Cut and try: building a dream

Last month marked the 2 year anniversary of Ethereum's public announcement at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, Florida, USA. Amid much rumour and excitement, a sizeable crowd mobbed the young Vitalik Buterin after his on-stage announcement, questioning the merit and his desire to build such a system.

It can be hard to truly appreciate how far we’ve come in the last couple years. Sometimes it feels as if the cryptoeconomic sphere moves at such a blistering speed that weekly news announcements have become the norm rather than the exception. Interest in the field has exploded for lots of great reasons, but none of that particularly matters unless the underlying technology exists. As interested observers, our job is to help manifest the idea of a blockchain-driven world into reality. With ideas enshrined in a white paper, the time to talk was over. Now was the time to build.

A look back

Vitalik announcing Ethereum (Marc van der Chijs)

Although Bitcoin's speed of settlement was a huge improvement over traditional systems, it was clear that more innovation could be had by further experimenting with whatever this “blockchain” thing was. At the time, there was much debate about so-called “blockchain bloat” and concerns that additional applications built on the Bitcoin protocol would cause problems scaling. Already, betting platforms had come under fire for creating lots of low-value transactions. There was a stirring in the bitcoin community that continues to this day.

With all these possibilities, how could a single protocol be made to accommodate all the varying needs? As a first experiment, Bitcoin was already gaining quickly in value. What began as a cypherpunk dream had blossomed into an industry. Changes to the core protocol risked billions in value and there was no clear governance in place for proposing and including changes. One path to acceptance was forming a consensus around a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP, for short) and offering the code in a “pull request” for public comment. Making the changes required to support more generalised use would be a radical proposal, to say the least.

Bootstrap

Contrast this to the Ethereum ecosystem which today has no less than 6 implementations of consensus: C++, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, and Haskell. When a discrepancy occurs due to either human or computer languages, a roundtable of client developers can compare results and discuss the ramifications of a particular interpretation so as to determine a specific course of action. Aided by automated and random testing, sometimes the result of a consensus failure was not in code, but the documentation itself. Nonetheless, the benefits of a specification-driven implementation began to shine, helping to neutralise human error as we interpreted words into code.

Ethereum Yellow Paper

Concurrent to this initial development, several legal entities were formed to provide a framework for coordinating the organised effort of building a decentralised DApp platform. The result was Stiftung Ethereum being established in June 2014 in Zug, Switzerland. With all the paperwork and agreements in place, a crowdsale of Ether tokens was held in Summer 2014, based on a proposal laid out earlier in the year. Within moments of launch, thousands of bitcoin began flowing to a multisig Bitcoin address, each purchase marking its place in history as supporters of an ambitious vision. In the spirit of complete decentralisation, no database was used, instead relying 100% on transactions as recorded in the Bitcoin ledger. If Ethereum were to build anything, it would be atop the shoulders of giants.

Kickstart

Almost immediately, the results of the sale were put to use paying back mounting legal debts and also for the months of developer effort that had yet to be compensated. Some had left their job and not seen a single satoshi in their Bitcoin wallet in a half-year, as others grew concerned about feeding their families and paying their mortgages. Times were tight for everyone involved.

Finally, around September 2014, the majority of funds would be available to support the complex engineering of bleeding-edge decentralisation technology. Born out of an interest in extending blockchains, Ethereum commenced a massive hiring effort, attracting developers across a variety of disciplines to carry out the hard work of fully flushing out what were only preliminary ideas.

DEVCON0 group photo (Wikipedia)

Only two months later, in November 2014, the majority of the Ethereum project team was assembled and descended upon Berlin to participate in the first Ethereum conference: DEVCON0. Although many had spoke via Skype, this was a time when most of the project members met for the first time. At this proto-conference, in a modest but beautiful space, developers took turns standing in front of peers explaining their vision for any given segment of the many protocols that would be necessary to develop “Web3”.

This was a key time for the project as the general community anxiously awaited more refined tools to begin building their own dream. Many iterations of protocols and several implementations of any given feature had yet to be developed. To understand this more clearly, it should be acknowledged that Ethereum had only reached PoC7 and many ideas were barely more coherent than theory.

As a team, we were only first starting to work with each other and the many tools and systems required for full-scale development had yet to be put in place. As a project, we identified the need to begin extensive testing and measurement to ensure each of the ideas were performing as expected. If the testing couldn’t prove the theory, the hypothesis was little more than fantasy.

Heroic efforts

An early Mist prototype

Already at this point in time, the bug bounty program was in full swing as we sought the most egregious bugs. As eventual users of the system, vigorously seeking problems brought far more benefit than hiding behind excuses. Because we were writing consensus software, there was little room for error and we would go as far as randomised fuzz testing to ensure that even unknown unknowns were handled to the best of our ability.

As the software audits progressed, the DevGrants program began to more publicly emerge with the announcement of the Ethereum Embedded program, making it exceptionally simple to run an Ethereum node on low-cost Raspberry Pi hardware. At the same time, the teams focused on ensuring a stable feature-rich command line interface (CLI) was available for developers to begin working with. It would take only a few more weeks until the eventual Olympic testnet was launched, providing a valuable testing bed for client patching and protocol upgrades.

As the suite of software and interfaces eventually marched towards stability and developer confidence grew around what we were building, murmurs of a Frontier launch started to permeate the community. Despite the excitement to release early and often, the community backed the developers decision to make sure the security and stability of the software was paramount, deferring to the software & security auditors on what must be changed before a wide-scale release.

Wild West

Network statistics dashboard

After a much-deserved reprieve in the summer following the relatively smooth launch of Frontier, the development teams refined rough edges in the software and began working towards improved abstractions to better model what the future of Ethereum might look like. A new & improved Ethereum Wallet beta was released based on a more robust toolkit than the prior Qt versions. This decision would yield huge dividends later as mobile builds would become a high-priority target for the project.

With the widening interest beyond the core Ethereum community, it was time to spread our collective wings to help the rest of the world see the same ideas that many early adopters had. Following a short delay, DEVCON1 was announced to take place in London, England for a week in November 2015. Almost 400 people joined together at this location for an entire week, totaling 80 talks and topics about the Ethereum ecosystem.

Full house at DEVCON1

Adding to the excitement, the community gleefully welcomed Nick Szabo, Imogen Heap, and representatives from IBM, Microsoft, and Deloitte. Unlike other crypto-conferences, there was little talk of price or speculation. Instead, the focus was squarely on building tools, standards, and shared understanding between technical and business folk.

Homesteading

Ethereum Dapps explosion

Also rapidly progressing is so-called “light client” functionality along with state-pruning, both of which will allow for resource-constrained devices like phones and watches to process and store the blockchain. Combined with the mobile builds effort and Mist developments, the community is pushing Ethereum to new edges where previous cryptocurrencies haven’t often treaded.

We are now on the precipice of the Homestead hard fork, tweaking minor issues before releasing what will be considered the “stable” version of the network. Because the initial launch of Frontier network was significantly more stable than planned for, relatively few changes are being implemented for Homestead: a block difficulty change, addition of a new opcode, and some networking tweaks.

Beyond the immediate planned updated, there’s a bright future of developments ahead including solutions for scalability and a move from wasteful proof-of-work (PoW) to a more earth-friendly proof-of-stake (PoS). What began as an abstract model in one human head has evolved to a tremendous amount of developer effort to see that vision through, and it exists today thanks largely to the active community with a healthy attitude for creating something meaningful. In 2015, Ethereum made a transition from an idea to reality, backed by a growing ecosystem striving for something more.

Dreaming forward

“Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them.”

–Orville Wright