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SchellingCoin: A Minimal-Trust Universal Data Feed
One of the main applications of Ethereum that people have been interested in is financial contracts and derivatives. Although financial derivatives have acquired a reputation as a highly risky and destabilizing device with the sole function of enriching speculators, the underlying concept in fact has a number of legitimate uses,...
Published on: March 28, 2014 | Source:
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The Latest EVM: βEthereum Is A Trust-Free Closure Systemβ
In the past two weeks our lead C++ developer, Gavin Wood, and myself have been spending a lot of time meeting the local Ethereum community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We were very excited to see such a large amount of interest in our project, and the fact that...
Published on: March 20, 2014 | Source:The Question of Mining
There are a lot of interesting changes to the Ethereum protocol that are in the works, which will hopefully improve the power of the system, add further features such as light-client friendliness and a higher degree of extensibility, and make Ethereum contracts easier to code. Theoretically, none of these changes...
Published on: March 20, 2014 | Source:DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 2: Reducing Barriers
In the last installment of this series, we talked about what βsmart contractsβ (or, perhaps more accurately, βself-enforcing contractsβ) are, and discussed in detail the two main mechanisms through which these contracts can have βforceβ: smart property and βfactumβ currencies. We also discussed the limits of smart contracts, and how...
Published on: March 01, 2014 | Source:DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law
Many of the concepts that we promote over in Ethereum land may seem incredibly futuristic, and perhaps even frightening, at times. We talk about so-called βsmart contractsβ that execute themselves without any need, or any opportunity, for human intervention or involvement, people forming Skynet-like βdecentralized autonomous organizationsβ that live entirely...
Published on: February 24, 2014 | Source:Ethereum Scalability and Decentralization Updates
Scalability is now at the forefront of the technical discussion in the cryptocurrency scene. The Bitcoin blockchain is currently over 12 GB in size, requiring a period of several days for a new bitcoind node to fully synchronize, the UTXO set that must be stored in RAM is approaching 500...
Published on: February 18, 2014 | Source:Important Statement regarding the Ether pre-sale
The Ethereum Project has had the incredible privilege to launch its PoC testnet and engage the crypto-currency community over the past two months. During our experiences, weβve encountered a lot of passionate support and wonderful questions that have helped us refine our thoughts and goals including the process we will...
Published on: February 13, 2014 | Source:Why Not Just Use X? An Instructive Example from Bitcoin
Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell writes the following on Reddit: There is a design flaw in the Bitcoin protocol where its possible for a third party to take a valid transaction of yours and mutate it in a way which leaves it valid and functionally identical but with a different...
Published on: February 09, 2014 | Source:Cryptographic Code Obfuscation: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Are About to Take a Huge Leap Forward
There have been a number of very interesting developments in cryptography in the past few years. Satoshiβs blockchain notwithstanding, perhaps the first major breakthrough after blinding and zero-knowledge proofs is fully homomorphic encryption, a technology which allows you to upload your data onto a server in an encrypted form so...
Published on: February 08, 2014 | Source:More Thoughts on Scripting and Future-Compatibility
My previous post introducing Ethereum Script 2.0 was met with a number of responses, some highly supportive, others suggesting that we switch to their own preferred stack-based / assembly-based / functional paradigm, and offering various specific criticisms that we are looking hard at. Perhaps the strongest criticism this time came...
Published on: February 05, 2014 | Source:Introducing Ethereum Script 2.0
This post will provide the groundwork for a major rework of the Ethereum scripting language, which will substantially modify the way ES works although still keeping many of the core components working in the exact same way. The rework is necessary as a result of multiple concerns which have been...
Published on: February 03, 2014 | Source:On Transaction Fees, And The Fallacy of Market-Based Solutions
Of all the parts of the Ethereum protocol, aside from the mining function the fee structure is perhaps the least set in stone. The current values, with one crypto operation taking 20 base fees, a new transaction taking 100 base fees, etc, are little more than semi-educated guesses, and harder...
Published on: February 01, 2014 | Source:Conference, Alpha Testnet and Ether Pre-sale Updates
Important notice: any information from this post regarding the ether sale is highly outdated and probably inaccurate. Please only consult the latest blog posts and official materials at ethereum.org for information on the sale Ethereum received an incredible response at the Miami Bitcoin Conference. We traveled there anticipating many...
Published on: January 29, 2014 | Source:Ethereum: Now Going Public
I first wrote the initial draft of the Ethereum whitepaper on a cold day in San Francisco in November, as a culmination of months of thought and often frustrating work into an area that we have come to call βcryptocurrency 2.0β³ β in short, using the Bitcoin blockchain for more...
Published on: January 23, 2014 | Source:Slasher: A Punitive Proof-of-Stake Algorithm
The purpose of this post is not to say that Ethereum will be using Slasher in place of Dagger as its main mining function. Rather, Slasher is a useful construct to have in our war chest in case proof of stake mining becomes substantially more popular or a compelling reason...
Published on: January 15, 2014 | Source:Bootstrapping a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation, Part 3: Identity Corp
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about what the basic workings of a decentralized autonomous corporation might look like, and what kinds of challenges it might need to deal with to be effective. However, there is still one question that we have not answered: what might...
Published on: December 31, 2013 | Source:Bootstrapping An Autonomous Decentralized Corporation, Part 2: Interacting With the World
In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them βaliveβ over thousands of servers. As it turns out, these networks can even maintain...
Published on: December 31, 2013 | Source:Bootstrapping A Decentralized Autonomous Corporation: Part I
Corporations, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney reminds us, are people. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions that his partisans draw from that claim, the statement certainly carries a large amount of truth. What is a corporation, after all, but a certain group of people working together under a...
Published on: December 31, 2013 | Source: