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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The crypto 2.0 industry has been making strong progress in the past year developing blockchain technology, including the formalization and in some cases realization of proof of stake designs like Slasher and DPOS, various forms of

Hi, I’m Jutta! As some of you might have read in earlier posts, I’ve recently been busy setting up a security audit prior to the Ethereum genesis block release. Ethereum will launch following a world-class review by experts in IT security, cryptography…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. Although the idea has many undeniable benefits, including efficiency, a larger security margin and future-proof immunity to hardware centralization co…

One of the latest ideas that has come to recently achieve some prominence in parts of the Bitcoin community is the line of thinking that has been described by both myself and others as “Bitcoin dominance maximalism” or just “Bitcoin maximalism” for sho…

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…

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir for much of the thinking behind multi-chain cryptoeconomic paradigms First off, a history lesson. In October 2013, when I was visiting Israel as part of my trip around the Bitcoin world, I came to know the core teams behi…

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…

Hi, I’m Stephan Tual, and I’ve been responsible for Ethereum’s adoption and education since January as CCO. I’m also leading our UK ÐΞV hub, located at Co-Work in Putney (South West London). I feel really privileged to be able to lead the effort on the…

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, …

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…

An important and controversial topic in the area of personal wallet security is the concept of “brainwallets” – storing funds using a private key generated from a password memorized entirely in one’s head. Theoretically, brainwallets have the potential…

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…

Who are you? I’m Gav – together with Jeffrey Wilcke and Vitalik Buterin, I’m one third of the ultimate leadership of Ethereum ÐΞV. ÐΞV is a UK software firm that is under a non-profit-making agreement with the Ethereum Foundation to create version 1.0…

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir and Zack Hess for ongoing research and discussions on proof-of-stake algorithms and their own input into Slasher-like proposals One of the hardest problems in cryptocurrency development is that of devising effective conse…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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One of the more exciting applications of decentralized computing that have aroused a considerable amount of interest in the past year is the concept of an incentivized decentralized online file storage system. Currently, if you want your files or data …

Now that the first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and over 50 million ETH has been sold, we intend to soon make a transaction to begin using the funds to repay loans and kickstart the process of setting up our development hubs and expanding our …

The first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and we have to date received over 25000 BTC from selling over 50 million ETH. This marks the largest cryptographic token sale to date, and with the two endowments places ETH as being the token with the 8t…

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Although we hope that the ether purchasing experience goes smoothly for everyone, we recognize that there will always be situations where things do not quite go as planned. Perhaps your internet connection dies in the middle of your purchase. Perhaps y…

First of all, I would like to thank the community, and especially those close to the project who have in many cases abandoned their jobs to dedicate their time to it, for their extreme patience regarding the launch of the ether sale. We have been promi…

One of the more popular proposals for implementing smart contracts differently from the way they are typically presented in Ethereum is through the concept of oracles. Essentially, instead of a long-running contract being run directly on the blockchain…

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche Ethereum as a project is more than just a technology, even if technology is at its core. In the rush of creating, co-creating and de…

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…

During the run-up to the ether sale we will be releasing a series of blog posts regarding our development plans and intended organizational structure. Today we describe some of the background details of the ether sale module.  The sale module will be d…

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…

Writing effective decentralized applications in Ethereum is at the same time easy and hard. The easy part we all know: rather than needing to create your own blockchain, manage complicated database code, deal with networking and NAT traversal, or any o…

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…

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…

Although truly solving blockchain scalability fundamentally, that is to say figuring out a solution to the problem that every node must process every transaction, is a very hard problem, and all suggested solutions rely on either highly advanced crypto…

One of the challenges when creating a new cryptocurrency is figuring out what the distribution model is going to be. Who is going to receive the currency units, at what time, and what is the mechanism that decides? Despite the crucial importance of thi…

Our current proof of work design, blockchain-based proof of work, is the second iteration of our attempt to create a mining algorithm that is guaranteed to remain CPU-friendly and resistant to optimization by specialized hardware (ASICs) in the long te…

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One of the most popular topics in the digital consensus space (a new term for cryptocurrency 2.0 that I’m beta-testing) is the concept of decentralized autonomous entities. There are now a number of groups rapidly getting involved in the space, includi…

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…

The idea of releasing a new currency as a mechanism for funding protocol development is perhaps one of the most interesting economic innovations to come out of the cryptocurrency space. In the past twenty years, we have seen a growing centralization in…

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…

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…

One of the main applications of Ethereum that people have been interested in is financial contracts and derivatives. Although financial derivatives have acquired a reputation as a highly risky and destabilizing device with the sole function of enrichin…

In the past two weeks our lead C++ developer, Gavin Wood, and myself have been spending a lot of time meeting the local Ethereum community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We were very excited to see such a large amount of interest in our project, …

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 …

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…

Many of the concepts that we promote over in Ethereum land may seem incredibly futuristic, and perhaps even frightening, at times. We talk about so-called “smart contracts” that execute themselves without any need, or any opportunity, for human interve…

Scalability is now at the forefront of the technical discussion in the cryptocurrency scene. The Bitcoin blockchain is currently over 12 GB in size, requiring a period of several days for a new bitcoind node to fully synchronize, the UTXO set that must…

The Ethereum Project has had the incredible privilege to launch its PoC testnet and engage the crypto-currency community over the past two months. During our experiences, we’ve encountered a lot of passionate support and wonderful questions that have h…

Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell writes the following on Reddit: There is a design flaw in the Bitcoin protocol where its possible for a third party to take a valid transaction of yours and mutate it in a way which leaves it valid and functionally id…

There have been a number of very interesting developments in cryptography in the past few years. Satoshi’s blockchain notwithstanding, perhaps the first major breakthrough after blinding and zero-knowledge proofs is fully homomorphic encryption, a tech…

My previous post introducing Ethereum Script 2.0 was met with a number of responses, some highly supportive, others suggesting that we switch to their own preferred stack-based / assembly-based / functional paradigm, and offering various specific criti…

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…

Of all the parts of the Ethereum protocol, aside from the mining function the fee structure is perhaps the least set in stone. The current values, with one crypto operation taking 20 base fees, a new transaction taking 100 base fees, etc, are little mo…

Important notice: any information from this post regarding the ether sale is highly outdated and probably inaccurate. Please only consult the latest blog posts and official materials at ethereum.org for information on the sale Ethereum received an inc…

I first wrote the initial draft of the Ethereum whitepaper on a cold day in San Francisco in November, as a culmination of months of thought and often frustrating work into an area that we have come to call “cryptocurrency 2.0″ – in short, using the Bi…

The purpose of this post is not to say that Ethereum will be using Slasher in place of Dagger as its main mining function. Rather, Slasher is a useful construct to have in our war chest in case proof of stake mining becomes substantially more popular o…

In the first two parts of this series, we talked about what the basic workings of a decentralized autonomous corporation might look like, and what kinds of challenges it might need to deal with to be effective. However, there is still one question that…

In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them “alive” over tho…

Corporations, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney reminds us, are people. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions that his partisans draw from that claim, the statement certainly carries a large amount of truth. What is a corporation, after all…