121-531: Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether ( abbreviation : ETH ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization . It is open-source software . Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin . Other founders include Gavin Wood , Charles Hoskinson , Anthony Di Iorio , and Joseph Lubin . In 2014, development work began and
242-515: A federal democracy confronts the widespread issue of political ignorance by allowing citizens to engage in foot voting , or moving to other jurisdictions with more favorable laws. He cites the mass migration of over one million southern-born African Americans to the North or the West to evade discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The European Union follows
363-409: A return value . In addition to control flow statements, the bytecode may include instructions to send ETH, read from and write to the contract's storage, create temporary storage ( memory ) that vanishes at the end of code evaluation, perform arithmetic and hashing operations, send transaction-like calls to other contracts (thus executing their code), create new contracts, and query information about
484-534: A "block", is processed by the network. Each block contains a cryptographic hash identifying the series of blocks that must precede it if the block is to be considered valid. This series of blocks is known as the blockchain . Each "node" (network participant) connects with a relatively small subset of the network to offer blocks and unvalidated transactions (i.e. transactions not yet in the blockchain) to its peers for download, and it downloads any of these from its peers that it doesn't already have. Each node usually has
605-542: A "counterpoint to globalization [which] removes decisions from the local and national stage to the global sphere of multi-national or non-national interests. Decentralization brings decision-making back to the sub-national levels". Decentralization strategies must account for the interrelations of global, regional, national, sub-national, and local levels. Norman L. Johnson writes that diversity plays an important role in decentralized systems like ecosystems , social groups , large organizations, political systems . "Diversity
726-516: A 3D map of tradable and customizable hexagonal tiles, was deployed to the network in October 2015 and demonstrated live at DEVCON1 in November of that year. In 2021, Christie's sold a digital image with an NFT by Beeple for US$ 69.3 million , making him the third-most-valuable living artist in terms of auction prices at the time, although observers have noted that both the buyer and seller had
847-402: A French journal that reviewed the dynamics of government and bureaucratic centralization and recent French efforts at decentralization of government functions. Ideas of liberty and decentralization were carried to their logical conclusions during the 19th and 20th centuries by anti-state political activists calling themselves " anarchists ", " libertarians ", and even decentralists. Tocqueville
968-418: A block reward of 5 ETH. Since the initial launch, Ethereum has undergone a number of planned protocol upgrades, which are important changes affecting the underlying functionality and/or incentive structures of the platform. Protocol upgrades are accomplished by means of a hard fork . In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO —a set of smart contracts developed on the platform—raised
1089-492: A central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller factions within it. Concepts of decentralization have been applied to group dynamics and management science in private businesses and organizations, political science , law and public administration , technology , economics and money . The word " centralisation " came into use in France in 1794 as the post- Revolution French Directory leadership created
1210-593: A centralized " welfarist " policy of entitlements which now has become a "post-welfare" policy of intergovernmental and market-based decentralization. In 1983, "Decentralization" was identified as one of the " Ten Key Values " of the Green Movement in the United States. A 1999 United Nations Development Programme report stated: "A large number of developing and transitional countries have embarked on some form of decentralization programmes. This trend
1331-408: A community-driven paper (an EIP, "Ethereum Improvement Proposal") under the leadership of civic hacker and lead author William Entriken was published, called ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard. It introduced ERC-721 , the first official NFT standard on Ethereum. This standardization allowed Ethereum to become central to a multi-billion dollar digital collectibles market. By January 2018, ether
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#17327724519471452-402: A country's number of regional legislatures, elector procedures, and the order in which national and regional elections occur. Brancati holds that decentralization can promote peace if it encourages statewide parties to incorporate regional demands and limit the power of regional parties. The processes by which entities move from a more to a less centralized state vary. They can be initiated from
1573-477: A cycle of reincarnation . In the 20th century, they are incarnated as Carter Hall and Shiera Saunders, the original Hawkman and Hawkgirl . As Hawkman and Hawkgirl, they wear Nth metal belts, made with the help of the Thanagarian Paran Katar , father of Katar Hol, when he is visiting Earth. Many years later, Carter and Shiera's son, Hector Hall , made a suit of armor of Nth metal and took
1694-414: A decentralized system, there is no single centralized authority that makes decisions on behalf of all the parties. Instead each party, also called a peer, makes local autonomous decisions towards its individual goals which may possibly conflict with those of other peers. Peers directly interact with each other and share information or provide service to other peers. An open decentralized system is one in which
1815-455: A directive in their platforms because rightist parties tend to advocate for a decrease in the role of central government. There is also strong evidence to support the idea that government stability increases the probability of political decentralization, since instability brought on by gridlock between opposing parties in legislatures often impedes a government's overall ability to enact sweeping reforms. The rise of regional ethnic parties in
1936-551: A foreman in its smelting plant. Retaining a metallic epidermal layer with the ability to heat up his body by several kelvin able to burn at a touch. Volatile promethium The rarest form of Promethium is its radioisotope, able to absorb and generate its own energy in near limitless amounts. Useful as a self-sustaining power source for many gadgets and facilities when properly used. The only drawback: "volatile Promethium" has dangerous mutagenic properties which can either be used to mutate living beings into hideous monstrosities or trigger
2057-443: A lower level of government while maintaining financial responsibility. While this process usually is called fiscal federalism , it may be relevant to unitary, federal, or confederal governments. Fiscal federalism also concerns the "vertical imbalances" where the central government gives too much or too little money to the lower levels. It actually can be a way of increasing central government control of lower levels of government, if it
2178-413: A modern economy. List of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and subatomic particles This list contains fictional chemical elements , materials, isotopes or subatomic particles that either a) play a major role in a notable work of fiction, b) are common to several unrelated works, or c) are discussed in detail by independent sources. In the "Wages of Fire" episode Big Guy and Rusty
2299-570: A new government structure. The word " décentralisation " came into usage in the 1820s. "Centralization" entered written English in the first third of the 1800s; mentions of decentralization also first appear during those years. In the mid-1800s Tocqueville would write that the French Revolution began with "a push towards decentralization" but became, "in the end, an extension of centralization." In 1863, retired French bureaucrat Maurice Block wrote an article called "Decentralization" for
2420-798: A process called "wrapping", certain DeFi protocols allow synthetic versions of various assets (such as bitcoin, gold, and oil) to be tradeable on Ethereum and also compatible with all of Ethereum's major wallets and applications. Ethereum-based software and networks, independent from the public Ethereum chain, have been tested by enterprise software companies. Interested parties have included Microsoft , IBM , JPMorgan Chase , Deloitte , R3, and Innovate UK (cross-border payments prototype). Barclays , UBS , Credit Suisse , Amazon , Visa , and other companies have also experimented with Ethereum. Ethereum-based permissioned blockchain variants are used and being investigated for various projects: As of January 2016,
2541-586: A programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine , that described a way to build decentralized applications. Buterin argued to the Bitcoin Core developers that blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and that it needed a more robust language for application development that could lead to attaching real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain. In 2013, Buterin briefly worked with eToro CEO Yoni Assia on
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#17327724519472662-450: A record US$ 150 million in a crowd sale to fund the project. The DAO was exploited in June 2016 when US$ 50 million of DAO tokens were stolen by an unknown hacker. The event sparked a debate in the crypto-community about whether Ethereum should perform a contentious "hard fork" to reappropriate the affected funds. The fork resulted in the network splitting into two blockchains: Ethereum with
2783-444: A region and the central government. Dawn Brancati finds that political decentralization reduces intrastate conflict unless politicians create political parties that mobilize minority and even extremist groups to demand more resources and power within national governments. However, the likelihood this will be done depends on factors like how democratic transitions happen and features like a regional party's proportion of legislative seats,
2904-401: A respectful manner. Gauging the appropriate size or scale of decentralized units has been studied in relation to the size of sub-units of hospitals and schools, road networks, administrative units in business and public administration, and especially town and city governmental areas and decision-making bodies. In creating planned communities ("new towns"), it is important to determine
3025-580: A return to small scale living. The decentralist movement attracted Southern Agrarians like Robert Penn Warren , as well as journalist Herbert Agar . New Left and libertarian individuals who identified with social, economic, and often political decentralism through the ensuing years included Ralph Borsodi , Wendell Berry , Paul Goodman , Carl Oglesby , Karl Hess , Donald Livingston , Kirkpatrick Sale (author of Human Scale ), Murray Bookchin , Dorothy Day , Senator Mark O. Hatfield , Mildred J. Loomis and Bill Kauffman . Leopold Kohr , author of
3146-473: A software development firm that builds Ethereum-related infrastructure. There were two network upgrades in 2021. The first was "Berlin", implemented on 14 April 2021. The second was "London", which took effect on 5 August. The London upgrade included Ethereum Improvement Proposal ("EIP") 1559, a mechanism for reducing transaction fee volatility . The mechanism causes a portion of the ether paid in transaction fees for each block to be destroyed rather than given to
3267-507: A strong desire for greater participation of citizens and private sector organizations in governance." Those studying the goals and processes of implementing decentralization often use a systems theory approach, which according to the United Nations Development Programme report applies to the topic of decentralization "a whole systems perspective, including levels, spheres, sectors and functions and seeing
3388-448: A systems approach. Norman Johnson of Los Alamos National Laboratory wrote in a 1999 paper: "A decentralized system is where some decisions by the agents are made without centralized control or processing. An important property of agent systems is the degree of connectivity or connectedness between the agents, a measure global flow of information or influence. If each agent is connected (exchange states or influence) to all other agents, then
3509-419: A unique set of peers, so that offering an item to its peers results in the propagation of that item throughout the entire network within seconds. A node's collection of unvalidated transactions is known as its "mempool". A node may choose to create a copy of the state for itself. It does this by starting with the genesis state and executing every transaction in the blockchain, in the proper order of blocks and in
3630-907: A variety of properties, crowdfunding (e.g. initial coin offerings ), decentralized finance , decentralized exchanges , decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), games, prediction markets , and gambling. Ethereum's smart contracts are written in high-level programming languages and then compiled down to EVM bytecode and deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. They can be written in Solidity (a language library with similarities to C and JavaScript ), Serpent (similar to Python , but deprecated), Yul (an intermediate language that can compile to various different backends—EVM 1.0, EVM 1.5, and eWASM are planned), LLL (a low-level Lisp -like language), and Mutan ( Go -based, but deprecated). Source code and compiler information are usually published along with
3751-424: A vested interest in driving demand for the artist's work. Decentralized finance (DeFi) offers financial instruments in a decentralized architecture, outside of companies' and governments' control, such as money market funds which let users earn interest. DeFi applications are typically accessed through a Web3 -enabled browser extension or application, such as MetaMask , which allows users to directly interact with
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3872-490: A while." Due to its ability to repel Investiture it is used along with Harmonium to create Weapons of Mass Destruction comparable to Thermonuclear weapons . These weapons of mass destruction create Atium and Lerasium as a by-product of their detonation. In the novel, the Americans use this technology, combined with Inerton, as well as explosive rockets and radio frequencies the enemy cannot detect, in their struggle with
3993-476: Is a conscious process based on explicit policies. However, it may occur as "silent decentralization" in the absence of reforms as changes in networks, policy emphasize and resource availability lead inevitably to a more decentralized system. Decentralization may be uneven and "asymmetric" given any one country's population, political, ethnic and other forms of diversity. In many countries, political, economic and administrative responsibilities may be decentralized to
4114-425: Is accomplished by the institution of reforms that either delegate a certain degree of meaningful decision-making autonomy to sub-national tiers of government, or grant citizens the right to elect lower-level officials, like local or regional representatives. Depending on the country, this may require constitutional or statutory reforms, the development of new political parties , increased power for legislatures ,
4235-406: Is coupled with a growing interest in the role of civil society and the private sector as partners to governments in seeking new ways of service delivery ... Decentralization of governance and the strengthening of local governing capacity is in part also a function of broader societal trends. These include, for example, the growing distrust of government generally, the spectacular demise of some of
4356-558: Is defined to be unique properties of entities, agents, or individuals that are not shared by the larger group, population, structure. Decentralized is defined as a property of a system where the agents have some ability to operate "locally." Both decentralization and diversity are necessary attributes to achieve the self-organizing properties of interest." Advocates of political decentralization hold that greater participation by better informed diverse interests in society will lead to more relevant decisions than those made only by authorities on
4477-399: Is done through deregulation , the abolition of restrictions on businesses competing with government services, for example, postal services, schools, garbage collection. Even as private companies and corporations have worked to have such services contracted out to or privatized by them, others have worked to have these turned over to non-profit organizations or associations. From the 1970s to
4598-475: Is extremely durable, Ronnie Raymond once commented even Superman couldn't break it even with his strength. When Depleted Promethium is alloyed with other dense metals such as Kevlar or molybdenum-steel, it forms a near-invulnerable metal polymer. The supervillain Prometheus got his powers after being dunked in a solution of titanium/vanadium alloy infused with promethium while working at Kord Industries as
4719-400: Is intended to become the new "head" (latest block) of the blockchain, and the attesters attest to which block is at the head of the chain. If a validator makes self-contradicting proposals or attestations, or if it is inactive, it loses a portion of its stake. It may add to its stake at any time. A validator's attestation is given a weight equal to its stake or 32, whichever is less. According to
4840-678: Is not linked to other kinds of responsibilities and authority. Fiscal decentralization can be achieved through user fees, user participation through monetary or labor contributions, expansion of local property or sales taxes, intergovernmental transfers of central government tax monies to local governments through transfer payments or grants , and authorization of municipal borrowing with national government loan guarantees. Transfers of money may be given conditionally with instructions or unconditionally without them. Market decentralization can be done through privatization of public owned functions and businesses, as described briefly above. But it also
4961-711: The Colored Coins project and drafted its white paper outlining additional use cases for blockchain technology. However, after failing to gain agreement on how the project should proceed, he proposed the development of a new platform with a more robust scripting language—a Turing-complete programming language—that would eventually become Ethereum. Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014. During
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5082-477: The financial crisis of 2007–2008 . One example of economic decentralization, which is based on a libertarian socialist model, is decentralized economic planning . Decentralized planning is a type of economic system in which decision-making is distributed amongst various economic agents or localized within production agents. An example of this method in practice is in Kerala , India which experimented in 1996 with
5203-588: The " Biggles " story "The Adventure of the Oxidized Grotto" from Biggles - Charter Pilot (1943). A naturally-occurring form, Energized Protodermis, is a silver-colored liquid that is a sapient being, and can transform or destroy any living thing that touches it. Pyrholidon's in-game description is as follows: "A pretty little puck-shaped cap of purple liquid that can bring on anything from hot flashes to military-grade psychosis. With sufficient tolerance, however, it can make any weather feel balmy – if only for
5324-414: The 1957 book The Breakdown of Nations – known for its statement "Whenever something is wrong, something is too big" – was a major influence on E. F. Schumacher , author of the 1973 bestseller Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered . In the next few years a number of best-selling books promoted decentralization. Daniel Bell 's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society discussed
5445-758: The 1990s, there was deregulation of some industries, like banking, trucking, airlines and telecommunications, which resulted generally in more competition and lower prices. According to the Cato Institute , an American libertarian think-tank, in some cases deregulation in some aspects of an industry were offset by increased regulation in other aspects, the electricity industry being a prime example. For example, in banking, Cato Institute believes some deregulation allowed banks to compete across state lines, increasing consumer choice , while an actual increase in regulators and regulations forced banks to make loans to individuals incapable of repaying them, leading eventually to
5566-648: The Boy Robot , it is revealed that the BGY-11 is powered by a Cobalt Thorium G power core. Inerton is used mostly in hulls of futuristic airships, serving as both armor and as a lifting body, as well as in special belts worn by the characters which allow them to leap great distances by counterbalancing the weight of their bodies. In ancient Egypt a Thanagarian spaceship made of Nth metal crash-landed, only to be found by Prince Khufu and his betrothed, Chay-ara. Constant exposure to Nth metal forced Khufu and Chay-ara into
5687-528: The ERC-20 token standard on top of the Ethereum blockchain and have utilized the platform for initial coin offerings . On 15 September 2022, Ethereum transitioned its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in an upgrade process known as "the Merge". This has cut Ethereum's energy usage by 99%. Ethereum was initially described in late 2013 in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin ,
5808-450: The EVM is hardcoded with a certain gas cost, which is intended to be roughly proportional to the monetary value of the resources (e.g. computation and storage ) a node must expend or dedicate to perform that operation. When a sender is creating a transaction, the sender must specify a gas limit and gas price . The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas the sender is willing to use in
5929-649: The Ethereum blockchain . The standard, proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, implements an API for tokens within smart contracts . The standard provides functions that include the transfer of tokens from one account to another, getting the current token balance of an account, and getting the total supply of the token available on the network. Smart contracts that correctly implement ERC-20 processes are called ERC-20 Token Contracts, and they keep track of created tokens on Ethereum. Numerous cryptocurrencies have launched as ERC-20 tokens and have been distributed through initial coin offerings . Ethereum also allows for
6050-540: The Ethereum Foundation as part of their proof-of-concept series. "Olympic" was the last prototype and public beta pre-release. The Olympic network gave users a bug bounty of 25,000 ether for stress-testing the Ethereum blockchain. On 30 July 2015, "Frontier" marked the official launch of the Ethereum platform, and Ethereum created its "genesis block". The genesis block contained 8,893 transactions allocating various amounts of ether to different addresses, and
6171-809: The Ethereum Yellow Paper that specified the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Subsequently, a Swiss non-profit foundation, the Ethereum Foundation ( Stiftung Ethereum ), was founded. Development was funded by an online public crowd sale from July to August 2014, in which participants bought the Ethereum value token (ether) with another digital currency, bitcoin . While there was early praise for the technical innovations of Ethereum, questions were also raised about its security and scalability. Several codenamed prototypes of Ethereum were developed over 18 months in 2014 and 2015 by
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#17327724519476292-491: The Ethereum Yellow Paper. EVMs have been implemented in C++ , C# , Go , Haskell , Java , JavaScript , Python , Ruby , Rust , Elixir , Erlang , and soon WebAssembly . Gas is a unit of account within the EVM used in the calculation of the transaction fee, which is the amount of ETH a transaction's sender must pay to the network to have the transaction included in the blockchain. Each type of operation which may be performed by
6413-411: The Ethereum blockchain through a website. Many of these DApps can connect and work together to create complex financial services. Examples of DeFi platforms include MakerDAO . Uniswap , a decentralized exchange for tokens on Ethereum grew from US$ 20 million in liquidity to US$ 2.9 billion in 2020. As of October 2020, over US$ 11 billion was invested in various DeFi protocols. Additionally, through
6534-472: The Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second; this did not change after the move to proof-of-stake. In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second. This has led some to question the scalability of Ethereum. A proposal to partition global state and computation into shard chains was presented at Ethereum's Devcon 3 in November 2017. If implemented, each node in
6655-410: The Ethereum protocol, the blockchain with the highest accumulated weight of attestations at any given time is to be regarded as the canonical chain. Validators are rewarded for making valid proposals and attestations. A validator's rewards are paid via transactions within the same chain that contains their proposal or attestation, and therefore would have little or no market value unless that chain becomes
6776-567: The People's Plan campaign . Emmanuelle Auriol and Michel Benaim write about the "comparative benefits" of decentralization versus government regulation in the setting of standards. They find that while there may be a need for public regulation if public safety is at stake, private creation of standards usually is better because "regulators or 'experts' might misrepresent consumers' tastes and needs." As long as companies are averse to incompatible standards, standards will be created that satisfy needs of
6897-565: The Stone Age" through not just chiefdoms and states, but empires and today's "hegemonic core states". Christopher K. Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall review other works that detail these cycles, including works which analyze the concept of core elites which compete with state accumulation of wealth and how their "intra-ruling-class competition accounts for the rise and fall of states" and their phases of centralization and decentralization. Rising government expenditures, poor economic performance and
7018-839: The United Kingdom's Labour Party appealed to Scottish constituents by creating a semi-autonomous Scottish Parliament in order to neutralize the threat from the increasingly popular Scottish National Party at the national level. In addition to increasing the administrative efficacy of government and endowing citizens with more power, there are many projected advantages to political decentralization. Individuals who take advantage of their right to elect local and regional authorities have been shown to have more positive attitudes toward politics, and increased opportunities for civic decision-making through participatory democracy mechanisms like public consultations and participatory budgeting are believed to help legitimize government institutions in
7139-411: The account's ETH balance denominated in wei (10 wei = 1 ether). At the end of each epoch, new ETH is generated by the addition of protocol-specified amounts to the balances of all validators for that epoch, with the block proposers receiving the largest portion. Additionally, ether is the only currency accepted by the protocol as payment for the transaction fee. The transaction fee is composed of two parts:
7260-453: The alliance, including MasterCard , Cisco Systems , Sberbank , and Scotiabank . In 2024, Paul Brody, EEA board member for EY, was announced as the new chairperson, and Karen Scarbrough, board member for Microsoft, as the new executive director. Vanessa Grellet from Arche Capital also joined as a new board member. In 2017, CryptoKitties , the blockchain game and decentralized application (dApp) featuring digital cat artwork as NFTs ,
7381-449: The appropriate population and geographical size. While in earlier years small towns were considered appropriate, by the 1960s, 60,000 inhabitants was considered the size necessary to support a diversified job market and an adequate shopping center and array of services and entertainment. Appropriate size of governmental units for revenue raising also is a consideration. Even in bioregionalism , which seeks to reorder many functions and even
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#17327724519477502-400: The base fee and the tip. The base fee is "burned" (deleted from existence) and the tip goes to the block proposer. The validator reward together with the tips provide the incentive to validators to keep the blockchain growing (i.e. to keep processing new transactions). Therefore, ETH is fundamental to the operation of the network. Ether may be "sent" from one account to another via a transaction,
7623-407: The basis of decentralization that can lead to local efficiency, equity and development." Columbia University 's Earth Institute identified one of three major trends relating to decentralization: "increased involvement of local jurisdictions and civil society in the management of their affairs, with new forms of participation, consultation, and partnerships." Decentralization has been described as
7744-420: The block proposer, reducing the inflation rate of ether and potentially resulting in periods of deflation. On 27 August 2021, the blockchain experienced a brief fork that was the result of clients running different incompatible software versions. Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) was a set of three or more upgrades, also known as "phases", meant to transition the network's consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake, and to scale
7865-412: The books in a later interview, Toffler said that industrial-style, centralized, top-down bureaucratic planning would be replaced by a more open, democratic, decentralized style which he called "anticipatory democracy". Futurist John Naisbitt 's 1982 book "Megatrends" was on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than two years and sold 14 million copies. Naisbitt's book outlines 10 "megatrends",
7986-414: The boundaries of governments according to physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics, appropriate size must be considered. The unit may be larger than many decentralist-bioregionalists prefer. Decentralization ideally happens as a careful, rational, and orderly process, but it often takes place during times of economic and political crisis,
8107-458: The canonical chain. This incentivizes validators to support the chain that they think other validators view as the canonical chain, which results in a high degree of consensus. Ether (ETH) is the cryptocurrency generated in accordance with the Ethereum protocol as a reward to validators in a proof-of-stake system for adding blocks to the blockchain. Ether is represented in the state as an unsigned integer associated with each account, this being
8228-985: The capital Helsinki to the provinces. The centre supports substantial subsidies that limit potential economic and political centralization to Helsinki. Political decentralization does not come without its drawbacks. A study by Fan concludes that there is an increase in corruption and rent-seeking when there are more vertical tiers in the government, as well as when there are higher levels of subnational government employment. Other studies warn of high-level politicians that may intentionally deprive regional and local authorities of power and resources when conflicts arise. In order to combat these negative forces, experts believe that political decentralization should be supplemented with other conflict management mechanisms like power-sharing , particularly in regions with ethnic tensions. Four major forms of administrative decentralization have been described. Fiscal decentralization means decentralizing revenue raising and/or expenditure of moneys to
8349-575: The centers of authority (" top-down ") or from individuals, localities or regions (" bottom-up "), or from a "mutually desired" combination of authorities and localities working together. Bottom-up decentralization usually stresses political values like local responsiveness and increased participation and tends to increase political stability. Top-down decentralization may be motivated by the desire to "shift deficits downwards" and find more resources to pay for services or pay off government debt. Some hold that decentralization should not be imposed, but done in
8470-411: The code of another contract, or create a new contract, and are identified on the blockchain and in the state by an account address. Contracts are the only type of account that has associated bytecode and storage (to store contract-specific state). The code of a contract is evaluated when a transaction is sent to it. The code of the contract may read user-specified data from the transaction, and may have
8591-428: The community level as the entry point at which holistic definitions of development goals are from the people themselves and where it is most practical to support them. It involves seeing multi-level frameworks and continuous, synergistic processes of interaction and iteration of cycles as critical for achieving wholeness in a decentralized system and for sustaining its development." However, it has been seen as part of
8712-541: The conference, Gavin Wood , Charles Hoskinson , and Anthony Di Iorio (who financed the project) rented a house in Miami with Buterin at which they could develop a fuller sense of what Ethereum might become. Di Iorio invited friend Joseph Lubin , who invited reporter Morgen Peck, to bear witness. Peck subsequently wrote about the experience in Wired . Six months later the founders met again in Zug , Switzerland, where Buterin told
8833-478: The creation of local political units, and encouragement of advocacy groups . A national government may decide to decentralize its authority and responsibilities for a variety of reasons. Decentralization reforms may occur for administrative reasons, when government officials decide that certain responsibilities and decisions would be handled best at the regional or local level. In democracies, traditionally conservative parties include political decentralization as
8954-536: The creation of unique and indivisible tokens, called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Since tokens of this type are unique, they have been used to represent such things as collectibles, digital art, sports memorabilia, virtual real estate, and items within games. ERC-721 is the first official NFT standard for Ethereum and was followed up by ERC-1155 which introduced semi-fungibility, both are widely used, though some fully fungible tokens using ERC-20 have been used for NFTs such as CryptoPunks . The first NFT project, Etheria,
9075-412: The current execution context, such as remaining gas, information about the current block, and the current transaction. The EVM is designed to be deterministic on a wide variety of hardware and operating systems , so that given a pre-transaction state and a transaction, each node produces the same post-transaction state, thereby enabling network consensus. The formal definition of the EVM is specified in
9196-580: The current transaction or the blockchain. Ethereum addresses are composed of the prefix " 0x " (a common identifier for hexadecimal ) concatenated with the rightmost 20 bytes of the Keccak-256 hash of the ECDSA public key (the curve used is the so-called secp256k1 ). In hexadecimal, two digits represent a byte, and so addresses contain 40 hexadecimal digits after the " 0x ", e.g. 0xb794f5ea0ba39494ce839613fffba74279579268 . Contract addresses are in
9317-400: The decentralization of Ancient Greece . Since the 1980s a number of scholars have written about cycles of centralization and decentralization. Stephen K. Sanderson wrote that over the last 4000 years chiefdoms and actual states have gone through sequences of centralization and decentralization of economic, political and social power. Yildiz Atasoy writes this process has been going on "since
9438-421: The demands of minorities for a greater say in local governance, the general weakening legitimacy of the public sector and global and international pressure on countries with inefficient, undemocratic, overly centralized systems. The following four goals or objectives are frequently stated in various analyses of decentralization. In decentralization, the principle of subsidiarity is often invoked. It holds that
9559-407: The depleted variety. Dayton believed Promethium alloys could make most anything coated in them impervious to destruction or abrasion. Even theorizing that it could impart its matter regenerative abilities to organic anatomy down the line of its testing. Depleted promethium The most common isotope of promethium is the inert element that is easier to sell and managed on a grander scale. By itself it
9680-404: The entry of peers is not regulated. Any peer can enter or leave the system at any time ... Decentralization in any area is a response to the problems of centralized systems. Decentralization in government, the topic most studied, has been seen as a solution to problems like economic decline, government inability to fund services and their general decline in performance of overloaded services,
9801-504: The execution of which simply entails subtracting the amount to be sent from the sender's balance and adding the same amount to the recipient's balance. Ether is often erroneously referred to as "Ethereum". The uppercase Greek letter Xi , Ξ, is sometimes used as a currency symbol for ether. There are two types of accounts on Ethereum: user accounts (also known as externally-owned accounts), and contract accounts. Both types have an ETH balance, may transfer ETH to any account, may execute
9922-453: The eyes of marginalized groups. Moreover, political decentralization is perceived as a valid means of protecting marginalized communities at a local level from the detrimental aspects of development and globalization driven by the state, like the degradation of local customs, codes, and beliefs. In his 2013 book, Democracy and Political Ignorance , George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin argued that political decentralization in
10043-425: The fall of a regime and the resultant power struggles. Even when it happens slowly, there is a need for experimentation, testing, adjusting, and replicating successful experiments in other contexts. There is no one blueprint for decentralization since it depends on the initial state of a country and the power and views of political interests and whether they support or oppose decentralization. Decentralization usually
10164-402: The fifth of which is from centralization to decentralization. In 1996 David Osborne and Ted Gaebler had a best selling book Reinventing Government proposing decentralist public administration theories which became labeled the " New Public Management ". Stephen Cummings wrote that decentralization became a "revolutionary megatrend" in the 1980s. In 1983 Diana Conyers asked if decentralization
10285-426: The following factors as determinants of decentralization: Historians have described the history of governments and empires in terms of centralization and decentralization. In his 1910 The History of Nations Henry Cabot Lodge wrote that Persian king Darius I (550–486 BC) was a master of organization and "for the first time in history centralization becomes a political fact." He also noted that this contrasted with
10406-543: The founders that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that time and soon after founded IOHK, a blockchain company responsible for Cardano . Ethereum has an unusually long list of founders. Anthony Di Iorio wrote: "Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, Myself, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie & Amir Chetrit (the initial 5) in December 2013. Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, & Jeffrey Wilcke were added in early 2014 as founders." Buterin chose
10527-457: The larger urban areas, while rural areas are administered by the central government. Decentralization of responsibilities to provinces may be limited only to those provinces or states which want or are capable of handling responsibility. Some privatization may be more appropriate to an urban than a rural area; some types of privatization may be more appropriate for some states and provinces but not others. The academic literature frequently mentions
10648-532: The latent metagene resting within the DNA of others. The latter is proven when due to Deathstroke the Terminator's use of promethium forged weaponry and equipment; i.e. his armor, sword and possibly his gun staff made of volatile promethium, which he can use without worry due to his healing factor; had triggered latent superpower abilities in his children Rose and Joseph Wilson . Its use and proliferation also had
10769-472: The launch of the contract so that users can see the code and verify that it compiles to the bytecode that is on-chain. One issue related to using smart contracts on a public blockchain is that bugs, including security holes, are visible to all but cannot be fixed quickly. One example of this is the 2016 attack on The DAO , which could not be quickly stopped or reversed. The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request-for-Comments #20) Token Standard allows for fungible tokens on
10890-505: The local information make decisions and in a more timely fashion; that their taking responsibility frees upper management for long term strategics rather than day-to-day decision-making; that managers have hands on training to prepare them to move up the management hierarchy; that managers are motivated by having the freedom to exercise their own initiative and creativity; that managers and divisions are encouraged to prove that they are profitable, instead of allowing their failures to be masked by
11011-427: The lowest or least centralized authority that is capable of addressing an issue effectively should do so. According to one definition: "Decentralization, or decentralizing governance, refers to the restructuring or reorganization of authority so that there is a system of co-responsibility between institutions of governance at the central, regional and local levels according to the principle of subsidiarity, thus increasing
11132-520: The main antagonists, "The Hans". Promethium is a metal alloy with two quite different isotopes, "depleted" and "volatile". Promethium's properties, key among which is that it's virtually indestructible with self restorative properties; make it highly coveted by various public and clandestine interests. The mercenary Deathstroke , for example, uses a suit of the volatile type which could mend itself after being damaged. Both young heroes Victor Stone 's bionic chassis and Roy Harper 's body armor were made of
11253-489: The most centralized regimes in the world (especially the Soviet Union) and the emerging separatist demands that seem to routinely pop up in one or another part of the world. The movement toward local accountability and greater control over one's destiny is, however, not solely the result of the negative attitude towards central government. Rather, these developments, as we have already noted, are principally being driven by
11374-577: The name Silver Scarab as a founding member of Infinity Inc. The suit gave him protection from attacks, let him lift great weights, and allowed him to fly and project solar energy blasts. The current Hawkman and Hawkgirl continue to wear Nth metal. Much later in the DC timeline, members of the Legion of Super Heroes wear "flight rings" made of an alloy of Nth metal called valorium. The mercenary Deathstroke wears armor made of Nth metal. Also mentioned in
11495-409: The name Ethereum after browsing a list of elements from science fiction on Misplaced Pages . He stated, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was that [it] sounded nice and it had the word ' ether ', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel." Buterin wanted his platform to be
11616-672: The national level. Decentralization has been described as a response to demands for diversity. In business, decentralization leads to a management by results philosophy which focuses on definite objectives to be achieved by unit results. Decentralization of government programs is said to increase efficiency – and effectiveness – due to reduction of congestion in communications, quicker reaction to unanticipated problems, improved ability to deliver services, improved information about local conditions, and more support from beneficiaries of programs. Firms may prefer decentralization because it ensures efficiency by making sure that managers closest to
11737-455: The national politics of parliamentary democracies is also heavily associated with the implementation of decentralization reforms. Ethnic parties may endeavor to transfer more autonomy to their respective regions, and as a partisan strategy, ruling parties within the central government may cooperate by establishing regional assemblies in order to curb the rise of ethnic parties in national elections. This phenomenon famously occurred in 1999, when
11858-488: The need for decentralization and a "comprehensive overhaul of government structure to find the appropriate size and scope of units", as well as the need to detach functions from current state boundaries, creating regions based on functions like water, transport, education and economics which might have "different 'overlays' on the map." Alvin Toffler published Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980). Discussing
11979-466: The network would only have to store and validate a subset of the network. Ethereum's blockchain uses a Merkle -Patricia Tree to store account state in each block. The trie allows for storage savings, set membership proofs (called "Merkle proofs"), and light client synchronization. The network has faced congestion problems, such as in 2017 in relation to CryptoKitties . In the United States ,
12100-525: The network's transaction throughput with execution sharding and an improved EVM architecture. The switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake on 15 September 2022 has cut Ethereum's energy usage by 99%. This upgrade, known as "The Merge", was the first phase in the series of upgrades. However, the impact this has on global energy consumption and climate change may be limited since the computers previously used for mining ether may be used to mine other cryptocurrencies that are energy-intensive. On March 13, 2024
12221-411: The order they are listed within each block. Any Ethereum account may "stake" (deposit) 32 ETH to become a validator. At the end of each "epoch" (32 block slots, each slot lasting 12 seconds), each validator is pseudorandomly assigned to one of the slots of the epoch after the next, either as the block proposer or as an attester. During a slot, the block proposer uses their mempool to create a block that
12342-622: The overall profitability of the company. The same principles can be applied to the government. Decentralization promises to enhance efficiency through both inter-governmental competitions with market features and fiscal discipline which assigns tax and expenditure authority to the lowest level of government possible. It works best where members of the subnational government have strong traditions of democracy, accountability, and professionalism. Economic and/or political decentralization can help prevent or reduce conflict because they reduce actual or perceived inequities between various regions or between
12463-422: The overall quality and effectiveness of the system of governance while increasing the authority and capacities of sub-national levels." Decentralization is often linked to concepts of participation in decision-making, democracy, equality and liberty from a higher authority. Decentralization enhances the democratic voice. Theorists believe that local representative authorities with actual discretionary powers are
12584-487: The principle of subsidiarity , which holds that decision-making should be made by the most local competent authority. The EU should decide only on enumerated issues that a local or member state authority cannot address themselves. Furthermore, enforcement is exclusively the domain of member states. In Finland, the Centre Party explicitly supports decentralization. For example, government departments have been moved from
12705-550: The proposed Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act would treat Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies as commodities , which could then be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Decentralization#Blockchain technology Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from
12826-488: The rise of free market -influenced ideas have convinced governments to decentralize their operations, to induce competition within their services, to contract out to private firms operating in the market, and to privatize some functions and services entirely. Government decentralization has both political and administrative aspects. Its decentralization may be territorial, moving power from a central city to other localities, and it may be functional, moving decision-making from
12947-412: The same format, however, they are determined by sender and creation transaction nonce . The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the runtime environment for transaction execution in Ethereum. The EVM is a stack based virtual machine with an instruction set specifically designed for Ethereum. The instruction set includes, among other things, stack operations, memory operations, and operations to inspect
13068-428: The second phase known as "Dencun" or also "Deneb-Cancun" upgrade went live. This upgrade lowered the transaction fees on the many Layer 2 networks built on top of the base Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a peer-to-peer network that maintains a database containing the storage values of all Ethereum accounts and processes state-altering transactions. Approximately every 12 seconds, a batch of new transactions, known as
13189-444: The system is highly connected." University of California, Irvine 's Institute for Software Research's "PACE" project is creating an "architectural style for trust management in decentralized applications." It adopted Rohit Khare 's definition of decentralization: "A decentralized system is one which requires multiple parties to make their own independent decisions" and applies it to Peer-to-peer software creation, writing: In such
13310-752: The theft reversed, and Ethereum Classic which continued on the original chain. In March 2017, various blockchain startups, research groups, and Fortune 500 companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with 30 founding members. By May 2017, the nonprofit organization had 116 enterprise members, including ConsenSys , CME Group , Cornell University's research group , Toyota Research Institute , Samsung SDS , Microsoft , Intel , J. P. Morgan , Cooley LLP , Merck KGaA , DTCC , Deloitte , Accenture , Banco Santander , BNY Mellon , ING , and National Bank of Canada . By July 2017, there were over 150 members in
13431-432: The tip, the more incentive a block proposer has to include the transaction in their block, and thus the quicker the transaction will be included in the blockchain. The sender buys the full amount of gas (i.e. their ETH balance is debited gas limit × gas price and their gas balance is set to gas limit ) up-front, at the start of the execution of the transaction, and is refunded at the end for any unused gas. If at any point
13552-457: The top administrator of any branch of government to lower level officials, or divesting of the function entirely through privatization. It has been called the " new public management " which has been described as decentralization, management by objectives, contracting out, competition within government and consumer orientation. Political decentralization signifies a reduction in the authority of national governments over policy-making. This process
13673-433: The transaction does not have enough gas to perform the next operation, the transaction is reverted but the sender is still only refunded for the unused gas. In user interfaces , gas prices are typically denominated in gigawei (Gwei), a subunit of ETH equal to 10 ETH. The EVM's instruction set is Turing-complete . Popular uses of Ethereum have included the creation of fungible (ERC-20) and non-fungible (ERC-721) tokens with
13794-405: The transaction, and the gas price is the amount of ETH the sender wishes to pay to the network per unit of gas used. A transaction may only be included in the blockchain at a block slot that has a base gas price less than or equal to the transaction's gas price . The portion of the gas price that is in excess of the base gas price is known as the tip and goes to the block proposer; the higher
13915-433: The underlying and imperceptible medium for the applications running on top of it. Formal development of the software underlying Ethereum began in early 2014 through a Swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH ( EthSuisse ). The idea of putting executable smart contracts in the blockchain needed to be specified before it could be implemented in software. This work was done by Gavin Wood, then the chief technology officer , in
14036-438: The words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization." In the early 20th century, America's response to the centralization of economic wealth and political power was a decentralist movement. It blamed large-scale industrial production for destroying middle-class shop keepers and small manufacturers and promoted increased property ownership and
14157-664: Was crowdfunded , and the network went live on 30 July 2015. Ethereum allows anyone to deploy permanent and immutable decentralized applications onto it, with which users can interact. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide financial instruments that do not directly rely on financial intermediaries like brokerages , exchanges , or banks . This facilitates borrowing against cryptocurrency holdings or lending them out for interest . Ethereum also allows users to create and exchange non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are tokens that can be tied to unique digital assets, such as images. Additionally, many other cryptocurrencies utilize
14278-620: Was an advocate, writing: "Decentralization has, not only an administrative value but also a civic dimension since it increases the opportunities for citizens to take interest in public affairs; it makes them get accustomed to using freedom. And from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the most efficient counterweight against the claims of the central government, even if it were supported by an impersonal, collective will." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), influential anarchist theorist wrote: "All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in
14399-421: Was launched on the Ethereum network. In cultivating popularity with users and collectors, it gained notable mainstream media attention providing significant exposure to Ethereum in the process. It was considered the most popular smart contract in use on the network but it also highlighted concerns over Ethereum's scalability due to the game's substantial consumption of network capacity at the time. In January 2018,
14520-410: Was the "latest fashion" in development administration. Cornell University 's project on Restructuring Local Government states that decentralization refers to the "global trend" of devolving responsibilities to regional or local governments. Robert J. Bennett's Decentralization, Intergovernmental Relations and Markets: Towards a Post-Welfare Agenda describes how after World War II governments pursued
14641-853: Was the second-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, behind bitcoin. As of 2021, it maintained that relative position. In 2019, Ethereum Foundation employee Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government for presenting at a blockchain conference in North Korea. He would later plead guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in 2021. In March 2021, Visa Inc. announced that it began settling stablecoin transactions using Ethereum. In April 2021, JP Morgan Chase , UBS , and MasterCard announced that they were investing US$ 65 million into ConsenSys ,
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