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...

Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir for much of the thinking behind multi-chain cryptoeconomic paradigms First off, a history lesson. In October 2013, when I was visiting Israel as part of my trip around the Bitcoin world, I came to know the core teams behind the colored coins and Mastercoin projects. Once I properly understood Mastercoin and its potential, I was immediately drawn in by the sheer power of the protocol; however, I disliked the fact that the protocol was designed...

Special thanks to Robert Sams for the development of Seignorage Shares and insights regarding how to correctly value volatile coins in multi-currency systems Note: we are not planning on adding price stabilization to ether; our philosophy has always been to keep ether simple to minimize black-swan risks. Results of this research will likely go into either subcurrencies or independent blockchains One of the main problems with Bitcoin for ordinary users is that, while the network may be a great way...