The crypto 2.0 industry has been making strong progress in the past year developing blockchain technology, including the formalization and in some cases realization of proof of stake designs like Slasher and DPOS, various forms of scalable blockchain algorithms, blockchains using “leader-free consensus” mechanisms derived from traditional Byzantine fault tolerance theory, as well as economic ingredients like Schelling consensus schemes and stable currencies. All of these technologies remedy key deficiencies of the blockchain design with respect to centralized servers: scalability...

Hi, I’m Jutta! As some of you might have read in earlier posts, I’ve recently been busy setting up a security audit prior to the Ethereum genesis block release. Ethereum will launch following a world-class review by experts in IT security, cryptography and blockchain technology. Prior to the launch, we will also complete a bug bounty program - a major cornerstone of our approach to achieving security. The bug bounty program will rely on the Ethereum community and all other motivated bug bounty...

OK so a minor update about what we are (and are not) doing here at Ethereum DEV. We are, first and foremost, developing a robust quasi-Turing-complete blockchain. This is known as Ethereum. Aside from having quasi-Turing-completeness, it delivers on a number of other important considerations, stemming from the fact we are developing entirely new blockchain technology including: speedy, through a 12 second blocktime; light-client-friendly through the use of Merkle roots in headers for compact inclusion/state proofs and DHT integration to...

Proof of stake continues to be one of the most controversial discussions in the cryptocurrency space. Although the idea has many undeniable benefits, including efficiency, a larger security margin and future-proof immunity to hardware centralization concerns, proof of stake algorithms tend to be substantially more complex than proof of work-based alternatives, and there is a large amount of skepticism that proof of stake can work at all, particularly with regard to the supposedly fundamental “nothing at stake” problem. As it...

One of the latest ideas that has come to recently achieve some prominence in parts of the Bitcoin community is the line of thinking that has been described by both myself and others as “Bitcoin dominance maximalism” or just “Bitcoin maximalism” for short - essentially, the idea that an environment of multiple competing cryptocurrencies is undesirable, that it is wrong to launch “yet another coin”, and that it is both righteous and inevitable that the Bitcoin currency comes to take...

I’m Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and, along with Vitalik Buterin and Jeffrey Wilcke, one of the three directors of the Eth Dev, the NFP organisation that is managing the development (under contract from Ethereum Suisse) of the Ethereum blockchain. This is a small update to let you all know what has been going on recently. I sit here on an immaculate couch that has been zapped forward in time from the 1960s. It is in the room that...