Author: Michael Johnson

We are only days away from launching ‘Frontier’, the first milestone in the release of the Ethereum project. Frontier will be followed by ‘Homestead’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Serenity’ throughout the coming year, each adding new features and improving the user friendliness and security of the platform. What is Frontier? Frontier is a live, but barebone implementation of the Ethereum project. It’s intended for technical users, specifically developers. During the Frontier release, we expect early adopters and application developers to establish communities and start forming a live ecosystem. Like their counterparts during the American Frontier, these settlers will be presented with vast…

An update as promised: all systems are now ‘Go’ on the technical side (pun intended) and we intend to release Frontier this week. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my previous blog post. What became apparent is that prior to the big day, many of you wanted to know more about what the sequence of events would exactly be, and how to prepare your machine for the release. A transparent and open release Frontier users will need to first generate, then load the Genesis block into their Ethereum client. The Genesis block is pretty much a database file:…

Genesis is roughly 4 hours away, here are a few last minute pointers for those preparing: All clients are functional on all platforms and build to completion: http://ethereum-buildboard.meteor.com/ Please note that it will take a little while (10-1000 blocks) before the network stabilises. This is a marathon, not a sprint. For this reason we will not make the Genesis block hash known until a solid consensus has been formed. We will not announce the –extradata immediately either – if we did, we might as well launch centrally. We’ll let the community come to a consensus on what it is (as…

A few minutes ago, many of you generated and loaded the Ethereum Genesis block, marking the inception of Frontier, the first Live release of the Ethereum project. The Dev team joins me in thanking each and everyone of you for your support during the past year and half. It’s incredible to see the progress that has taken place since that humble first commit on Christmas Eve 2013. The vision of a censorship-proof ‘world computer’ that anyone can program, paying exclusively for what they use and nothing more, is now a reality. Many of you will want to get started immediately.…

After an intensive recruitment period, the Ethereum Foundation has selected an Executive Director and named three members to the Board of Directors. This is a new organizational structure, which will allow us to focus on our next phase of development. The Ethereum Foundation is a not for profit (‘Stiftung’) organization registered in Switzerland, and has the purpose of managing the funds that were raised from the Ether Sale in order to best serve the Ethereum and decentralized technology ecosystem. Our new executive Director is Ming Chan, and our Board is currently comprised of four members. They are: Lars Klawitter, Vadim…

Hi everyone – Vlad here. I’ve been working on the analysis and specification of  “proof-of-stake” blockchain architecture since September 2014. While Vitalik and I haven’t agreed on all of the details of the spec, we do have consensus on many properties of the proof-of-stake protocol that will likely be implemented for the Serenity release! It is called Casper “the friendly ghost” because it is an adaptation of some of the principles of the GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) protocol for proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake. This blog post (my first one!) shares properties that are likely to be true of Casper’s implementation…

After a smooth launch, please find a few updates of note below. These probably will be of interest only to the more advanced users amongst you – if you’re not a miner, there is nothing to action. Epoch switch in 2 hours Let’s start with a quick heads up to miners, the network will be switching epoch in roughly 2 hours. If you are using the geth/ethminer combo, you should be all set if you have opted to use the –autodag flag on geth and –no-precompute on ethminer. If not, keep an eye on your miners as they generate the…

Here comes the first Frontier patch, and this is a big one! Before you go further, if your keys date back from Go 1.0 rc or C++ 0.9.36, note that you should regenerate all of your keys NOW. Though some releases of the pre-alpha and alpha clients are secure, this depends on which codebase and which version. You should assume that all keys generated prior to these clients are insecure and compromised. This, note, does not affect the pre-sale wallets. Thawing The thawing pull request has been merged for the Go client and the Master branch has been updated. If…

Over the last year the concept of “private blockchains” has become very popular in the broader blockchain technology discussion. Essentially, instead of having a fully public and uncontrolled network and state machine secured by cryptoeconomics (eg. proof of work, proof of stake), it is also possible to create a system where access permissions are more tightly controlled, with rights to modify or even read the blockchain state restricted to a few users, while still maintaining many kinds of partial guarantees of authenticity and decentralization that blockchains provide. Such systems have been a primary focus of interest from financial institutions, and…

This affects users of Alethzero GUI client on Windows. Users of eth CLI client or not on the Windows platform are unlikely to be affected but should take action detailed below. Users of Frontier command line interface geth are unaffected. Issue description: While setting privacy permissions on the keys directory, insufficient error handling can cause the key files to not be written; this may be widespread on the Windows platform. As such, current versions of AlethZero and eth may include identities for which there exists no underlying key. Ether Presale Claim functionality of AlethZero may result in funds automatically being transferred…