It is our entry-level article for Polkadot from zero to one. We try to start from the most basic part of Polkadot and provide you with a comprehensive understanding of Polkadot. Of course, this is a huge project and full of challenges However, we hope that through such efforts, everyone can correctly understand Polkadot, and also make it easy for people who don’t know Polkadot to quickly grasp Polkadot-related knowledge.
Polca Knowledge GraphIt is our entry-level article for Polkadot from zero to one. We try to start from the most basic part of Polkadot and provide you with a comprehensive understanding of Polkadot. Of course, this is a huge project and full of challenges However, we hope that through such efforts, everyone can correctly understand Polkadot, and also make it easy for people who don’t know Polkadot to quickly grasp Polkadot-related knowledge.Today is the first issue of this column. Let’s start with Dr. Gavin, the founder of Polkadot, and talk about the birth of Polkadot.
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——Gavin Wood
From programming to Ethereum
Gavin Wood，The core founder of Polkadot and the co-founder and chief technology officer of Ethereum. With a double doctorate in computer science and music visualization from York University, he not only has excellent academic qualifications, but also has strong creativity. He once demonstrated how to build a blockchain within 15 minutes at the Web3 Summit in 2018.
As early as 2011, Gavin heard about Bitcoin, but in 2013, Gavin really had an in-depth study of Bitcoin. Gavin has always been interested in game theory, social science, and political science. Later, through a friend’s introduction, he got to know v God who had just completed the Ethereum white paper. Out of interest in Ethereum, Gavin joined the project development of Ethereum.
At that time, Ethereum was only a preliminary framework, and after Gavin joined, Ethereum was implemented on a technical level. Let’s take a look at his contribution to Ethereum:
(1) Completed PoC-1 (Proof of Concept-1) of Ethereum;
(2) Almost one person completed the earliest C++ version client of Ethereum;
(3) Wrote the Yellow Book, the technical specification of Ethereum. ;
(4) Invented Solidity, a high-level language for smart contract development;
Two years after joining the Ethereum development project, Ethereum went live as scheduled.secondary title
Ethereum is just an experiment
At the end of 2015, Gavin left from Ethereum, and then he founded Parity Technologies, and developed an Ethereum client written in Rust language, which once monopolized the Ethereum wallet market. We dont know the reason why Gavin left Ethereum, but in 2014, Gavin published an article titled Why do we need Web3.0? article, what we can know isGavins vision is to build a new decentralized Internet world。
Ethereum is an experiment for me, a product prototype to verify whether the technology is feasible. Ethereum is also my school. I graduated from this school. I want to try to do more things.
"In fact, what I learned the most from Ethereum was not technology (at that time, Ethereum had a research team dedicated to managing technical details), but social experience.Governance is one of them.I think in the blockchain system,It is important to improve the capacity of the system through governance, which would be a revolutionary new feature, which is exactly what Ethereum does not do.
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Birth of Polkadot
After doing Ethereum, Gavin used Ethereum to bring a new architecture to the world - the idea of Ethereum virtual machine EVM and smart contracts. Although this technology has a history of six or seven years since its birth, we still see that many blockchains are still adhering to this architecture, insisting on the architecture of smart contracts, gas consumption, and dynamic measurement. Introduced in Ethereum.
What followed was that different teams improved around this architecture to improve transaction performance. But using the same architecture may not make a huge difference in revolutionary innovations. So, you have to be mindful of the difference between evolution and revolution, you have to look beyond that framework to find the treasures of the golden age, and Gavin knows that.
So, one year after leaving Ethereum, Gavin solved the problem that has been lingering in his mind, and released the Polkadot white paper in 2016. Many people know that in addition to solving the expansion problem, Polkadot also wants to allow independent blockchains to communicate, that is, the cross-chain problem. But when it comes to Polkadot, what you should know most is: sharding,Because the fragmentation is divided to the extreme, it is actually Polkadot。
The original words of Polkadot founder Gavin illustrate this point better:
The design logic of Polkadot (Poca) is not directly associated with interoperability. We are waiting for Ethereums sharding technology to be launched. But sharding has never been implemented, nor is it launched now. Therefore, I want to build a more scalable Ethereum by myself. In the design process, the concept of sharding has been pushed to an extreme level, so I dont want to shard at all, and just design an independent chain. With this design, different chains can transmit information to each other, and the final result is to achieve communication through a shared consensus layer.
So how should we understand fragmentation? First of all, let’s talk about the dilemma of Ethereum. For a long time, the performance problem of Ethereum has been its flaw. In 2018, serious congestion broke out due to the hot CryptoKitties, which not only increased the transfer time, but also made the transfer fee remain high. . Just like a bank handles business, the bank has only one window and the processing speed is slow. When there are more people handling business, there will be a long queue waiting for processing.
However, if the bank has several windows and handles business at the same time, there may be no need to queue up. This is the basic logic of sharding,Divide the nodes of the entire network into different areas called shards, and hand over a large number of transactions to different shards for processing, greatly improving the efficiency.
So in Polkadot, each shard carries the core logic and allows them to trade in parallel, exchange data, and finally link multiple blockchains to a network.
The emergence of Polkadot is not only comparable to or even surpassing the vision of Ethereum 2.0, but also more creative:In Polkadot, there can be many Ethereum. It is no longer a pure blockchain, Polkadot wants to provide a truly open and free platform for various social innovations.
This is the ideal of Web3, the ideal of Polkadot, and the ideal of Gavin.
