Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger

TLDR

The blockchain paradigm, exemplified by Bitcoin, uses cryptographically secured transactions on a decentralized singleton compute resource—a transactional singleton machine with shared state—and Ethereum generalizes this paradigm. The paper discusses Ethereum’s design, implementation challenges, opportunities, and future hurdles. Ethereum provides multiple resources, each with distinct state and code, that interact via a message‑passing framework.

Abstract

The blockchain paradigm when coupled with cryptographically-secured transactions has demonstrated its utility through a number of projects, not least Bitcoin. Each such project can be seen as a simple application on a decentralised, but singleton, compute resource. We can call this paradigm a transactional singleton machine with shared-state. Ethereum implements this paradigm in a generalised manner. Furthermore it provides a plurality of such resources, each with a distinct state and operating code but able to interact through a message-passing framework with others. We discuss its design, implementation issues, the opportunities it provides and the future hurdles we envisage.