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One of the key properties that is usually sought for in a cryptoeconomic algorithm, whether a blockchain consensus algorithm such a proof of work or proof of stake, a reputation system or a trading process for something like data transmission or file storage, is the ideal of incentive-compatibility - the...
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State of Ethereum: August Edition
Development of Ethereum has been progressing increasingly quickly this past month. The release of PoC5 ("proof of concept five") last month the day before the sale marked an important event for the project, as for the first time we had two clients, one written in C++ and one in Go,...
An Introduction to Futarchy
One of the more interesting long-term practical benefits of the technology and concept behind decentralized autonomous organizations is that DAOs allow us to very quickly prototype and experiment with an aspect of our social interactions that is so far arguably falling behind our rapid advancements in information and social technology...
Secret Sharing and Erasure Coding: A Guide for the Aspiring Dropbox Decentralizer
One of the more exciting applications of decentralized computing that have aroused a considerable amount of interest in the past year is the concept of an incentivized decentralized online file storage system. Currently, if you want your files or data securely backed up "in the cloud", you have three choices...
Announcement on planned withdrawal from exodus
Now that the first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and over 50 million ETH has been sold, we intend to soon make a transaction to begin using the funds to repay loans and kickstart the process of setting up our development hubs and expanding our staff. We...
Ether 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...
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
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” 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 — development of the software platform — 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 I’m 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 “decentralized 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: “Ethereum Is A Trust-Free Closure System”
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 “smart contracts” (or, perhaps more accurately, “self-enforcing contracts”) are, and discussed in detail the two main mechanisms through which these contracts can have “force”: smart property and “factum” 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 “smart contracts” that execute themselves without any need, or any opportunity, for human intervention or involvement, people forming Skynet-like “decentralized autonomous organizations” 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, we’ve encountered a lot of passionate support and wonderful questions that have helped us refine our thoughts and goals including the process we will...