The Infinite Machine

Developers learned the world can’t be crammed into smart contracts, and that smart contracts will only be as smart as the people who wrote them—and those who tried to break them for nefarious or hubristic reasons.

Ethereans learned that they can program computers, but they can’t program humans, whose greed, ambition, and ingenuity can be strong enough to find their way around those programs.

And blockchains didn’t fix everything. They made everything slower, and harder. It made sense to use them only in very specific situations. Smart contracts didn’t make invincible applications. They’re difficult to code, and the use cases weren’t so obvious anymore. Suddenly, after the reality check of the hard fork, Ethereum didn’t feel like a magi

To keep the system fully decentralized, the correct outcome needs to be defined by consensus, and that’s where the REP tokens come in. Holders will stake their REP to an outcome, either before or in a brief period after it happens. Those who staked their REP tokens to the correct outcome get their tokens back plus a portion of the fees users paid t

In Ethereum, there are two types of accounts: externally owned accounts, controlled by people’s private keys and containing no code, and contract accounts, controlled by their code.

Ethereum uses the Account/Balance model, which keeps track of the total balance, or “state,” of each account. If Bitcoin’s UTXO model is similar to bills and coins, Ethereum’s model is more like a checking account, allowing for fine-grained control over the amount that can be withdrawn, and making more complex programs easier to implement.

Vitalik’s vision was much too big to be constrained by another chain. He was thinking about creating a base layer for everything. A computer that could simultaneously live in all the nodes of an enormous global network, which would be able to process anything you threw at it, without downtime or interference, so developers could build whatever they