Author: Sophia Brown

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir for much of the thinking behind multi-chain cryptoeconomic paradigms First off, a history lesson. In October 2013, when I was visiting Israel as part of my trip around the Bitcoin world, I came to know the core teams behind the colored coins and Mastercoin projects. Once I properly understood Mastercoin and its potential, I was immediately drawn in by the sheer power of the protocol; however, I disliked the fact that the protocol was designed as a disparate ensemble of “features”, providing a subtantial amount of functionality for people to use, but offering no freedom…

I’m Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and, along with Vitalik Buterin and Jeffrey Wilcke, one of the three directors of the Eth Dev, the NFP organisation that is managing the development (under contract from Ethereum Suisse) of the Ethereum blockchain. This is a small update to let you all know what has been going on recently. I sit here on an immaculate couch that has been zapped forward in time from the 1960s. It is in the room that will become the chillout & wind-down room of the heart of the (C++) Ethereum development operation. Surrounding me is Alex…

One of the latest ideas that has come to recently achieve some prominence in parts of the Bitcoin community is the line of thinking that has been described by both myself and others as “Bitcoin dominance maximalism” or just “Bitcoin maximalism” for short – essentially, the idea that an environment of multiple competing cryptocurrencies is undesirable, that it is wrong to launch “yet another coin”, and that it is both righteous and inevitable that the Bitcoin currency comes to take a monopoly position in the cryptocurrency scene. Note that this is distinct from a simple desire to support Bitcoin and…

Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. Although the idea has many undeniable benefits, including efficiency, a larger security margin and future-proof immunity to hardware centralization concerns, proof of stake algorithms tend to be substantially more complex than proof of work-based alternatives, and there is a large amount of skepticism that proof of stake can work at all, particularly with regard to the supposedly fundamental “nothing at stake” problem. As it turns out, however, the problems are solvable, and one can make a rigorous argument that proof of stake, with all…

Yesterday was the first proper day of ÐΞVhub Berlin being open, following the first Ethereum internal developers’ symposium ÐΞVcon-0. I want to post a few images to let you gauge the mood here. Henning, Marek, Viktor and Felix hacking on the couch Aeron and Brian in discussion Alex and Jutta conferencing over network and security The rest of the team hacking in the lab Source link

Day 1 – Monday 24th Nov – ÐΞV: Mission and Processes The first day of ÐΞVcon-0 kicked off early at 7am with the Ethereum UK communications team arriving at the venue (Ethereum Dev UG’s workspace in Kreuzberg, Berlin) to set up the 4K high quality recording equipment and arrange the space for the event.  After a quick coffee and croissant/pain au chocolat, everyone was ready for the first presentation – “Welcome! Our mission: ÐApps” which was delivered by Gavin Wood. Gavin made it very clear within this presentation the need for decentralised applications in today’s society with two very powerful…

Time for another update! So quite a bit has happened following ÐΞVcon-0, our internal developer’s conference. The conference itself was a great time to get all the developers together and really get to know each other, dissipate a lot of information (back to back presentations for 5 days!) and chat over a lot of ideas. The comms team will be releasing each of the presentations as fast as Ian can get them nicely polished. During the time since the last update, much has happened including, finally, the release of the Ethereum ÐΞV website, ethdev.com. Though relatively simple as present, there…

OK so a minor update about what we are (and are not) doing here at Ethereum DEV. We are, first and foremost, developing a robust quasi-Turing-complete blockchain. This is known as Ethereum. Aside from having quasi-Turing-completeness, it delivers on a number of other important considerations, stemming from the fact we are developing entirely new blockchain technology including: speedy, through a 12 second blocktime; light-client-friendly through the use of Merkle roots in headers for compact inclusion/state proofs and DHT integration to allow light clients to host & share small parts of the full chain; ÐApp-friendly, even for light-clients, through the use…

Hi, I’m Jutta! As some of you might have read in earlier posts, I’ve recently been busy setting up a security audit prior to the Ethereum genesis block release. Ethereum will launch following a world-class review by experts in IT security, cryptography and blockchain technology. Prior to the launch, we will also complete a bug bounty program – a major cornerstone of our approach to achieving security. The bug bounty program will rely on the Ethereum community and all other motivated bug bounty hunters out there. We’ll soon release the final details of the program, currently under development by Gustav. A first glimpse:…

The crypto 2.0 industry has been making strong progress in the past year developing blockchain technology, including the formalization and in some cases realization of proof of stake designs like Slasher and DPOS, various forms of scalable blockchain algorithms, blockchains using “leader-free consensus” mechanisms derived from traditional Byzantine fault tolerance theory, as well as economic ingredients like Schelling consensus schemes and stable currencies. All of these technologies remedy key deficiencies of the blockchain design with respect to centralized servers: scalability knocks down size limits and transaction costs, leader-free consensus reduces many forms of exploitability, stronger PoS consensus algorithms reduce consensus…