The Birth of Ethereum

Yet, developers were confronted with a difficult situation that involved them either building on top of Bitcoin or starting a new Blockchain. Building on Bitcoin simply means living within the restriction of the network and aiming to find workarounds.

Also, the sorts of applications that could run directly on a Bitcoin System are often limited by a set of transaction types, sizes of data storage, and data types, and anything else required additional off-chain layers, and that seemed to compromise many of the benefits of using a public Blockchain.

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin began to think about extending what Bitcoin and Mastercoin can do. Vitalik suggested a more general approach to the Mastercoin team - one that ensured flexible contracts to replace the customized language of Mastercoin. Despite the fact that the Mastercoin team was impressed, this posed to be too radical to be a change that fits into their development roadmap.

By the end of that year, Vitalik began to share a whitepaper that discussed the idea behind Ethereum - which is a Turing-complete, general-purpose blockchain. A few people saw this early draft and offered feedback, allowing Vitalik to improve his proposal.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos was intrigued by the idea and asked Vitalik many questions about the use of a separate blockchain to enforce consensus rules on smart contract execution and the implications of a Turing-complete language. Andreas continued to follow Ethereum's progress with great interest. Dr. Gavin Wood, yet, was one of the first people to reach out to Vitalik and offer to help improve his C++ programming skills. Then, Gavin became the codesigner, co-founder, and CTO of Ethereum.

Vitalik once recounted in his "Ethereum Prehistory" post, "this was the time when the Ethereum protocol was entirely my own creation." After this, however, new participants grew interested and began to join the fold. Gavin can also be credited for the delicate change in vision from Ethereum being a platform for building programmable money, with Blockchain-based contracts that can handle digital assets and transfer them in accordance with the pre-set rules, to a general-purpose computing platform. This started with subtle changes in emphasis and terminology and later grew stronger in influence. This saw Ethereum become one piece of a suite of decentralized technologies - with the other two being Whisper and Swarm.

Similar to Satoshi, Vitalik and Gavin did more than inventing new technology - they combined new inventions with existing technologies in an unprecedented way and provided the prototype code to prove their ideas to the world. The founders worked really hard, developing and refining the vision. And on July 30, 2015, the first Ethereum block was mined.

The Development Stages of Ethereum

The development of Ethereum has been planned over four different stages, with significant changes occurring at each stage. The four main stages of development are known to be: Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity. The intermediate hard forks are: Ice Age, DAO, Tangerine Whistle, Spurious Dragon, Byzantium, and Constantinople. Both the development stages and the
intermediate hard forks are shown on the following timeline, which is "dated" by block number:

Block number zero
Frontier: The initial stage of Ethereum, that spanned from July 30, 2015, to March 2016.

Block number 200,000
Ice Age: A hard fork to introduce an exponential difficulty increase, to motivate a transition to PoS when ready.

Block number 1,150,000
Homestead: The second stage of Ethereum, which was launched in March 2016.

Block number 1,192,000
DAO: This hard fork reimbursed the victims of the hacked DAO contract and led to the splitting of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic into two competing systems.

Block number 2,463,000
Tangerine Whistle: This hard fork helps in changing the gas calculation for specific I/O-heavy operations and clearing the accumulated state from a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that exploited the low gas cost of those operations.

Block number 2,675,000
Spurious Dragon — A hard fork to address more DoS attack vectors, and another state clearing. Also, a replay attack protection mechanism.

Block number 4,370,000
Metropolis Byzantium: As of the time of this writing, Metropolis is the third stage of Ethereum, and was launched in October 2017. Metropolis is followed by the final stage of Ethereum's development - codenamed Serenity. (TINN/2 days ago) https://www.newkerala.com/business-world-news.php