Dev Update: Formal Methods

Posted by Christian Reitwiessner on September 1, 2016

Today, I am delighted to announce that Yoichi Hirai (pirapira on github) is joining the Ethereum project as a formal verification engineer. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo on the topic of formalizing communicating parallel processes and created formal verification tools for Ethereum in his spare time.... [Read More]

On Inflation, Transaction Fees and Cryptocurrency Monetary Policy

Posted by Vitalik Buterin on July 27, 2016

The primary expense that must be paid by a blockchain is that of security. The blockchain must pay miners or validators to economically participate in its consensus protocol, whether proof of work or proof of stake, and this inevitably incurs some cost. There are two ways to pay for this... [Read More]

Onward from the Hard Fork

Posted by Vitalik Buterin on July 26, 2016

The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision. Seeing the results of various metrics, including carbonvote, dapp and ecosystem infrastructure adoption, this means that we will focus our resources and attention on the chain which is now called ETH (ie. the fork... [Read More]

Hive: How we strived for a clean fork

Posted by Péter Szilágyi on July 22, 2016

The DAO soft-fork attempt was difficult. Not only did it turn out that we underestimated the side effects on the consensus protocol (i.e. DoS vulnerability), but we also managed to introduce a data race into the rushed implementation that was a ticking time bomb. It was not ideal, and even... [Read More]