Chapter 1Origins and the Problem Being Solved
Free preview- Assembled, not invented: Byzantine Generals (1982), cryptographic timestamps (1991), Hashcash (1997-2002) and SHA-256 (2001) all predate the 2008 whitepaper.
- The whitepaper's problem: Payments routed through trusted third parties are reversible, so disputes need mediation, mediation costs money, and small casual payments become uneconomic.
- The Byzantine Generals Problem: Agreeing on one plan when some participants lie, some go silent, and nobody is in charge. In Bitcoin, the plan is the order of the blocks.
- Ethereum's separate origin: A general-purpose chain that runs programs, not just payments: whitepaper 2013, Yellow Paper and crowdsale 2014, Frontier launch July 2015.
Chapter 2Cryptography, Keys and Wallets
Free preview- Cryptography vs encryption: Cryptography proves in the open; encryption hides. Bitcoin lives on the first and barely touches the second — nothing on-chain is encrypted.
- Hashing: A one-way fingerprint: any input, a fixed-length output, no way back. Change one character and the entire output changes.
- The derivation path: Entropy → BIP39 mnemonic → PBKDF2/HMAC-SHA512 seed → BIP32 → secp256k1 key pair → SHA-256 + RIPEMD-160 → address.
- Why no registry is needed: The keyspace is 2^256 — comparable to the number of atoms in the observable universe — so collision is not a practical concern.
- EOA vs contract account: On Ethereum a key controls an externally owned account; code controls a contract account. On-chain they look identical.
Chapter 3The Ledger: UTXOs, Accounts, Blocks and Merkle Roots
Enroll to unlock5 topics in this chapter.
Chapter 4Consensus and Finality
Enroll to unlock6 topics in this chapter.
Chapter 5The Transaction Journey
Enroll to unlock6 topics in this chapter.
Chapter 6Economics: Issuance, Fees and Price
Enroll to unlock6 topics in this chapter.
Chapter 7The Ethereum Machine
Enroll to unlock6 topics in this chapter.
Chapter 8Boundaries: Scaling and the Quantum Horizon
Enroll to unlock6 topics in this chapter.