Author: Michael Johnson
Over the past two weeks our primary focus has been getting all of the clients updated to PoC5 compatibility, and it definitely has been a long road. Among the changes to the VM include: The new init/code mechanism: basically, when you create a contract, the code provided will execute immediately, and then the return value of that code will be what becomes the contract’s code. This allows us to have contract initialization code, but still keep to the same format of [nonce, price, gas, to, value, data] for both transactions and contract creation, also making it easier to create new…
One of the most popular topics in the digital consensus space (a new term for cryptocurrency 2.0 that I’m beta-testing) is the concept of decentralized autonomous entities. There are now a number of groups rapidly getting involved in the space, including Bitshares (also known as Invictus Innovations) developing “decentralized autonomous companies”, BitAngels’ David Johnston with decentralized applications, our own concept of decentralized autonomous corporations which has since transformed into the much more general and not necessarily financial “decentralized autonomous organizations” (DAOs); all in all, it is safe to say that “DAOism” is well on its way to becoming a quasi-cyber-religion.…
What is Ethereum, the Project? The Ethereum Project is an open source, community-driven effort designed to create a next-generation distributed application platform intended to be maximally flexible and powerful in the possibilities that it enables. What is Ethereum, the Platform? The Ethereum Platform combines a generalized peer-to-peer networking platform with next-generation blockchain architecture to deliver a decentralized consensus-based (decentcon), full-stack platform for developing, offering and using distributed application services. A consumer-facing application, called the EtherBrowser, integrates the front and back ends to create an environment in which anyone can easily and rapidly build highly secure, scalable and interoperable decentralized applications.…
The Necessity to Build and Launch an Ecosystem on Genesis Day Imagine if Microsoft released the Xbox and there were no games. On the day on which the Ethereum genesis block is created, many of the elements of the ecosystem — core infrastructure, mining network, user app browser and applications — will be in place. Granted there will be an enormous amount of development to do beyond the genesis to craft Ethereum into a sophisticated, decentralized consensus (decentcon) application platform. But on day one, there will be “launch titles.” Originally, when the idea behind Ethereum was conceived in November, the…
Our current proof of work design, blockchain-based proof of work, is the second iteration of our attempt to create a mining algorithm that is guaranteed to remain CPU-friendly and resistant to optimization by specialized hardware (ASICs) in the long term. Our first attempt, Dagger, tried to take the idea of memory-hard algorithms like Scrypt one step further by creating an algorithm which is memory-hard to compute, but memory-easy to verify, using directed acyclic graphs (basically, trees where each node has multiple parents). Our current strategy takes a much more rigorous track: make the proof of work involve executing random contracts…
One of the challenges when creating a new cryptocurrency is figuring out what the distribution model is going to be. Who is going to receive the currency units, at what time, and what is the mechanism that decides? Despite the crucial importance of this question, there has actually been comparatively little thought into the issue compared with other aspects of currency, like consensus algorithms and feature sets. The question is particularly challenging because, just like many other problems in the cryptocurrency space that have parallels in the “real world” at large, cryptocurrencies also face the requirement of decentralization: it is…
Although truly solving blockchain scalability fundamentally, that is to say figuring out a solution to the problem that every node must process every transaction, is a very hard problem, and all suggested solutions rely on either highly advanced cryptography or intricate multi-blockchain architectures, partial solutions that provide a constant-factor improvement over the way Bitcoin does things are actually quite easy to find. In Ethereum, for example, we have the concept of a separate state tree and transaction history, allowing miners to easily store only existing account states and not historical transaction outputs that are no longer relevant and thereby drastically…
Development of the Ethereum project has gone very well over the months since inception. The core activity — development of the software platform — is on track and many developers around the world are starting to build small, exploratory distributed applications on the platform, even though we are still not yet in alpha release. The 5th installment of the proof of concept series will be released soon, though many community members download the developing source code, compile it and use it on a regular basis for their various activities. Other core activities include attention to legalities in different jurisdictions regarding…
Decentralization, n. The security assumption that a nineteen year old in Hangzhou and someone who is maybe in the UK, and maybe not, have not yet decided to collude with each other. There has been a large amount of ruckus in the past week about the issue of mining centralization in the Bitcoin network. We saw a single mining pool, GHash.io, amass over 45% hashpower for many hours, and at one point even grow to become 51% of the entire network. The entire front page of the Bitcoin reddit was ablaze in intense discussion and a rare clash of complacency…
Writing effective decentralized applications in Ethereum is at the same time easy and hard. The easy part we all know: rather than needing to create your own blockchain, manage complicated database code, deal with networking and NAT traversal, or any of the other complexities involving writing a peer-to-peer app from scratch, you can write code in a simple, high-level programming language like Serpent or Mutan (or LLL if you prefer mucking around a bit lower-level), with the simplicity of a toy scripting language but the power and security of a full blockchain backing it up. An entire implementation of a…