One of the more interesting long-term practical benefits of the technology and concept behind decentralized autonomous organizations is that DAOs allow us to very quickly prototype and experiment with an aspect of our social interactions that is so far arguably falling behind our rapid advancements in information and social technology elsewhere: organizational governance. Although our modern communications technology is drastically augmenting individuals’ naturally limited ability to both interact and gather and process information, the governance processes we have today are...

One of the more exciting applications of decentralized computing that have aroused a considerable amount of interest in the past year is the concept of an incentivized decentralized online file storage system. Currently, if you want your files or data securely backed up “in the cloud”, you have three choices - (1) upload them to your own servers, (2) use a centralized service like Google Drive or Dropbox or (3) use an existing decentralized file system like Freenet. These approaches...

Now that the first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and over 50 million ETH has been sold, we intend to soon make a transaction to begin using the funds to repay loans and kickstart the process of setting up our development hubs and expanding our staff. We have made a commitment to be highly transparent about how we spend the funds, and that is a commitment that we intend to live up to; to that end, we...

The first two weeks of the ether sale are over, and we have to date received over 25000 BTC from selling over 50 million ETH. This marks the largest cryptographic token sale to date, and with the two endowments places ETH as being the token with the 8th highest total value, even beating out the beloved Dogecoin at $17.3M USD vs $15.5M. A total of 6670 transactions have been made, with values ranging from the minimum 0.01 BTC to a...

Although we hope that the ether purchasing experience goes smoothly for everyone, we recognize that there will always be situations where things do not quite go as planned. Perhaps your internet connection dies in the middle of your purchase. Perhaps you accidentally click a back button or some link or simply hit refresh while the purchase is in progress. Perhaps you forgot to download your wallet. Perhaps you think you may have forgotten your password, and you want to make...

First of all, I would like to thank the community, and especially those close to the project who have in many cases abandoned their jobs to dedicate their time to it, for their extreme patience regarding the launch of the ether sale. We have been promising that the sale would arise in two weeks for six months, and many team members have endured substantial hardships because of expectations that we set regarding when we would be able to provide funding....

One of the more popular proposals for implementing smart contracts differently from the way they are typically presented in Ethereum is through the concept of oracles. Essentially, instead of a long-running contract being run directly on the blockchain, all funds that are intended to go into the contract would instead go into an M-of-N multisig address controlled by a set of specialized entities called “oracles”, and the contract code would be simultaneously sent to all of these entities. Every time...