Author: Michael Johnson

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…

Ethereum is often described as a platform for self-enforcing smart contracts. While this is certainly true, this article argues that, especially when more complex systems are involved, it is rather a court with smart lawyers and a judge that is not so smart, or more formally, a judge with restricted computational resources. We will see later how this view can be leveraged to write very efficient smart contract systems, to the extent that cross-chain token transfers or computations like checking proof of work can be implemented at almost no cost. The Court Analogy First of all, you probably know that…

Update: We’ve released version 1.3.5 including networking hotfix for homestead 1.3.4.  Development of Ethereum started in December 2013 when two developers and a college dropout researcher decided to put their heads together and develop this amazing piece of technology. We were later joined by many like-minded individuals. Our first Proof of Concept (PoC) came on February 1, 2014. By the time we started our crowdsale on July 23, we were up to PoC 5 with a protocol that was almost finished, and had achieved compatibility between multiple clients. The team was psyched when we got our first million and our second…

After an additional two months of work after the release of the first python proof of concept release of Serenity, I am pleased to announce that Serenity PoC2 is now available. Although the release continues to be far from a testnet-ready client, much less a production-ready one, PoC2 brings with it a number of important improvements. First and foremost, the goal of PoC2 was to implement the complete protocol, including the basic corner cases (slashing bets and deposits), so as to make sure that we have a grasp of every detail of the protocol and see it in action even…

Ethereum’s present reliance on Proof of Work (PoW) mining is not ideal, and while we continue to work with gusto towards a Proof of Stake solution (PoS), we have to live with PoW as gracefully as possible (at least until the eventual switch!). Meanwhile, in the interest of overall network health, mining decentralization and diversity is a clear imperative: Though there are some instances of open source Ethereum pool mining software available, the uptake has been low, and there appears to be a large efficiency gap between proprietary and available open source pool software. We propose to change that. As…

Consensys and Microsoft have announced that the Ethereum contract programming language Solidity will be available in Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development environment. ConsenSys and Microsoft collaborated on this integration to enable developers to rapidly build smart contract-based applications for the public Ethereum blockchain, as well as private and consortium blockchain deployments based on Ethereum. This integration is being revealed at //Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, in San Francisco on March 30th; Vitalik Buterin, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin and Consensys Enterprise director Andrew Keys will be present. Vitalik, Andrew and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the //Build pre-conference reception The integration…