Cryptocurrency

Chain Reorganisation Depth Expectations

This following shows our current and planned expectations concerning maximum likely chain-reorganisation depth. We would not consider transactions within this depth to have an exceptionally high chance of being permanent. These are our own expectations...
Cryptocurrency

Security Alert 1 [windows+alethzero]

This affects users of Alethzero GUI client on Windows. Users of eth CLI client or not on the Windows platform are unlikely to be affected but should take action detailed below. Users of Frontier command line interface geth are unaffected. Issue descri...
Cryptocurrency

On Public and Private Blockchains

Over the last year the concept of "private blockchains" has become very popular in the broader blockchain technology discussion. Essentially, instead of having a fully public and uncontrolled network and state machine secured by cryptoeconomics (eg. pr...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Protocol Update 1

Here comes the first Frontier patch, and this is a big one! Before you go further, if your keys date back from Go 1.0 rc or C++ 0.9.36, note that you should regenerate all of your keys NOW. Though some releases of the pre-alpha and alpha clients are s...
Cryptocurrency

The Thawing Frontier

After a smooth launch, please find a few updates of note below. These probably will be of interest only to the more advanced users amongst you - if you’re not a miner, there is nothing to action....
Cryptocurrency

Introducing Casper “the Friendly Ghost”

Hi everyone – Vlad here. I’ve been working on the analysis and specification of  “proof-of-stake” blockchain architecture since September 2014. While Vitalik and I haven’t agreed on all of the details of the spec, we do have consensus on many propertie...
Cryptocurrency

Ethereum Launches

A few minutes ago, many of you generated and loaded the Ethereum Genesis block, marking the inception of Frontier, the first Live release of the Ethereum project. The Dev team joins me in thanking each and everyone of you for your support during the p...
Cryptocurrency

A few last minute notes…

Genesis is roughly 4 hours away, here are a few last minute pointers for those preparing: All clients are functional on all platforms and build to completion: http://ethereum-buildboard.meteor.com/ Please note that it will take a little while (10-100...
Cryptocurrency

Final Steps

An update as promised: all systems are now ‘Go’ on the technical side (pun intended) and we intend to release Frontier this week. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my previous blog post. What became apparent is that prior to the big day, ...
Cryptocurrency

How do you know Ethereum is secure?

As I'm writing this, I’m sitting in the London office and pondering how to give you a good overview about the work we’ve been doing to secure Ethereum’s protocols, clients and p2p-network. As you might remember, I joined the Ethereum team at the end of...
Cryptocurrency

On Abstraction

Special thanks to Gavin Wood, Vlad Zamfir, our security auditors and others for some of the thoughts that led to the conclusions described in this post One of Ethereum's goals from the start, and arguably its entire raison d'être, is the high degree o...
Cryptocurrency

State Tree Pruning

One of the important issues that has been brought up over the course of the Olympic stress-net release is the large amount of data that clients are required to store; over little more than three months of operation, and particularly during the last mon...
Cryptocurrency

Another Ethereum ÐΞV Update

Been a while, I know, but then these are rather busy days. I'm writing this from a Starbucks in Shanghai sitting behind the Great Firewall, able to peep out only occasionally. I've been in Asia with Marek for the last couple of weeks, mainly for meetu...
Cryptocurrency

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