Ethereum Foundation Blog

After a successful launch, Frontier passed it’s 100000th block earlier this week. Here are some interesting stats from these first blocks. The first 50 block times (in seconds): Right after genesis, it took 29 seconds for the second block to appear, then 31 and 29 seconds for the next couple of blocks. Not too surprising as the miners scrambled with their setups as the final genesis block became known. After these first blocks, we see the block time drop significantly... [Read More]

This following shows our current and planned expectations concerning maximum likely chain-reorganisation depth. We would not consider transactions within this depth to have an exceptionally high chance of being permanent. These are our own expectations only and do not constitute any sort of guarantee. They are derived from theoretical considerations, ongoing empirical data, human factors in contingency planning and the past experience of our security team. As with all things in the peer-to-peer space the risk is entirely with the... [Read More]

This affects users of Alethzero GUI client on Windows. Users of eth CLI client or not on the Windows platform are unlikely to be affected but should take action detailed below. Users of Frontier command line interface geth are unaffected. Issue description: While setting privacy permissions on the keys directory, insufficient error handling can cause the key files to not be written; this may be widespread on the Windows platform. As such, current versions of AlethZero and eth may include identities... [Read More]

Over the last year the concept of “private blockchains” has become very popular in the broader blockchain technology discussion. Essentially, instead of having a fully public and uncontrolled network and state machine secured by cryptoeconomics (eg. proof of work, proof of stake), it is also possible to create a system where access permissions are more tightly controlled, with rights to modify or even read the blockchain state restricted to a few users, while still maintaining many kinds of partial guarantees... [Read More]

Here comes the first Frontier patch, and this is a big one! Before you go further, if your keys date back from Go 1.0 rc or C++ 0.9.36, note that you should regenerate all of your keys NOW. Though some releases of the pre-alpha and alpha clients are secure, this depends on which codebase and which version. You should assume that all keys generated prior to these clients are insecure and compromised. This, note, does not affect the pre-sale wallets.... [Read More]

After a smooth launch, please find a few updates of note below. These probably will be of interest only to the more advanced users amongst you - if you’re not a miner, there is nothing to action. Epoch switch in 2 hours Let’s start with a quick heads up to miners, the network will be switching epoch in roughly 2 hours. If you are using the geth/ethminer combo, you should be all set if you have opted to use the... [Read More]

Hi everyone – Vlad here. I’ve been working on the analysis and specification of  “proof-of-stake” blockchain architecture since September 2014. While Vitalik and I haven’t agreed on all of the details of the spec, we do have consensus on many properties of the proof-of-stake protocol that will likely be implemented for the Serenity release! It is called Casper “the friendly ghost” because it is an adaptation of some of the principles of the GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) protocol for proof-of-work... [Read More]

After an intensive recruitment period, the Ethereum Foundation has selected an Executive Director and named three members to the Board of Directors. This is a new organizational structure, which will allow us to focus on our next phase of development. The Ethereum Foundation is a not for profit (‘Stiftung’) organization registered in Switzerland, and has the purpose of managing the funds that were raised from the Ether Sale in order to best serve the Ethereum and decentralized technology ecosystem. Our... [Read More]

A few minutes ago, many of you generated and loaded the Ethereum Genesis block, marking the inception of Frontier, the first Live release of the Ethereum project. The Dev team joins me in thanking each and everyone of you for your support during the past year and half. It’s incredible to see the progress that has taken place since that humble first commit on Christmas Eve 2013. The vision of a censorship-proof ‘world computer’ that anyone can program, paying exclusively... [Read More]

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... [Read More]