Ethereum Foundation Blog

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

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.... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

As part of our drive to introduce Ethereum to the far corners of the world, not to mention demonstrate the potential for embedded blockchain technology (even without light-nodes) I’m happy to announce the roll-out of our “eπ” Ethereum-on-Raspberry Pi programme. As part of our programme, we’re offering a full-kit for placing a full Ethereum node on the internet to communities around the world. Included in the kit is a Raspberry Pi (version 2), power connector and SD card preloaded with... [Read More]

What began all the way back on midnight of February 1st 2014, is coming to a close: we are happy to announce the release of the ninth and last in the Ethereum Proof-of-Concept series. We invite the community to participate in the ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet in our present release, Olympic, made available now. The purpose of Olympic is to reward people who try to test the limits of the Ethereum blockchain during the pre-release period, spamming the network with... [Read More]

As part of our tiered release process, we will soon be beginning the final phase prior to our Frontier release. So far our ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet has been running smoothly for around a month with dozens of nodes around the world, well over 200,000 blocks and including clients on several platforms and three different clean-room implementations. However, that’s not enough of a test for us. In a phase of the PoC-IX testnet called “Olympic”, the usage of this network... [Read More]

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 single fundamental advantage of the technology is, there is a high chance that they will give you one particular predictable answer: it does not require trust. Unlike traditional (financial or other) systems, where you need to trust a particular entity to... [Read More]