Original subtitles

Now that we've gotten through some administrative work, it's time to start learning about a theory

and using it to build actual applications in the section, we're going to start off with a little bit

of a history lesson.

Normally, for any technology that you learn, the history of how it was created is not always super

important.

For example, when you learn about HTML, you don't always learn about who first created HTML.

However, in the world of Ethereum, development is changing so rapidly at this point in time that I

think getting an idea of why, if the dream was created, can serve to help you understand about what

the project is and where it's headed.

So little history lesson here.

We're going to first start off back in October 31st, 2008.

This is the first notable event and it's not actually tied to a theory at all.

Instead, this is the date of the original Bitcoin white paper.

We refer to it as a white paper.

It essentially was a academic paper.

It was released by Satoshi Nakamoto.

The paper described the creation of a system that would allow people to pay each other directly without

the need for a central authority like a bank out of this paper.

The Bitcoin network was eventually brought online in January of 2009, and this is the original Bitcoin

network.

One of the key characteristics of the Bitcoin network was the idea of a block chain.

We'll talk about block chains in great detail throughout this course.

But for now, just understand that the Bitcoin block chain was a tool to store a list of monetary transactions

between different people.

The Bitcoin network thrived and continues to thrive today.

However, the only purpose of Bitcoin was to enable financial transactions.

That was it.

Send money from person to person B.

Not long after its release, many people realized that they could use some of Bitcoins original innovations

to not only handle the transfer of currency, but other types of exchanges as well.

So one person who felt very strongly about this was named Retallack Budarin.

The talent authored a white paper of his own.

Again, a white paper is essentially an academic document, and he published it back in late 2013.

Metalic was a proponent of the Bitcoin project, but he thought that the Bitcoin project was too simple

in nature.

He envisioned using block to block chain technology to create far more complex applications.

In fact, he describes using a theorem to create sub crypto currencies, domain name registration systems

and gambling applications.

So the italics ideal world.

He didn't want to just use Bitcoin to transfer money.

He wanted to figure out some way to use these innovations to create much more advanced applications.

And that's what we are here in this course to do.

We're going to use this technology to build more advanced applications.

Now, inside of his white paper Vitello, it goes on to describe the most important part of the theorem

network, something called a smart contract.

A smart contract is a piece of code that lives in the theory and block chain.

This contract can be instructed to do certain things by having a person or another contract send a message

to it.

These contracts are at the absolute core of what a theorem is and really spending the vast, vast majority

of this course to learn about the behavior of these contracts.

The theorem system eventually went online on July 30th of 2015, and it also continues to flourish to

this day.

All right.

So that's a little history lesson.

Again, we don't usually talk too much about the history of the technology we use, but I wanted to

share this short creation story with you just to highlight the fact that at the very point of its inception,

the etherial network was designed around this idea of smart contracts that operate on a block chain,

and their purpose is to allow for the creation of advanced applications.

Now that we have a sense of one of the design goals of a theorem, let's continue in the next section

and start getting some experience with the Ethereum network.