Author: Sophia Brown

Of all the parts of the Ethereum protocol, aside from the mining function the fee structure is perhaps the least set in stone. The current values, with one crypto operation taking 20 base fees, a new transaction taking 100 base fees, etc, are little more than semi-educated guesses, and harder data on exactly how much computational power a database read, an arithmetic operation and a hash actually take will certainly give us much better estimates on what exactly the ratios between the different computational fees should be. The other part of the question, that of exactly how much the base…

This post will provide the groundwork for a major rework of the Ethereum scripting language, which will substantially modify the way ES works although still keeping many of the core components working in the exact same way. The rework is necessary as a result of multiple concerns which have been raised about the way the language is currently designed, primarily in the areas of simplicity, optimization, efficiency and future-compatibility, although it does also have some side-benefits such as improved function support. This is not the last iteration of ES2; there will likely be many incremental structural improvements that can be…

My previous post introducing Ethereum Script 2.0 was met with a number of responses, some highly supportive, others suggesting that we switch to their own preferred stack-based / assembly-based / functional paradigm, and offering various specific criticisms that we are looking hard at. Perhaps the strongest criticism this time came from Sergio Damian Lerner, Bitcoin security researcher, developer of QixCoin and to whom we are grateful for his analysis of Dagger. Sergio particularly criticizes two aspects of the change: the fee system, which is changed from a simple one-variable design where everything is a fixed multiple of the BASEFEE, and…

There have been a number of very interesting developments in cryptography in the past few years. Satoshi’s blockchain notwithstanding, perhaps the first major breakthrough after blinding and zero-knowledge proofs is fully homomorphic encryption, a technology which allows you to upload your data onto a server in an encrypted form so that the server can then perform calculations on it and send you back the results all without having any idea what the data is. In 2013, we saw the beginnings of succinct computational integrity and privacy (SCIP), a toolkit pioneered by Eli ben Sasson in Israel that lets you cryptographically…

Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell writes the following on Reddit: There is a design flaw in the Bitcoin protocol where its possible for a third party to take a valid transaction of yours and mutate it in a way which leaves it valid and functionally identical but with a different transaction ID. This greatly complicates writing correct wallet software, and it can be used abusively to invalidate long chains of unconfirmed transactions that depend on the non-mutant transaction (since transactions refer to each other by txid). This issue arises from several sources, one of them being OpenSSL’s willingness to accept and…

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 eventually use to sell ether. This said, we have not finalized the structure and format for the ether presale and thus we do not recommend, encourage, or endorse any attempt to sell, trade, or acquire ether. We have recently become aware of peercover.com announcing a fundraising structure based in some…

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 MB, and continued software improvements in the source code are simply not enough to alleviate the trend. With every passing year, it becomes more and more difficult for an ordinary user to locally run a fully functional Bitcoin node on their own desktop, and even as the price, merchant acceptance…

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 on the cloud and yet control powerful financial resources and can incentivize people to do very real things in the physical world, decentralized “math-based law”, and a seemingly utopian quest to create some kind of fully trust-free society. To the uninformed user, and especially to those who have not even…

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 a smart contract-enabled legal system might use a combination of human judgement and automatic execution to achieve the best possible outcomes. But what is the point of these contracts? Why automate? Why is it better to have our relationships regulated and controlled by algorithms rather than humans? These are the…

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 are necessary; the Ethereum protocol is fine as it stands today, and can theoretically be released as is once the clients are further built up somewhat; rather, the changes are there to make Ethereum better. However, there is one design objective of Ethereum where the light at the end of…