Author: Michael Johnson

Special thanks to Andrew Miller for coming up with this attack, and to Zack Hess, Vlad Zamfir and Paul Sztorc for discussion and responses One of the more interesting surprises in cryptoeconomics in recent weeks came from an attack on SchellingCoin conceived by Andrew Miller earlier this month. Although it has always been understood that SchellingCoin, and similar systems (including the more advanced Truthcoin consensus), rely on what is so far a new and untested cryptoeconomic security assumption – that one can safely rely on people acting honestly in a simultaneous consensus game just because they believe that everyone else…

One of the issues inherent in many kinds of consensus architectures is that although they can be made to be robust against attackers or collusions up to a certain size, if an attacker gets large enough they are still, fundamentally, exploitable. If attackers in a proof of work system have less than 25% of mining power and everyone else is non-colluding and rational, then we can show that proof of work is secure; however, if an attacker is large enough that they can actually succeed, then the attack costs nothing – and other miners actually have the incentive to go…

I was woken by Vitalik’s call at 5:55 this morning; pitch black outside, nighttime was still upon us. Nonetheless, it was time to leave and this week had best start on the right foot. The 25-minute walk in darkness from the Zug-based headquarters to the train station was wet. Streetlights reflecting off the puddles on the clean Swiss streets provided a picturesque, if quiet, march into town. I couldn’t help but think the rain running down my face was a very liquid reminder of the impending seasonal change, and then, on consideration, how fast the last nine months had gone.…

I’m Vinay Gupta, the newly minted release coordinator for Ethereum. I’ve been working with the comms team on strategy, and have now come aboard to help smooth the release process (some of the content in this blog is out of date, please see this link for the most up to date information on Ethereum). I’ll be about 50/50 on comms and on release coordination. A lot of that is going to be about keeping you updated on progress: new features, new documentation, and hopefully writing about great new services you can use, so it’s in the hinterland between comms and project…

So I’m not sure if this kind of development methodology has ever been applied to such an extreme before so I figured I’d document it. In a nutshell, it’s sort of like test-driven triplet-programming development. While speed-developing our alpha codebase, four of us sat around a table in the office in Berlin. Three people (Vitalik, Jeff and me) each coders of their own clean-room implementation of the Ethereum protocol. The fourth was Christoph, our master of testing. Our target was to have three fully compatible implementations as well as an unambiguous specification by the end of three days of substantial…

So first some background. We’ve already covered a little about what to expect from Frontier in the Ethereum Launch Process blog post and Gav has given us a comprehensive overview of the state of the development effort. You can also read about some of the ongoing security work, including the bug bounty system. The bug bounty program has found my favorite bug so far: Jonas Nick’s discovery that you could send a negative payment to somebody which moves value from their account to yours! As bug bounty finds go, an absolute gem. Well done! Gav has a new blog post describing a little…

Into the ether Hello, fellow Ethereans. I am Mihai Alisie, one of the Ethereum founders, and for the past year I’ve served as the Vice President of the Ethereum Foundation and Director of Ethereum Switzerland. In the early days of the project I concentrated my attention on the community side and worked on the holons idea for a distributed physical infrastructure; however, the project needed someone in Switzerland, and I was more useful here focusing on other things. During the the last couple of weeks I started to think about how far we’ve come and how many things we have…

Hi, Jutta writing again – I initially introduced myself when we started the bounty program earlier this year and I’m happy to provide you with an update on what’s happening on the security side prior and throughout launch. We have had some high quality submissions by bounty hunters – kudos for the creative exploits sent along that the bugs made possible. The number of submissions recently rose. Hence we decided and are announcing that we will continue the bounty program at least throughout the Frontier phase of Ethereum’s launch plan – see Gav’s and Vinay’s respective blog posts. Please go…

Hello, fellow Ethereans. I am Mihai Alisie, one of the Ethereum founders, and for the past year I’ve served as the vice president of the Ethereum Foundation and as director of Ethereum Switzerland. In the early days of the project I concentrated my attention on the community side and worked on the holons idea for a distributed physical infrastructure. For the past few months I’ve been contemplating what the next project step(s) should be and how we can create favorable conditions for a thriving community and ecosystem of smart contracts. In this post I will propose an experiment for the…

Ethereum has been preparing what we consider to be the most exciting digital alliance since IBM and Microsoft partnered so successfully on the IBM PC. We know that you’ve been anticipating great things from Ethereum and we are delighted to present you with this exciting and unexpected news. As you know, mining in Ethereum is best done on graphics cards. However, industrial scale buying of expensive graphics cards to mine re-creates the centralized mining cartels which are so much a part of the Bitcoin landscape. We would like to be more decentralized than that, and after much consideration and quiet…