Ethereum and the State-Based Model

An Alternative to Bitcoin

Throughout the early 2010s, Bitcoin began to gain popularity and soon enough, other blockchains such as Litecoin began to pop up. However, although blockchains like Bitcoin and Litecoin fulfilled their tasks as decentralized payment systems, many in the community began to see perhaps the biggest flaw with such blockchains - the lack of decentralized programs.

Recall from the Bitcoin section that each blockchain relies on a virtual machine. Script, the programming language that Bitcoin utilizes, allows developers to write logic which then gets executed on Bitcoin's VM. However, the biggest issue with Script (and the Bitcoin VM as a whole) is that it is catered towards processing the transferring of bitcoin. Bitcoin lacks many features that are required to write sophisticated programs - it is Turing-Incomplete.

This is what motivated the creation of Ethereum - to create a blockchain whose virtual machine was general purpose and Turing-Complete.

History of Ethereum

Decentralized Programs