URGENT ALL MINERS: The network is under attack. The attack is a computational DDoS, ie. miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. This is due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from disk; the attack transactions are calling this opcode roughly 50,000 times per block. The consequence of this is that the network is greatly slowing down, but there is NO consensus...

Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Likelihood: High Severity: High Summary: geth nodes running out of memory and crashing on block https://etherchain.org/block/2283416 Details: TBD Solution: Geth 1.4.12 was released. Please update ASAP.

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. In his own words: I’m joining Ethereum as a formal verification engineer. My reasoning: formal verification makes sense as a profession only in a rare situation where the verification target...

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 cost: inflation and transaction fees. Currently, Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two leading proof-of-work blockchains, both use high levels of inflation to pay for security; the Bitcoin community presently intends to...

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 chain). That said, we recognize that the Ethereum code can be used to instantiate other blockchains with the same consensus rules, including testnets, consortium and private chains, clones and spinoffs,...

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 though averted at the last instance, the fast approaching hard-fork deadline looked eerily bleak to say the least. We needed a new strategy… The stepping stone towards this was an idea borrowed from Google...

We would like to congratulate the Ethereum community on a successfully completed hard fork. Block 1920000 contained the execution of an irregular state change which transferred ~12 million ETH from the “Dark DAO” and “Whitehat DAO” contracts into the WithdrawDAO recovery contract. The fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly 85% of miners mining on the fork: You can see ongoing fork progress here. EthStats shows Go, Java and Parity (Rust) nodes successfully synchronized to the fork chain. The recovery...

The DAO, though not a product developed by the Ethereum Foundation, has been a hot topic as of late, both internally in the organisation as well as within our community. The Hard Fork is a delicate topic and the way we see it, no decision is the right one. As this is not a decision that can be made by the foundation or any other single entity, we again turn towards the community to assess its wishes in order to provide the...

Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can be done and give some basic examples on how to start building a decentralized app. Who is this for? This text is intended at those who have a basic understanding...