepaper: A Next-Generation Smart Contract Platform
Vitalik Buterin · 2013
"A Turing-complete blockchain enabling arbitrary smart contracts and decentralized applications."
Bitcoin's blockchain is deliberately limited — it's designed almost exclusively to verify and move a currency, with very little room for arbitrary programmable logic. Buterin's whitepaper proposed a blockchain built from the start to run any program (Turing-complete, meaning it can compute anything a general-purpose computer can, given enough resources), where developers write 'smart contracts' — code that executes exactly as written, automatically, with no company or server able to shut it down, alter it, or interfere with it once deployed. This turns a blockchain from just a ledger of currency balances into what's often described as a 'world computer.'
The mechanism is a decentralized virtual machine (the Ethereum Virtual Machine) that runs on every participating node simultaneously, executing smart contract code identically everywhere and reaching consensus on the results the same way Bitcoin reaches consensus on transaction history. Because unrestricted computation could allow an infinite loop to freeze or spam the entire network, every operation costs 'gas' — a small fee paid in Ether that scales with computational complexity, which prices network usage by supply and demand and makes deliberately wasteful or malicious code prohibitively expensive to run. This single design choice (a fee-metered, general-purpose computer with no owner) is what allowed later innovations — DeFi lending markets, NFTs, DAOs — to be built entirely as code on top of Ethereum without needing Ethereum itself to be redesigned for each one.
Why does Ethereum require paying 'gas' fees for every computation, unlike Bitcoin's simpler transaction model?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Ethereum Whitepaper (original)ethereum.org
- Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract Platform (context)Wikipedia
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