News

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

Ethereum ÐΞV: What are we doing?

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...
Cryptocurrency

Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update IV

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 (b...
Cryptocurrency

ÐΞVcon-0 Recap

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 recor...
Cryptocurrency

From inside Ethereum ÐΞVhub Berlin

Yesterday was the first proper day of ÐΞVhub Berlin being open, following the first Ethereum internal developers' symposium ÐΞVcon-0. I want to post a few images to let you gauge the mood here. Henning, Marek, Viktor and Felix hacking on the couch ...
Cryptocurrency

Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update III

I'm Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and, along with Vitalik Buterin and Jeffrey Wilcke, one of the three directors of the Eth Dev, the NFP organisation that is managing the development (under contract from Ethereum Suisse) of the Ethereum blockcha...
Cryptocurrency

The Search for a Stable Cryptocurrency

Special thanks to Robert Sams for the development of Seignorage Shares and insights regarding how to correctly value volatile coins in multi-currency systems Note: we are not planning on adding price stabilization to ether; our philosophy has always b...
Cryptocurrency

Jeff’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update I

I thought it was about time I'd give an update on my side of things for those interested in knowing how we're doing on the Dutch side. My name is Jeff, a founder of Ethereum and one of the three directors (alongside Vitalik and Gavin) of Ethereum ÐΞV, ...
Cryptocurrency

Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update II

Well... what a busy two weeks. I thought it about time to make another update for any of you who might be interested in how we're doing. If you don't already know, I'm Gavin, a founder of Ethereum and one of the three directors (alongside Vitalik and J...
Cryptocurrency

Scalability, Part 2: Hypercubes

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir, Chris Barnett and Dominic Williams for ideas and inspiration In a recent blog post I outlined some partial solutions to scalability, all of which fit into the umbrella of Ethereum 1.0 as it stands. Specialized micropayme...
Cryptocurrency

Scalability, Part 1: Building on Top

Over the next few weeks, I am going to make a series of posts that is going to be a large overview of the possibilities for scalability of Ethereum, intending to create a precise understanding of the problems at bay in implementing a scalable cryptocur...
Cryptocurrency

crypto renaissance

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Alan Kay January 3rd 2009 marked the beginning of a new era. The invention of the blockchain is a milestone in technology -- the string of characters 36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2EogxLo2 being just o...
Cryptocurrency

Software and Bounded Rationality

One of the key properties that is usually sought for in a cryptoeconomic algorithm, whether a blockchain consensus algorithm such a proof of work or proof of stake, a reputation system or a trading process for something like data transmission or file s...
Cryptocurrency

State of Ethereum: August Edition

Development of Ethereum has been progressing increasingly quickly this past month. The release of PoC5 ("proof of concept five") last month the day before the sale marked an important event for the project, as for the first time we had two clients, one...
Cryptocurrency

An Introduction to Futarchy

One of the more interesting long-term practical benefits of the technology and concept behind decentralized autonomous organizations is that DAOs allow us to very quickly prototype and experiment with an aspect of our social interactions that is so far...
Cryptocurrency