As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the London office and pondering how to give you a good overview about the work we’ve been doing to secure Ethereum’s protocols, clients and p2p-network. As you might remember, I joined the Ethereum team at the end of last year to manage the security audit. As spring has passed and summer arrived and meanwhile several audits finished, it’s now a good time for me to share some results from the inspection of the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...