One of the main applications of Ethereum that people have been interested in is financial contracts and derivatives. Although financial derivatives have acquired a reputation as a highly risky and destabilizing device with the sole function of enriching speculators, the underlying concept in fact has a number of legitimate uses,...
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The Latest EVM: “Ethereum Is A Trust-Free Closure System”
In the past two weeks our lead C++ developer, Gavin Wood, and myself have been spending a lot of time meeting the local Ethereum community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We were very excited to see such a large amount of interest in our project, and the fact that...
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The Question of Mining
There are a lot of interesting changes to the Ethereum protocol that are in the works, which will hopefully improve the power of the system, add further features such as light-client friendliness and a higher degree of extensibility, and make Ethereum contracts easier to code. Theoretically, none of these changes...
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DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 2: Reducing Barriers
In the last installment of this series, we talked about what “smart contracts” (or, perhaps more accurately, “self-enforcing contracts”) are, and discussed in detail the two main mechanisms through which these contracts can have “force”: smart property and “factum” currencies. We also discussed the limits of smart contracts, and how...
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