Author: Michael Johnson
Day 1 – Monday 24th Nov – ÐΞV: Mission and Processes The first day of ÐΞVcon-0 kicked off early at 7am with the Ethereum UK communications team arriving at the venue (Ethereum Dev UG’s workspace in Kreuzberg, Berlin) to set up the 4K high quality recording equipment and arrange the space for the event. After a quick coffee and croissant/pain au chocolat, everyone was ready for the first presentation – “Welcome! Our mission: ÐApps” which was delivered by Gavin Wood. Gavin made it very clear within this presentation the need for decentralised applications in today’s society with two very powerful…
Time for another update! So quite a bit has happened following ÐΞVcon-0, our internal developer’s conference. The conference itself was a great time to get all the developers together and really get to know each other, dissipate a lot of information (back to back presentations for 5 days!) and chat over a lot of ideas. The comms team will be releasing each of the presentations as fast as Ian can get them nicely polished. During the time since the last update, much has happened including, finally, the release of the Ethereum ÐΞV website, ethdev.com. Though relatively simple as present, there…
OK so a minor update about what we are (and are not) doing here at Ethereum DEV. We are, first and foremost, developing a robust quasi-Turing-complete blockchain. This is known as Ethereum. Aside from having quasi-Turing-completeness, it delivers on a number of other important considerations, stemming from the fact we are developing entirely new blockchain technology including: speedy, through a 12 second blocktime; light-client-friendly through the use of Merkle roots in headers for compact inclusion/state proofs and DHT integration to allow light clients to host & share small parts of the full chain; ÐApp-friendly, even for light-clients, through the use…
Hi, I’m Jutta! As some of you might have read in earlier posts, I’ve recently been busy setting up a security audit prior to the Ethereum genesis block release. Ethereum will launch following a world-class review by experts in IT security, cryptography and blockchain technology. Prior to the launch, we will also complete a bug bounty program – a major cornerstone of our approach to achieving security. The bug bounty program will rely on the Ethereum community and all other motivated bug bounty hunters out there. We’ll soon release the final details of the program, currently under development by Gustav. A first glimpse:…
The crypto 2.0 industry has been making strong progress in the past year developing blockchain technology, including the formalization and in some cases realization of proof of stake designs like Slasher and DPOS, various forms of scalable blockchain algorithms, blockchains using “leader-free consensus” mechanisms derived from traditional Byzantine fault tolerance theory, as well as economic ingredients like Schelling consensus schemes and stable currencies. All of these technologies remedy key deficiencies of the blockchain design with respect to centralized servers: scalability knocks down size limits and transaction costs, leader-free consensus reduces many forms of exploitability, stronger PoS consensus algorithms reduce consensus…
One of the criticisms that many people have made about the current direction of the cryptocurrency space is the increasing amount of fragmentation that we are seeing. What was earlier perhaps a more tightly bound community centered around developing the common infrastructure of Bitcoin is now increasingly a collection of “silos”, discrete projects all working on their own separate things. There are a number of developers and researchers who are either working for Ethereum or working on ideas as volunteers and happen to spend lots of time interacting with the Ethereum community, and this set of people has coalesced into…
First of all, happy new year! What a year it has been. With a little luck we’ll surpass last year with an even more awesome year. It’s been too long since I’ve given an update on my side of things and that of the Go team and mostly due to a lack of time. I’ve been so incredibly busy and so many things have happened these past 2 months I’ve hardly had time to sit down and assess it all. As you may be well aware the audit is looming around the corner and my little baby (go-ethereum!) will undergo it’s full…
Back in November, we created a quick survey for the Ethereum community to help us gauge how we’re doing, what can be improved, and how best we can engage with you all as we move forward towards the genesis block release in March. We feel it’s very important to enable the community to interact with Ethereum as well as itself, and we hope to offer new and exciting tools to do so using the survey results for guidance. The survey itself consisted of 14 questions split into two sections; Ethereum as an “Organisation” and Ethereum as a “Technology”. There was a…
Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir and Jae Kwon for many of the ideas described in this post Aside from the primary debate around weak subjectivity, one of the important secondary arguments raised against proof of stake is the issue that proof of stake algorithms are much harder to make light-client friendly. Whereas proof of work algorithms involve the production of block headers which can be quickly verified, allowing a relatively small chain of headers to act as an implicit proof that the network considers a particular history to be valid, proof of stake is harder to fit into such a…
Warning: this post contains crazy ideas. Myself describing a crazy idea should NOT be construed as implying that (i) I am certain that the idea is correct/viable, (ii) I have an even >50% probability estimate that the idea is correct/viable, or that (iii) “Ethereum” endorses any of this in any way. One of the common questions that many in the crypto 2.0 space have about the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations is a simple one: what are DAOs good for? What fundamental advantage would an organization have from its management and operations being tied down to hard code on a…