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#General #Development #Mobile Development #Cloud & DevOps #Cybersecurity & Privacy #AI & Data Science #Hardware & Gadgets #Design & UXEther Sale: A Statistical Overview
The first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and we have to date received over 25000 BTC from selling over 50 million ETH. This marks the largest cryptographic token sale to date, and with the two endowments places ETH as being the token with the 8th highest total...
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Programming Society with Asm: Gavin Wood at Assembly 2014
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Ether Purchase Troubleshooting
Although we hope that the ether purchasing experience goes smoothly for everyone, we recognize that there will always be situations where things do not quite go as planned. Perhaps your internet connection dies in the middle of your purchase. Perhaps you accidentally click a back button or some link or...
Launching the Ether Sale
First of all, I would like to thank the community, and especially those close to the project who have in many cases abandoned their jobs to dedicate their time to it, for their extreme patience regarding the launch of the ether sale. We have been promising that the sale would...
Ethereum and Oracles
One of the more popular proposals for implementing smart contracts differently from the way they are typically presented in Ethereum is through the concept of oracles. Essentially, instead of a long-running contract being run directly on the blockchain, all funds that are intended to go into the contract would instead...
the ethereum project: learning to dream with open minds
βAnd those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.β Friedrich Nietzsche Ethereum as a project is more than just a technology, even if technology is at its core. In the rush of creating, co-creating and debugging everything you sometimes...
Toward a 12-second Block Time
One of the annoyances of the blockchain as a decentralized platform is the sheer length of delay before a transaction gets finalized. One confirmation in the Bitcoin network takes ten minutes on average, but in reality due to statistical effects when one sends a transaction one can only expect a...
Background on the mechanics of the ether pre-sale
During the run-up to the ether sale we will be releasing a series of blog posts regarding our development plans and intended organizational structure. Today we describe some of the background details of the ether sale module. The sale module will be displayed on our website at https://www.ethereum.org for the...
On Stake
The topic of mining centralization has been a very important one over the past few weeks. GHASH.io, the Bitcoin network's largest mining pool, has for the past month directed over 40% of the Bitcoin network's hashpower, and two weeks ago briefly spiked over 50%, theoretically giving it monopoly control over...
Advanced Contract Programming Example: SchellingCoin
Writing effective decentralized applications in Ethereum is at the same time easy and hard. The easy part we all know: rather than needing to create your own blockchain, manage complicated database code, deal with networking and NAT traversal, or any of the other complexities involving writing a peer-to-peer app from...
On Mining
Decentralization, n. The security assumption that a nineteen year old in Hangzhou and someone who is maybe in the UK, and maybe not, have not yet decided to collude with each other. There has been a large amount of ruckus in the past week about the issue of mining...
Ethereum Project Update
Development of the Ethereum project has gone very well over the months since inception. The core activity β development of the software platform β is on track and many developers around the world are starting to build small, exploratory distributed applications on the platform, even though we are still not...
What If Ethereum Lived on a Treap? Or, Blockchains Charging Rent
Although truly solving blockchain scalability fundamentally, that is to say figuring out a solution to the problem that every node must process every transaction, is a very hard problem, and all suggested solutions rely on either highly advanced cryptography or intricate multi-blockchain architectures, partial solutions that provide a constant-factor improvement...
On Long-Term Cryptocurrency Distribution Models
One of the challenges when creating a new cryptocurrency is figuring out what the distribution model is going to be. Who is going to receive the currency units, at what time, and what is the mechanism that decides? Despite the crucial importance of this question, there has actually been comparatively...
Long-Range Attacks: The Serious Problem With Adaptive Proof of Work
Our current proof of work design, blockchain-based proof of work, is the second iteration of our attempt to create a mining algorithm that is guaranteed to remain CPU-friendly and resistant to optimization by specialized hardware (ASICs) in the long term. Our first attempt, Dagger, tried to take the idea of...
What is Ethereum? Project, Platform, Fuel, Stack.
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DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide
One of the most popular topics in the digital consensus space (a new term for cryptocurrency 2.0 that Iβm beta-testing) is the concept of decentralized autonomous entities. There are now a number of groups rapidly getting involved in the space, including Bitshares (also known as Invictus Innovations) developing βdecentralized autonomous...
Serpent upgrades: More Fun Stuff
Over the past two weeks our primary focus has been getting all of the clients updated to PoC5 compatibility, and it definitely has been a long road. Among the changes to the VM include: The new init/code mechanism: basically, when you create a contract, the code provided will...
Decentralized Protocol Monetization and Forks
The idea of releasing a new currency as a mechanism for funding protocol development is perhaps one of the most interesting economic innovations to come out of the cryptocurrency space. In the past twenty years, we have seen a growing centralization in the protocols that underlie the internet, with the...
The Issuance Model in Ethereum
Ether (ETH), the cryptofuel that powers distributed applications on the Ethereum platform, will be issued at a constant annual linear rate via the block mining process. This rate is 0.3 times the total amount of ETH that will be purchased in the pre-sale. While the best metaphor for ETH...
Pyethereum and Serpent Programming Guide
The content of this tutorial is intended to apply to PoC5. Most of the instructions given below will not work in the older PoC4 implementations of AlethZero (C++) and Ethereal (Go) Over the last few weeks, we have made a large number of changes to the Ethereum protocol. POC4,...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...