Author: Sophia Brown

Unfortunately we were not able to secure the venue for devcon one in London on the dates desired (October 5th-8th). As a consequence we are postponing the event until further notice.  Please do not make travel plans at this time. Updates will be forthcoming on the devcon one website . Please standby for further information. Source link

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State transition and consensus issue in geth client causes panic (crash) when processing a (valid) block with a specific combination of transactions, which may cause overall network instability if block is accepted and relayed by unaffected clients thus causing a DoS. This may happen in a block that contains transactions which suicide to the block reward address. Affected configurations: Issue reported for Geth.While investigating the issue, related issues were discovered and corrected in pyethereum, hence pyethapp is also affected. C++ clients are unaffected. Likelihood: Low Severity: High Complexity: High Impact: Network Instability and DoS Details: A block containing a specific…

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Implementation bug in the go client leads to steady increase of difficulty independent of hashing power. Affected configurations: All Go client versions v1.0.x, v1.1.x, release and develop branches. The bug was introduced in a recent update and release through commit https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/7324176f702a77fc331bf16a968d2eb4bccce021 which went into the affected client versions. All miners running earlier mentioned versions are affected and are advised to update as soon as possible. Likelihood: High Severity: Medium Impact: Increase in block time will lead to an exponential increase in difficulty Details: A bug in the go client leads to steady increase in difficulty in the following block, as…

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To the wonderful Ethereum Community, You often heard me say at conferences that Ethereum was not a company, a foundation, an implementation, or an individual. Ethereum is both an idea and an ideal, encompassing the first censorship-resistant network build specifically to enable those who need it the most to safely trade, privately self-organise and freely communicate, rather than relying on the crippled walled garden handed out by the powers that be. Due to divergence in personal values, Eth/Dev and I have mutually decided to part ways. I of course intend to continue promoting the Ethereum ideals and bring about a…

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  Summary: Implementation bug in the go client may lead to invalid state Affected client versions: Latest (unpatched) versions of Go client; v1.1.2, v1.0.4 tags and develop, master branches before September 9. Likelihood: Low Severity: High Impact: High Details: Go ethereum client does not correctly restore state of execution environment when a transaction goes out-of-gas if – within the same block – a contract was suicided. This would result in an invalid copy operation of the state object; flagging the contract as not deleted. This operation would cause a consensus issue between the other implementations.   Effects on expected chain…

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One of the largest sources of confusion in the question of blockchain security is the precise effect of the block time. If one blockchain has a block time of 10 minutes, and the other has an estimated block time of 17 seconds, then what exactly does that mean? What is the equivalent of six confirmations on the 10-minute blockchain on the 17-second blockchain? Is blockchain security simply a matter of time, is it a matter of blocks, or a combination of both? What security properties do more complex schemes have? Note: this article will not go into depth on the…

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We are happy to announce our very first developer-preview of the Ethereum Wallet ÐApp. The point of this release is to gather feedback, squash bugs and, most importantly, get the code audited. Please note that this is a developer-preview and not the final release. We advise you to be extremely careful putting large amount of Ether in the wallet contracts. Using the wallet on the mainnet should only be done with small amounts!   As Steve Ballmer once said Developers! Developers! Developers! And note that this is exactly our target audience, don’t blindly trust us and we ask (and advise!)…

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The foundation is currently in the phase of restructuring its communications activities. Several members of our current communications team in London are soon leaving or reducing their involvement in the Foundation in order to pursue for-profit ventures on top of the Ethereum ecosystem; we wish them the best of luck. And so, we have both the necessity and a unique opportunity to “reboot” that side of the organization and take another look at how the Ethereum foundation interacts with the community. As some initial steps, we are going to do the following: We will make an effort to de-emphasize Skype,…

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DevCon 1 will be happening in London on November 9-13, a little over one hundred days since the Ethereum network launched. Over the last months, we’ve seen the network grow from a few hundred nodes starting on that one exciting and special night to a very substantial, globally deployed stable platform with thousands of devs pushing towards the decentralization revolution which motivates and inspires us. DevCon will have three primary categories of topics: Basic research and core protocols: including proof of stake, scalability, networking protocols, privacy and zero-knowledge proofs, as well as some of the more mathematical aspects of decentralized…

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The following are some interesting results on the performance of different miners over the course of the first 280,000 blocks of the Ethereum blockchain. For this timespan I have collected the list of block and uncle coinbase addresses; raw data can be found here for blocks and here for uncles, and from this we can glean a lot of interesting information particularly about stale rates and how well-connected the different miners and pools are. First off, the scatter plot: What we clearly see here are a few primary trends. First of all, uncle rates are quite low compared to Olympic;…

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