In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin described his idea in a white paper, which he sent out to a few of his friends, who in turn sent it out further. As a result, about 30 people reached out to Vitalik to discuss the concept. He was waiting for critical reviews and people pointing out critical mistakes in the concept, but it never happened.
The project was publicly announced in January 2014, with the core team consisting of Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, Joe Lubin and Gavin Wood. Buterin also presented Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami, and just a few months later the team decided to hold a crowdsale of Ether, the native token of the network, to fund the development.
By definition, Ethereum is a software platform that aims to act as a decentralized Internet as well as a decentralized app store. A system like this needs a currency to pay for the computational resources required to run an application or a program. This is where ‘Ether’ comes into play.
Ether is a digital bearer asset and it doesn’t require a third party to process the payment. However, it doesn’t only operate as a digital currency, it also acts as ‘fuel’ for the decentralized apps within the network. If a user wants to change something in one of the apps within Ethereum, they need to pay a transaction fee so that the network can process the change.
The transaction fees are automatically calculated based on how much ‘gas’ an action requires. The amount of required fuel is calculated based on how much computing power is necessary and how long it will take to run.
