By its design, the Ethereum Smart Contract platform was designed to be a continually evolving entity that would be flexible, allow a diverse set of applications to be built on it, and attract a wide range of participants into the network.

To mature the blockchain into a world-class platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications, Ethereum divided its release into four stages, or hard forks, namely Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and finally Serenity.

It also hard-coded a difficulty bomb, which is a del...

Generating a Seal (aka Proof-of-Work)

We’ll use this magic machine to generate a seal for ...