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…

Visions, Part 1: The Value of Blockchain Technology

One of the questions that has perhaps been central to my own research in blockchain technology is: ultimately, what is it even useful for? Why do we need blockchains for anything, what kinds of services should be run on blockchain-like architectures, a…

Ethereum Foundation Open Call re: Board Selection

With Ethereum getting close to its first official launch with Frontier, we have spent the last week of February at our holon in Switzerland discussing what the future of the Ethereum Foundation is going to look like. Since the start of the project, one…

Ethereum Foundation is hiring an Executive Director

Stiftung Ethereum, the Zug, Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation –ethereum.org, is seeking to immediately fill the Executive Director position within the Foundation. The role involves defining and discharging the day-to-day business of the Foundatio…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

Ethereum’s unexpected future direction

Ethereum has been preparing what we consider to be the most exciting digital alliance since IBM and Microsoft partnered so successfully on the IBM PC. We know that you’ve been anticipating great things from Ethereum and we are delighted to present you …

Ethereum Builders: A Proposed Experiment

Hello, fellow Ethereans. I am Mihai Alisie, one of the Ethereum founders, and for the past year I’ve served as the vice president of the Ethereum Foundation and as director of Ethereum Switzerland. In the early days of the project I concentrated my at…

Jutta’s update on bug bounty program and security audit

Hi, Jutta writing again – I initially introduced myself when we started the bounty program earlier this year and I’m happy to provide you with an update on what’s happening on the security side prior and throughout launch. We have had some high qualit…

Mihai’s Ethereum Project Update. The First Year.

Into the ether Hello, fellow Ethereans. I am Mihai Alisie, one of the Ethereum founders, and for the past year I’ve served as the Vice President of the Ethereum Foundation and Director of Ethereum Switzerland. In the early days of the project I conce…

Getting to the Frontier

So first some background. We’ve already covered a little about what to expect from Frontier in the Ethereum Launch Process blog post and Gav has given us a comprehensive overview of the state of the development effort. You can also read about some of t…

The Ethereum Development Process

So I’m not sure if this kind of development methodology has ever been applied to such an extreme before so I figured I’d document it. In a nutshell, it’s sort of like test-driven triplet-programming development. While speed-developing our alpha codeba…

The Ethereum Launch Process

I’m Vinay Gupta, the newly minted release coordinator for Ethereum. I’ve been working with the comms team on strategy, and have now come aboard to help smooth the release process (some of the content in this blog is out of date, please see this link fo…

Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update V

I was woken by Vitalik’s call at 5:55 this morning; pitch black outside, nighttime was still upon us. Nonetheless, it was time to leave and this week had best start on the right foot. The 25-minute walk in darkness from the Zug-based headquarters to t…

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…

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…

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…