Author: Sophia Brown

One of the criticisms that many people have made about the current direction of the cryptocurrency space is the increasing amount of fragmentation that we are seeing. What was earlier perhaps a more tightly bound community centered around developing the common infrastructure of Bitcoin is now increasingly a collection of “silos”, discrete projects all working on their own separate things. There are a number of developers and researchers who are either working for Ethereum or working on ideas as volunteers and happen to spend lots of time interacting with the Ethereum community, and this set of people has coalesced into…

First of all, happy new year! What a year it has been. With a little luck we’ll surpass last year with an even more awesome year. It’s been too long since I’ve given an update on my side of things and that of the Go team and mostly due to a lack of time. I’ve been so incredibly busy and so many things have happened these past 2 months I’ve hardly had time to sit down and assess it all. As you may be well aware the audit is looming around the corner and my little baby (go-ethereum!) will undergo it’s full…

Back in November, we created a quick survey for the Ethereum community to help us gauge how we’re doing, what can be improved, and how best we can engage with you all as we move forward towards the genesis block release in March. We feel it’s very important to enable the community to interact with Ethereum as well as itself, and we hope to offer new and exciting tools to do so using the survey results for guidance. The survey itself consisted of 14 questions split into two sections; Ethereum as an “Organisation” and Ethereum as a “Technology”.  There was a…

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir and Jae Kwon for many of the ideas described in this post Aside from the primary debate around weak subjectivity, one of the important secondary arguments raised against proof of stake is the issue that proof of stake algorithms are much harder to make light-client friendly. Whereas proof of work algorithms involve the production of block headers which can be quickly verified, allowing a relatively small chain of headers to act as an implicit proof that the network considers a particular history to be valid, proof of stake is harder to fit into such a…

Warning: this post contains crazy ideas. Myself describing a crazy idea should NOT be construed as implying that (i) I am certain that the idea is correct/viable, (ii) I have an even >50% probability estimate that the idea is correct/viable, or that (iii) “Ethereum” endorses any of this in any way. One of the common questions that many in the crypto 2.0 space have about the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations is a simple one: what are DAOs good for? What fundamental advantage would an organization have from its management and operations being tied down to hard code on a…

Special thanks to Andrew Miller for coming up with this attack, and to Zack Hess, Vlad Zamfir and Paul Sztorc for discussion and responses One of the more interesting surprises in cryptoeconomics in recent weeks came from an attack on SchellingCoin conceived by Andrew Miller earlier this month. Although it has always been understood that SchellingCoin, and similar systems (including the more advanced Truthcoin consensus), rely on what is so far a new and untested cryptoeconomic security assumption – that one can safely rely on people acting honestly in a simultaneous consensus game just because they believe that everyone else…

One of the issues inherent in many kinds of consensus architectures is that although they can be made to be robust against attackers or collusions up to a certain size, if an attacker gets large enough they are still, fundamentally, exploitable. If attackers in a proof of work system have less than 25% of mining power and everyone else is non-colluding and rational, then we can show that proof of work is secure; however, if an attacker is large enough that they can actually succeed, then the attack costs nothing – and other miners actually have the incentive to go…

I was woken by Vitalik’s call at 5:55 this morning; pitch black outside, nighttime was still upon us. Nonetheless, it was time to leave and this week had best start on the right foot. The 25-minute walk in darkness from the Zug-based headquarters to the train station was wet. Streetlights reflecting off the puddles on the clean Swiss streets provided a picturesque, if quiet, march into town. I couldn’t help but think the rain running down my face was a very liquid reminder of the impending seasonal change, and then, on consideration, how fast the last nine months had gone.…

I’m Vinay Gupta, the newly minted release coordinator for Ethereum. I’ve been working with the comms team on strategy, and have now come aboard to help smooth the release process (some of the content in this blog is out of date, please see this link for the most up to date information on Ethereum). I’ll be about 50/50 on comms and on release coordination. A lot of that is going to be about keeping you updated on progress: new features, new documentation, and hopefully writing about great new services you can use, so it’s in the hinterland between comms and project…

So I’m not sure if this kind of development methodology has ever been applied to such an extreme before so I figured I’d document it. In a nutshell, it’s sort of like test-driven triplet-programming development. While speed-developing our alpha codebase, four of us sat around a table in the office in Berlin. Three people (Vitalik, Jeff and me) each coders of their own clean-room implementation of the Ethereum protocol. The fourth was Christoph, our master of testing. Our target was to have three fully compatible implementations as well as an unambiguous specification by the end of three days of substantial…