Ethereum Blog

Toward a 12-second Block Time

One of the annoyances of the blockchain as a decentralized platform is the sheer length of delay before a transaction gets finalized. One confirmation in the Bitcoin network takes ten minutes on average, but in reality due to statistical effects when o...
Cryptocurrency

On Stake

The topic of mining centralization has been a very important one over the past few weeks. GHASH.io, the Bitcoin network's largest mining pool, has for the past month directed over 40% of the Bitcoin network's hashpower, and two weeks ago briefly spiked...
Cryptocurrency

On Mining

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 is...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Project Update

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 ap...
Cryptocurrency

Serpent upgrades: More Fun Stuff

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 contr...
Cryptocurrency

The Issuance Model in Ethereum

Ether (ETH), the cryptofuel that powers distributed applications on the Ethereum platform, will be issued at a constant annual linear rate via the block mining process. This rate is 0.3 times the total amount of ETH that will be purchased in the pre-sa...
Cryptocurrency

Pyethereum and Serpent Programming Guide

The content of this tutorial is intended to apply to PoC5. Most of the instructions given below will not work in the older PoC4 implementations of AlethZero (C++) and Ethereal (Go) Over the last few weeks, we have made a large number of changes to the...
Cryptocurrency

The Question of Mining

There are a lot of interesting changes to the Ethereum protocol that are in the works, which will hopefully improve the power of the system, add further features such as light-client friendliness and a higher degree of extensibility, and make Ethereum ...
Cryptocurrency

DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 2: Reducing Barriers

In the last installment of this series, we talked about what “smart contracts” (or, perhaps more accurately, “self-enforcing contracts”) are, and discussed in detail the two main mechanisms through which these contracts can have “force”: smart property...
Cryptocurrency

Introducing Ethereum Script 2.0

This post will provide the groundwork for a major rework of the Ethereum scripting language, which will substantially modify the way ES works although still keeping many of the core components working in the exact same way. The rework is necessary as a...
Cryptocurrency