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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

An update as promised: all systems are now ‘Go’ on the technical side (pun intended) and we intend to release Frontier this week. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my previous blog post. What became apparent is that prior to the big day, many of you wanted to know more about what the sequence of events would exactly be, and how to prepare your machine for the release. A transparent and open release Frontier users will need to...

We are only days away from launching ‘Frontier’, the first milestone in the release of the Ethereum project. Frontier will be followed by ‘Homestead’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Serenity’ throughout the coming year, each adding new features and improving the user friendliness and security of the platform.