Author: Sophia Brown
In the past two weeks our lead C++ developer, Gavin Wood, and myself have been spending a lot of time meeting the local Ethereum community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We were very excited to see such a large amount of interest in our project, and the fact that after only two months we have a meetup group that comes together every week, just like the Bitcoin meetup, with over thirty people attending each time. People in the community are taking it upon themselves to make educational videos, organize events and experiment with contracts, and one person is even…
One of the main applications of Ethereum that people have been interested in is financial contracts and derivatives. Although financial derivatives have acquired a reputation as a highly risky and destabilizing device with the sole function of enriching speculators, the underlying concept in fact has a number of legitimate uses, some of which actually help people protect themselves against the volatility of financial markets. The main idea here is called “hedging”, and is best explained in the context of Bitcoin, where ordinary businesses and individuals with no desire to take massive risks end up needing to deal with high volumes…
The content of this tutorial is intended to apply to PoC5. Most of the instructions given below will not work in the older PoC4 implementations of AlethZero (C++) and Ethereal (Go) Over the last few weeks, we have made a large number of changes to the Ethereum protocol. POC4, introducing a large body of changes made by Gavin Wood and myself, was announced as an informal description two weeks ago, and has been formally specified in Gavin Wood’s “yellow paper” at http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf. The protocol spec did change substantially, but at the same time things are solidifying; we know why we…
Ether (ETH), the cryptofuel that powers distributed applications on the Ethereum platform, will be issued at a constant annual linear rate via the block mining process. This rate is 0.3 times the total amount of ETH that will be purchased in the pre-sale. While the best metaphor for ETH is “fuel for running the contract processing engine,” for the purposes of this post, we will treat ETH purely as a currency. There are two common definitions of “inflation.” The first relates to prices and the second relates to the total amount of money in a system – the monetary base…
The idea of releasing a new currency as a mechanism for funding protocol development is perhaps one of the most interesting economic innovations to come out of the cryptocurrency space. In the past twenty years, we have seen a growing centralization in the protocols that underlie the internet, with the rise of proprietary chat systems and social networks like Facebook, and a large part of the reason for this trend has been the need for monetization; if Facebook was cryptographically secure and decentralized, the developers would have no way to make money by data mining their users’ activities and taking…
Over the past two weeks our primary focus has been getting all of the clients updated to PoC5 compatibility, and it definitely has been a long road. Among the changes to the VM include: The new init/code mechanism: basically, when you create a contract, the code provided will execute immediately, and then the return value of that code will be what becomes the contract’s code. This allows us to have contract initialization code, but still keep to the same format of [nonce, price, gas, to, value, data] for both transactions and contract creation, also making it easier to create new…
One of the most popular topics in the digital consensus space (a new term for cryptocurrency 2.0 that I’m beta-testing) is the concept of decentralized autonomous entities. There are now a number of groups rapidly getting involved in the space, including Bitshares (also known as Invictus Innovations) developing “decentralized autonomous companies”, BitAngels’ David Johnston with decentralized applications, our own concept of decentralized autonomous corporations which has since transformed into the much more general and not necessarily financial “decentralized autonomous organizations” (DAOs); all in all, it is safe to say that “DAOism” is well on its way to becoming a quasi-cyber-religion.…
What is Ethereum, the Project? The Ethereum Project is an open source, community-driven effort designed to create a next-generation distributed application platform intended to be maximally flexible and powerful in the possibilities that it enables. What is Ethereum, the Platform? The Ethereum Platform combines a generalized peer-to-peer networking platform with next-generation blockchain architecture to deliver a decentralized consensus-based (decentcon), full-stack platform for developing, offering and using distributed application services. A consumer-facing application, called the EtherBrowser, integrates the front and back ends to create an environment in which anyone can easily and rapidly build highly secure, scalable and interoperable decentralized applications.…
The Necessity to Build and Launch an Ecosystem on Genesis Day Imagine if Microsoft released the Xbox and there were no games. On the day on which the Ethereum genesis block is created, many of the elements of the ecosystem — core infrastructure, mining network, user app browser and applications — will be in place. Granted there will be an enormous amount of development to do beyond the genesis to craft Ethereum into a sophisticated, decentralized consensus (decentcon) application platform. But on day one, there will be “launch titles.” Originally, when the idea behind Ethereum was conceived in November, the…
Our current proof of work design, blockchain-based proof of work, is the second iteration of our attempt to create a mining algorithm that is guaranteed to remain CPU-friendly and resistant to optimization by specialized hardware (ASICs) in the long term. Our first attempt, Dagger, tried to take the idea of memory-hard algorithms like Scrypt one step further by creating an algorithm which is memory-hard to compute, but memory-easy to verify, using directed acyclic graphs (basically, trees where each node has multiple parents). Our current strategy takes a much more rigorous track: make the proof of work involve executing random contracts…