Author: Michael Johnson

Special thanks to Gavin Wood for prompting my interest into abstraction improvements, and Martin Becze, Vlad Zamfir and Dominic Williams for ongoing discussions. For a long time we have been public about our plans to continue improving the Ethereum protocol over time and our long development roadmap, learning from our mistakes that we either did not have the opportunity to fix in time for 1.0 or only realized after the fact. However, the Ethereum protocol development cycle has started up once again, with a Homestead release coming very soon, and us quietly starting to develop proof-of-concepts for the largest milestone…

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir for introducing the idea of by-block consensus and convincing me of its merits, alongside many of the other core ideas of Casper, and to Vlad Zamfir and Greg Meredith for their continued work on the protocol In the last post in this series, we discussed one of the two flagship feature sets of Serenity: a heightened degree of abstraction that greatly increases the flexibility of the platform and takes a large step in moving Ethereum from “Bitcoin plus Turing-complete” to “general-purpose decentralized computation”. Now, let us turn our attention to the other flagship feature, and…

Now that Ethereum has launched and is rapidly nearing its Homestead phase, over the last few months we at the Ethereum Foundation have finally had the chance to have some breathing room and plan our strategies with a more long-term view. From a development perspective, we have now started in earnest the development of Serenity, the next large overhaul of the Ethereum protocol that will include powerful software abstraction features, the Casper consensus algorithm and hopefully some basic scaffolding that will allow for the development of scalability features over time with minimal disruption. POC1 has been released, and POC2 will…

If DEVCON1 proved anything in spades, it was certainly the enthusiasm, creativity, and momentum of the Ethereum developer community. Utilizing the never-before-seen potential unleashed by the Ethereum World Computer, our small-but-growing community is not just re-imagining money (or even just re-imagining the Internet)… It is also re-imagining and delivering alternative models for re-organizing the very fabric of our society around a more transparent and inspectable “stack”. ÐΞVgrants came into existence on April 7, 2015, in order to ease some of the natural burdens of developing the lower-level tools which will hopefully further the above scenario. At DEVCON1, I presented a…

The time is gone, the song is over, Thought I’d something more to say. — Pink Floyd It is with no small amount of sadness that I must bid ye farewell. Like The Floyd’s work, in the time I’ve been involved with Ethereum, I’ve sampled the full gamut of emotion. From the amazement of meeting so many cool people (not least of whom Jani and Wendell) in Miami, Jan ‘14, to meeting Jeff for the first time in Feb ‘14 for the first real face-to-face collaboration on a client, to travelling through the U.S. in March ‘14 and meeting luminaries…

Blockchains are a powerful technology, as regular readers of the blog already likely agree. They allow for a large number of interactions to be codified and carried out in a way that greatly increases reliability, removes business and political risks associated with the process being managed by a central entity, and reduces the need for trust. They create a platform on which applications from different companies and even of different types can run together, allowing for extremely efficient and seamless interaction, and leave an audit trail that anyone can check to make sure that everything is being processed correctly. However,…

Part I Sometimes Ethereum is compared to a singleton Virtual Machine.  While this is correct in some sense; I think it is a bit more. First of all what is a singleton in a distributed system? It is merely a set of values that some threshold of participants have come to consensus on.  A Virtual Machine is a computational environment that is isolated from the physical computer and from other environments. A hypervisor allows the physical machine to be multiplexed into many VMs. According to this definition a common hypervisor is the web browser where webpages are VMs. Another example…

Last month marked the 2 year anniversary of Ethereum’s public announcement at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida, USA. Amid much rumour and excitement, a sizeable crowd mobbed the young Vitalik Buterin after his on-stage announcement, questioning the merit and his desire to build such a system. It can be hard to truly appreciate how far we’ve come in the last couple years. Sometimes it feels as if the cryptoeconomic sphere moves at such a blistering speed that weekly news announcements have become the norm rather than the exception. Interest in the field has exploded for lots of…

Although this is my first post in this blog, many people might already know me as the person behind Solidity. I recently took on the lead of the C++ team and would like to share my vision for the future development. Ethereum is a free software project that anyone is free to use and improve. From what we have seen at our conferences and meetups, there are so many people working on projects on top of Ethereum, but we only have a small team working on the actual platform. Ethereum should be an open project that is inviting for anyone…

Following hacking @ DEVCON1,  Martin Swende is Nr. 1 on the leaderboard of the Ethereum Bounty Program. The bounty program is ongoing and the last bounty awarded amounted to 5 BTC. The program is open to anyone. With BTC Relay getting ready for launch on Ethereum and its importance for many DApps, we want to highlight its ongoing security audit by including it in the Ethereum Bounty Program. BTC Relay is an Ethereum contract that implements Bitcoin SPV: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security The chief purpose of BTC Relay is to pass along any sufficiently confirmed Bitcoin transaction, to a specified Ethereum contract. If…