On Slow and Fast Block Times

One of the largest sources of confusion in the question of blockchain security is the precise effect of the block time. If one blockchain has a block time of 10 minutes, and the other has an estimated block time of 17 seconds, then what exactly does th...
Cryptocurrency

A message from Stephan Tual

To the wonderful Ethereum Community, You often heard me say at conferences that Ethereum was not a company, a foundation, an implementation, or an individual. Ethereum is both an idea and an ideal, encompassing the first censorship-resistant network b...
Cryptocurrency

devcon one postponed until further notice

Unfortunately we were not able to secure the venue for devcon one in London on the dates desired (October 5th-8th). As a consequence we are postponing the event until further notice.  Please do not make travel plans at this time. Updates will be forthc...
Cryptocurrency

On Anti-Pre-Revelation Games

An increasing number of proposed applications on top of Ethereum rely on some kind of incentivized, multi-party data provision - whether voting, random number collection, or other use cases where getting information from multiple parties to increase de...
Cryptocurrency

Olympic Rewards Announced

ETH DEV would like to thank everyone for their participation in the Olympic test network, which helped us greatly in stress testing, optimization, and finding bugs in the Ethereum clients, as well as determining what the limits of the current Ethereum ...
Cryptocurrency

Security alert [consensus issue]

This alert is related to a consensus issue that occurred on the Frontier network at block 116,522, mined on 2015-08-20 at 14:59:16+02:00 – Issue has been fixed, see "Fix" below. Impact: High Issue description: State database consensus issue in geth w...
Cryptocurrency

An Analysis of the First 100000 Blocks

After a successful launch, Frontier passed it's 100000th block earlier this week. Here are some interesting stats from these first blocks. The first 50 block times (in seconds): Right after genesis, it took 29 seconds for the second block to appear,...
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