Author: Sophia Brown
Few would argue against the fact that Ethereum has been gifted with one of the most diverse and thoughtful communities ever gathered around any open source project. Fueled by what can only be described as impassioned determination, developers from all walks of life have risked their time and credibility to pioneer in this radical and largely unknown domain of innovation. Indeed, even before genesis, Ethereum already boasts hundreds of projects covering everything from self-stabilizing currency to potential replacements for government services. Today we are launching a new program to support and thank those who continue to take this journey with us.…
Stiftung Ethereum, the Zug, Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation –ethereum.org, is seeking to immediately fill the Executive Director position within the Foundation. The role involves defining and discharging the day-to-day business of the Foundation and leading the organization at the executive level. The successful candidate will have significant experience in corporate finance activities and/or operations. A technical (software, hardware, math, sciences) background is advantageous but not necessary. The ability to effectively operate in Switzerland and globally is essential and the successful candidate will need to either live full time in Switzerland or spend a majority of her/his time there. Experience in building…
With Ethereum getting close to its first official launch with Frontier, we have spent the last week of February at our holon in Switzerland discussing what the future of the Ethereum Foundation is going to look like. Since the start of the project, one of our primary dreams has been to not just deliver a world-class product, but also build a world-class organization, with quality of governance and transparency suitable for a foundation that would be tasked with helping to organize the maintenance of the Ethereum code for potentially decades to come. To that end, we have taken a number…
One of the questions that has perhaps been central to my own research in blockchain technology is: ultimately, what is it even useful for? Why do we need blockchains for anything, what kinds of services should be run on blockchain-like architectures, and why specifically should services be run on blockchains instead of just living on plain old servers? Exactly how much value do blockchains provide: are they absolutely essential, or are they just nice to have? And, perhaps most importantly of all, what is the “killer app” going to be? Over the last few months, I have spent a lot…
Special thanks to: Robert Sams, Gavin Wood, Mark Karpeles and countless cryptocurrency critics on online forums for helping to develop the thoughts behind this article If you were to ask the average cryptocurrency or blockchain enthusiast what the key single fundamental advantage of the technology is, there is a high chance that they will give you one particular predictable answer: it does not require trust. Unlike traditional (financial or other) systems, where you need to trust a particular entity to maintain the database of who holds what quantity of funds, who owns a particular internet-of-things-enabled device, or what the status…
As part of our tiered release process, we will soon be beginning the final phase prior to our Frontier release. So far our ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet has been running smoothly for around a month with dozens of nodes around the world, well over 200,000 blocks and including clients on… Source link
What began all the way back on midnight of February 1st 2014, is coming to a close: we are happy to announce the release of the ninth and last in the Ethereum Proof-of-Concept series. We invite the community to participate in the ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet in our present release, Olympic, made available now. The purpose of Olympic is to reward people who try to test the limits of the Ethereum blockchain during the pre-release period, spamming the network with transactions and doing crazy things with the state, so that we can see how the network holds up under high…
As part of our drive to introduce Ethereum to the far corners of the world, not to mention demonstrate the potential for embedded blockchain technology (even without light-nodes) I’m happy to announce the roll-out of our “eπ” Ethereum-on-Raspberry Pi programme. As part of our programme, we’re offering a full-kit for placing a full Ethereum node on the internet to communities around the world. Included in the kit is a Raspberry Pi (version 2), power connector and SD card preloaded with all software required to run an Ethereum Frontier node. The only thing that must be supplied by the applicant is…
Special thanks to Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke for countless revisions feedback, picks at their brains, and helping me read their tea leaves. Introduction In the world of cryptography-based computer science, the Ethereum technology vision has captivated the imagination of a large number of software developers and technologists who saw its obvious promise. But those same promises and their business interpretations (and implications) have not widely reached, nor been well understood by non-technical audiences. As Ethereum nears coming out of the “labs” and into the market, it is even more important that its message be widely understood by the…
One of the interesting problems in designing effective blockchain technologies is, how can we ensure that the systems remain censorship-proof? Although lots of work has been done in cryptoeconomics in order to ensure that blockchains continue pumping out new blocks, and particularly to prevent blocks from being reverted, substantially less attention has been put on the problem of ensuring that transactions that people want to put into the blockchain will actually get in, even if “the powers that be”, at least on that particular blockchain, would prefer otherwise. Censorship-resistance in decentralized cryptoeconomic systems is not just a matter of making…