Author: Michael Johnson
As part of our tiered release process, we will soon be beginning the final phase prior to our Frontier release. So far our ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet has been running smoothly for around a month with dozens of nodes around the world, well over 200,000 blocks and including clients on… Source link
What began all the way back on midnight of February 1st 2014, is coming to a close: we are happy to announce the release of the ninth and last in the Ethereum Proof-of-Concept series. We invite the community to participate in the ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet in our present release, Olympic, made available now. The purpose of Olympic is to reward people who try to test the limits of the Ethereum blockchain during the pre-release period, spamming the network with transactions and doing crazy things with the state, so that we can see how the network holds up under high…
As part of our drive to introduce Ethereum to the far corners of the world, not to mention demonstrate the potential for embedded blockchain technology (even without light-nodes) I’m happy to announce the roll-out of our “eπ” Ethereum-on-Raspberry Pi programme. As part of our programme, we’re offering a full-kit for placing a full Ethereum node on the internet to communities around the world. Included in the kit is a Raspberry Pi (version 2), power connector and SD card preloaded with all software required to run an Ethereum Frontier node. The only thing that must be supplied by the applicant is…
Special thanks to Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke for countless revisions feedback, picks at their brains, and helping me read their tea leaves. Introduction In the world of cryptography-based computer science, the Ethereum technology vision has captivated the imagination of a large number of software developers and technologists who saw its obvious promise. But those same promises and their business interpretations (and implications) have not widely reached, nor been well understood by non-technical audiences. As Ethereum nears coming out of the “labs” and into the market, it is even more important that its message be widely understood by the…
One of the interesting problems in designing effective blockchain technologies is, how can we ensure that the systems remain censorship-proof? Although lots of work has been done in cryptoeconomics in order to ensure that blockchains continue pumping out new blocks, and particularly to prevent blocks from being reverted, substantially less attention has been put on the problem of ensuring that transactions that people want to put into the blockchain will actually get in, even if “the powers that be”, at least on that particular blockchain, would prefer otherwise. Censorship-resistance in decentralized cryptoeconomic systems is not just a matter of making…
Been a while, I know, but then these are rather busy days. I’m writing this from a Starbucks in Shanghai sitting behind the Great Firewall, able to peep out only occasionally. I’ve been in Asia with Marek for the last couple of weeks, mainly for meetups, workshops and technical meetings. During this time, we’ve seen the release, struggle and survival of the Olympic testnet, a very clear signal that a multi-client system would be far superior to the present monoculture. We’ve seen the beginning of the second external Go audit, mainly for checking of regressions but also to offer comments…
When I started evangelizing bitcoin and blockchain tech back in 2012 my Dad was a hard sell. There was the common skepticism and typical counters of “what’s backing it?”, “what can be done with it?” and “what the heck is cryptography?” Back then my pitch wasn’t refined and the learning tools had just not quite matured yet…but frankly, I think more of the reason he didn’t grasp it was that he just isn’t technical and doesn’t adopt early tech. I delicately persisted and he eventually came around. Before the end of 2012 he had secured a nice stash of coins…
One of the important issues that has been brought up over the course of the Olympic stress-net release is the large amount of data that clients are required to store; over little more than three months of operation, and particularly during the last month, the amount of data in each Ethereum client’s blockchain folder has ballooned to an impressive 10-40 gigabytes, depending on which client you are using and whether or not compression is enabled. Although it is important to note that this is indeed a stress test scenario where users are incentivized to dump transactions on the blockchain paying…
Special thanks to Gavin Wood, Vlad Zamfir, our security auditors and others for some of the thoughts that led to the conclusions described in this post One of Ethereum’s goals from the start, and arguably its entire raison d’être, is the high degree of abstraction that the platform offers. Rather than limiting users to a specific set of transaction types and applications, the platform allows anyone to create any kind of blockchain application by writing a script and uploading it to the Ethereum blockchain. This gives an Ethereum a degree of future-proof-ness and neutrality much greater than that of other…
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the London office and pondering how to give you a good overview about the work we’ve been doing to secure Ethereum’s protocols, clients and p2p-network. As you might remember, I joined the Ethereum team at the end of last year to manage the security audit. As spring has passed and summer arrived and meanwhile several audits finished, it’s now a good time for me to share some results from the inspection of the world computer’s machine room. 😉 This much is clear, as much as the delivery of the clients is an elaborate…