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Ethereum

Ethereum adds general-purpose computation to the blockchain model this book built up through Bitcoin, trading Bitcoin's UTXO model for accounts, its non-Turing-complete Script for the Turing-complete EVM, and (since 2022) its proof-of-work consensus for proof-of-stake. This section covers Ethereum's own architecture on its own terms, drawing direct comparisons to Bitcoin throughout precisely because the contrasts are the fastest way to understand why Ethereum made each different design choice.

What you need to know first

Everything through Bitcoin and Distributed Systems. This section assumes you understand blocks, transactions, consensus, and Sybil resistance in Bitcoin's specific context, and builds Ethereum's differences directly on top of that foundation rather than re-explaining shared concepts from scratch.

Chapters

Accounts and transactions

  1. Ethereum Accounts: the four fields every account has, verified against live chain data
  2. Externally Owned Accounts: key-controlled accounts, and why every transaction traces back to one
  3. Contract Accounts: code-controlled accounts, and why they can never act unprompted
  4. Ethereum Transactions: the fields, and the EIP-1559 type that's been default since 2021
  5. Gas: metering computation to bound a Turing-complete virtual machine
  6. Gas Price and Fees: the base-fee-and-tip model, with its adjustment formula run and verified

State

  1. Ethereum Blocks: the header fields with no Bitcoin analogue
  2. Ethereum State: the current snapshot, distinguished from history
  3. State Trie: why a plain Merkle tree isn't enough for key-based state

Infrastructure

  1. JSON-RPC: the raw protocol underneath every wallet and library, called directly and verified live
  2. Ethereum Nodes: why a full node is two communicating pieces of software, not one
  3. Execution Clients: Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth
  4. Consensus Clients: Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar

Proof of Stake

  1. The Merge: the two-year, two-chain strategy behind Ethereum's consensus transition
  2. Proof of Stake: staked capital as Sybil resistance, and why it needs a known validator set
  3. Validators: activation queues, effective balance, and exit
  4. Staking: solo, pooled, and liquid staking, and the centralization question each raises
  5. Slashing: the two narrow, cryptographically provable offenses that trigger it
  6. Finality: justified and finalized checkpoints, compared directly against Bitcoin's probabilistic model

Next

Continue to The EVM to see exactly what a contract account's code actually is and how it executes, the bytecode and opcode level this section's Contract Accounts chapter described only from the outside.