Author: Sophia Brown
When I started evangelizing bitcoin and blockchain tech back in 2012 my Dad was a hard sell. There was the common skepticism and typical counters of “what’s backing it?”, “what can be done with it?” and “what the heck is cryptography?” Back then my pitch wasn’t refined and the learning tools had just not quite matured yet…but frankly, I think more of the reason he didn’t grasp it was that he just isn’t technical and doesn’t adopt early tech. I delicately persisted and he eventually came around. Before the end of 2012 he had secured a nice stash of coins…
One of the important issues that has been brought up over the course of the Olympic stress-net release is the large amount of data that clients are required to store; over little more than three months of operation, and particularly during the last month, the amount of data in each Ethereum client’s blockchain folder has ballooned to an impressive 10-40 gigabytes, depending on which client you are using and whether or not compression is enabled. Although it is important to note that this is indeed a stress test scenario where users are incentivized to dump transactions on the blockchain paying…
Special thanks to Gavin Wood, Vlad Zamfir, our security auditors and others for some of the thoughts that led to the conclusions described in this post One of Ethereum’s goals from the start, and arguably its entire raison d’être, is the high degree of abstraction that the platform offers. Rather than limiting users to a specific set of transaction types and applications, the platform allows anyone to create any kind of blockchain application by writing a script and uploading it to the Ethereum blockchain. This gives an Ethereum a degree of future-proof-ness and neutrality much greater than that of other…
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the London office and pondering how to give you a good overview about the work we’ve been doing to secure Ethereum’s protocols, clients and p2p-network. As you might remember, I joined the Ethereum team at the end of last year to manage the security audit. As spring has passed and summer arrived and meanwhile several audits finished, it’s now a good time for me to share some results from the inspection of the world computer’s machine room. 😉 This much is clear, as much as the delivery of the clients is an elaborate…
We are only days away from launching ‘Frontier’, the first milestone in the release of the Ethereum project. Frontier will be followed by ‘Homestead’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Serenity’ throughout the coming year, each adding new features and improving the user friendliness and security of the platform. What is Frontier? Frontier is a live, but barebone implementation of the Ethereum project. It’s intended for technical users, specifically developers. During the Frontier release, we expect early adopters and application developers to establish communities and start forming a live ecosystem. Like their counterparts during the American Frontier, these settlers will be presented with vast…
An update as promised: all systems are now ‘Go’ on the technical side (pun intended) and we intend to release Frontier this week. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my previous blog post. What became apparent is that prior to the big day, many of you wanted to know more about what the sequence of events would exactly be, and how to prepare your machine for the release. A transparent and open release Frontier users will need to first generate, then load the Genesis block into their Ethereum client. The Genesis block is pretty much a database file:…
Genesis is roughly 4 hours away, here are a few last minute pointers for those preparing: All clients are functional on all platforms and build to completion: http://ethereum-buildboard.meteor.com/ Please note that it will take a little while (10-1000 blocks) before the network stabilises. This is a marathon, not a sprint. For this reason we will not make the Genesis block hash known until a solid consensus has been formed. We will not announce the –extradata immediately either – if we did, we might as well launch centrally. We’ll let the community come to a consensus on what it is (as…
A few minutes ago, many of you generated and loaded the Ethereum Genesis block, marking the inception of Frontier, the first Live release of the Ethereum project. The Dev team joins me in thanking each and everyone of you for your support during the past year and half. It’s incredible to see the progress that has taken place since that humble first commit on Christmas Eve 2013. The vision of a censorship-proof ‘world computer’ that anyone can program, paying exclusively for what they use and nothing more, is now a reality. Many of you will want to get started immediately.…
After an intensive recruitment period, the Ethereum Foundation has selected an Executive Director and named three members to the Board of Directors. This is a new organizational structure, which will allow us to focus on our next phase of development. The Ethereum Foundation is a not for profit (‘Stiftung’) organization registered in Switzerland, and has the purpose of managing the funds that were raised from the Ether Sale in order to best serve the Ethereum and decentralized technology ecosystem. Our new executive Director is Ming Chan, and our Board is currently comprised of four members. They are: Lars Klawitter, Vadim…
Hi everyone – Vlad here. I’ve been working on the analysis and specification of “proof-of-stake” blockchain architecture since September 2014. While Vitalik and I haven’t agreed on all of the details of the spec, we do have consensus on many properties of the proof-of-stake protocol that will likely be implemented for the Serenity release! It is called Casper “the friendly ghost” because it is an adaptation of some of the principles of the GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) protocol for proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake. This blog post (my first one!) shares properties that are likely to be true of Casper’s implementation…