Author: Sophia Brown

First of all, I would like to thank the community, and especially those close to the project who have in many cases abandoned their jobs to dedicate their time to it, for their extreme patience regarding the launch of the ether sale. We have been promising that the sale would arise in two weeks for six months, and many team members have endured substantial hardships because of expectations that we set regarding when we would be able to provide funding. We certainly miscalculated the sheer difficulty of navigating the relevant legal processes in the United States and Switzerland, as well…

Although we hope that the ether purchasing experience goes smoothly for everyone, we recognize that there will always be situations where things do not quite go as planned. Perhaps your internet connection dies in the middle of your purchase. Perhaps you accidentally click a back button or some link or simply hit refresh while the purchase is in progress. Perhaps you forgot to download your wallet. Perhaps you think you may have forgotten your password, and you want to make sure you have it down correctly. For all of these situations, the user experience is unfortunately going to be a…

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The first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and we have to date received over 25000 BTC from selling over 50 million ETH. This marks the largest cryptographic token sale to date, and with the two endowments places ETH as being the token with the 8th highest total value, even beating out the beloved Dogecoin at 17.3MUSDvs17.3M USD vs 17.3MUSDvs15.5M. A total of 6670 transactions have been made, with values ranging from the minimum 0.01 BTC to a high of 500 BTC, and purchases continue to come in every hour. Additionally, the ether sale marks the largest use…

Now that the first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and over 50 million ETH has been sold, we intend to soon make a transaction to begin using the funds to repay loans and kickstart the process of setting up our development hubs and expanding our staff. We have made a commitment to be highly transparent about how we spend the funds, and that is a commitment that we intend to live up to; to that end, we have already released an Intended Use of Revenue chart and a roadmap to show how we intend to spend the…

One of the more exciting applications of decentralized computing that have aroused a considerable amount of interest in the past year is the concept of an incentivized decentralized online file storage system. Currently, if you want your files or data securely backed up “in the cloud”, you have three choices – (1) upload them to your own servers, (2) use a centralized service like Google Drive or Dropbox or (3) use an existing decentralized file system like Freenet. These approaches all have their own faults; the first has a high setup and maintenance cost, the second relies on a single…

how ethereum could shard the web Given the state of our 25-year old web and all the problems inherited from legacy 1970’s systems design, we should pause and take inventory of those components which are fundamentally broken and would offer a substantial return on development investment. Intersecting this concern with security, privacy, and censorship resistance, it should be painfully obvious that an all-out attack on Internet infrastructure is already underway. As netizens, a shared duty falls on us to explore, exploit, and implement new technologies that benefits creators, not oppressors. And while cryptography first allowed us to secure our messages…

One of the more interesting long-term practical benefits of the technology and concept behind decentralized autonomous organizations is that DAOs allow us to very quickly prototype and experiment with an aspect of our social interactions that is so far arguably falling behind our rapid advancements in information and social technology elsewhere: organizational governance. Although our modern communications technology is drastically augmenting individuals’ naturally limited ability to both interact and gather and process information, the governance processes we have today are still dependent on what may now be seen as centralized crutches and arbitrary distinctions such as “member”, “employee”, “customer” and…

Development of Ethereum has been progressing increasingly quickly this past month. The release of PoC5 (“proof of concept five”) last month the day before the sale marked an important event for the project, as for the first time we had two clients, one written in C++ and one in Go, perfectly interoperating with each other and processing the same blockchain. Two weeks later, the Python client was also added to the list, and now a Java version is also almost done. Currently, we are in the process of using an initial quantity of funds that we have already withdrawn from…

One of the key properties that is usually sought for in a cryptoeconomic algorithm, whether a blockchain consensus algorithm such a proof of work or proof of stake, a reputation system or a trading process for something like data transmission or file storage, is the ideal of incentive-compatibility – the idea that it should be in everyone’s economic interest to honestly follow the protocol. The key underlying assumption in this goal is the idea that people (or more precisely in this case nodes) are “rational” – that is to say, that people have a relatively simple defined set of objectives…