A Short Book Review of The Aether Raid: The Revolution of the Idealists

Revolutions usually begin with resentment.

The financial system is not perfect, the political system responsible for supervision is not perfect, and sometimes it is full of holes, which has caused so many financial crises time and time again.

Even if you are unfamiliar with these financial crises, it does not matter if you have watched the popular Japanese drama "Naoki Hansawa" a few years ago, you can understand that people's greed is often the source of the problem. But do we have a better solution?

In the financial tsunami of 2008, the disgruntled Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, challenging the corrupt centralized financial system, and in the turbulent dark tide, started the decentralized cryptocurrency revolution.

But the real revolution is based on a few idealists.

Just a year and a half ago, Vitalik Buterin wrote about the basic structure he believed could further advance cryptocurrency, and Gavin Wood refined that concept into computer language in his yellow paper. Dozens of developers, designers, bloggers, and hundreds of speculators from all over the world got together, and many even left everything behind, left their hometowns, tightened their belts and lived a miserable life just to make this moment happen .

The early development of Ethereum was similar to that of many start-ups. In addition to recording the founder of Ethereum, Buterin, "Ethereum Raid" also includes the stories of other core members who were once Ethereum and surrounding developers.

Since the development of Ethereum, Buterin has also made many important and difficult decisions, such as insisting on developing as a non-profit foundation.

There is also a group of people who master cryptocurrency technology, advocating the principle of "Code is Law" to eliminate all government and human intervention and manipulation, which means that everything operates the cryptocurrency system fairly according to the open code; because computers are not greedy of.

Although blockchain technology has the characteristics of immutability, it can only be implemented by relying on this principle.

face the real world.

In 2016, a DAO fundraising contract on Ethereum was hacked and more than 3.6 million ETH was hacked. The Ethereum community has to decide whether to stick to the "Code is Law" principle and allow hackers to steal ether? Or "hard fork" the blockchain system, a technical reversal to recover the stolen ether? In the end, the community chose the latter by a majority vote, believing that "the currency system must serve the people", and the hard forked blockchain is still called "Ethereum", which has continued to evolve to this day.

Another group of people who disagreed continued to maintain the existing blockchain, renaming it "Ethereum Classic", adhering to their principles: "We believe that there should be clear distinctions between issues and that system forks are just to correct the actual platform vulnerabilities, not to rescue failed contracts and special interests.”

The details of the real-life story described in the book are even more wonderful and twisted. The cryptocurrency system adopts blockchain technology and has developed a new path that is different from the traditional currency system. How to deal with abnormal transactions? How to define abnormal transactions? Who has the right to speak above? The real world, after all, is not perfect. Code is not unbreakable. Deal with it.

The author of "Aether Raid: A 19-Year-Old Genius, a Digital and Financial Revolution" has interviewed many people and connected many stories well, but it doesn't stop there. There is very little discussion on the social value of cryptocurrencies in the book (this part can be seen in Gao Reconstruction's "Blockchain Sociology: Reimagining Money, Media and Democracy"), and it does not particularly focus on the technical value of cryptocurrencies. This is an issue that I will continue to explore.