Ethereum Blog

The Problem of Censorship

One of the interesting problems in designing effective blockchain technologies is, how can we ensure that the systems remain censorship-proof? Although lots of work has been done in cryptoeconomics in order to ensure that blockchains continue pumping o...
Cryptocurrency

Olympic: Frontier Pre-Release

What began all the way back on midnight of February 1st 2014, is coming to a close: we are happy to announce the release of the ninth and last in the Ethereum Proof-of-Concept series. We invite the community to participate in the ongoing Proof-of-Conc...
Cryptocurrency

The end of the beginning…

As part of our tiered release process, we will soon be beginning the final phase prior to our Frontier release. So far our ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet has been running smoothly for around a month with dozens of nodes around the world, well over...
Cryptocurrency

Visions, Part 2: The Problem of Trust

Special thanks to: Robert Sams, Gavin Wood, Mark Karpeles and countless cryptocurrency critics on online forums for helping to develop the thoughts behind this article If you were to ask the average cryptocurrency or blockchain enthusiast what the key...
Cryptocurrency

DEVgrants: Here to Help

Few would argue against the fact that Ethereum has been gifted with one of the most diverse and thoughtful communities ever gathered around any open source project. Fueled by what can only be described as impassioned determination, developers from all ...
Cryptocurrency

Blockchain Scalability: Chain-Fibers Redux

History I came up with the first seed of this idea while chatting to Janislav Malahov in Berlin in Spring 2014. Unfortunately, the original article I wrote was lost along with my laptop when it was stolen in Vienna. After chatting over the principles ...
Cryptocurrency

Bazaar Services

I'm a great believer in judging the present through the knowledge of the past. In the past 25 or so years one of the biggest trends in business and technology was what might loosely be termed as the open source revolution. The notion of it being good b...
Cryptocurrency

Implementing Vitalik’s vision

Although the core concept was proven last summer when lead developers Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke initiated the PoC (proof-of-concept) series in Python, C++, and Go, a lot of engineering effort has gone to solidifying these implemen...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum’s unexpected future direction

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 ...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Builders: A Proposed Experiment

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 at...
Cryptocurrency

Getting to the Frontier

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 t...
Cryptocurrency

The Ethereum Development Process

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 codeba...
Cryptocurrency

The Ethereum Launch Process

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 fo...
Cryptocurrency

Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update V

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 t...
Cryptocurrency

The Subjectivity / Exploitability Tradeoff

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 att...
Cryptocurrency

The P + epsilon Attack

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 co...
Cryptocurrency

Superrationality and DAOs

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 (i...
Cryptocurrency

Light Clients and Proof of Stake

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 alg...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Community Survey

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 impo...
Cryptocurrency

Jeff’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update II

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...
Cryptocurrency

On Silos

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 th...
Cryptocurrency