Author: Michael Johnson
Special thanks to Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke for countless revisions feedback, picks at their brains, and helping me read their tea leaves. Introduction In the world of cryptography-based computer science, the Ethereum technology vision has captivated the imagination of a large number of software developers and technologists who saw its obvious promise. But those same promises and their business interpretations (and implications) have not widely reached, nor been well understood by non-technical audiences. As Ethereum nears coming out of the “labs” and into the market, it is even more important that its message be widely understood by the…
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 out new blocks, and particularly to prevent blocks from being reverted, substantially less attention has been put on the problem of ensuring that transactions that people want to put into the blockchain will actually get in, even if “the powers that be”, at least on that particular blockchain, would prefer otherwise. Censorship-resistance in decentralized cryptoeconomic systems is not just a matter of making…
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 meetups, workshops and technical meetings. During this time, we’ve seen the release, struggle and survival of the Olympic testnet, a very clear signal that a multi-client system would be far superior to the present monoculture. We’ve seen the beginning of the second external Go audit, mainly for checking of regressions but also to offer comments…
When I started evangelizing bitcoin and blockchain tech back in 2012 my Dad was a hard sell. There was the common skepticism and typical counters of “what’s backing it?”, “what can be done with it?” and “what the heck is cryptography?” Back then my pitch wasn’t refined and the learning tools had just not quite matured yet…but frankly, I think more of the reason he didn’t grasp it was that he just isn’t technical and doesn’t adopt early tech. I delicately persisted and he eventually came around. Before the end of 2012 he had secured a nice stash of coins…
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 month, the amount of data in each Ethereum client’s blockchain folder has ballooned to an impressive 10-40 gigabytes, depending on which client you are using and whether or not compression is enabled. Although it is important to note that this is indeed a stress test scenario where users are incentivized to dump transactions on the blockchain paying…
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 of abstraction that the platform offers. Rather than limiting users to a specific set of transaction types and applications, the platform allows anyone to create any kind of blockchain application by writing a script and uploading it to the Ethereum blockchain. This gives an Ethereum a degree of future-proof-ness and neutrality much greater than that of other…
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 last year to manage the security audit. As spring has passed and summer arrived and meanwhile several audits finished, it’s now a good time for me to share some results from the inspection of the world computer’s machine room. 😉 This much is clear, as much as the delivery of the clients is an elaborate…
We are only days away from launching ‘Frontier’, the first milestone in the release of the Ethereum project. Frontier will be followed by ‘Homestead’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Serenity’ throughout the coming year, each adding new features and improving the user friendliness and security of the platform. What is Frontier? Frontier is a live, but barebone implementation of the Ethereum project. It’s intended for technical users, specifically developers. During the Frontier release, we expect early adopters and application developers to establish communities and start forming a live ecosystem. Like their counterparts during the American Frontier, these settlers will be presented with vast…
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, many of you wanted to know more about what the sequence of events would exactly be, and how to prepare your machine for the release. A transparent and open release Frontier users will need to first generate, then load the Genesis block into their Ethereum client. The Genesis block is pretty much a database file:…
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 (10-1000 blocks) before the network stabilises. This is a marathon, not a sprint. For this reason we will not make the Genesis block hash known until a solid consensus has been formed. We will not announce the –extradata immediately either – if we did, we might as well launch centrally. We’ll let the community come to a consensus on what it is (as…