Author: Olivia Martinez

Writing effective decentralized applications in Ethereum is at the same time easy and hard. The easy part we all know: rather than needing to create your own blockchain, manage complicated database code, deal with networking and NAT traversal, or any of the other complexities involving writing a peer-to-peer app from scratch, you can write code in a simple, high-level programming language like Serpent or Mutan (or LLL if you prefer mucking around a bit lower-level), with the simplicity of a toy scripting language but the power and security of a full blockchain backing it up. An entire implementation of a…

The topic of mining centralization has been a very important one over the past few weeks. GHASH.io, the Bitcoin network’s largest mining pool, has for the past month directed over 40% of the Bitcoin network’s hashpower, and two weeks ago briefly spiked over 50%, theoretically giving it monopoly control over the Bitcoin network. Although miners quidkly left the pool and reduced its hashpower to 35%, it’s clear that the problem is not solved. At the same time, ASICs threaten to further centralize the very production . One approach to solving the problem is the one I advocated in my previous…

During the run-up to the ether sale we will be releasing a series of blog posts regarding our development plans and intended organizational structure. Today we describe some of the background details of the ether sale module.  The sale module will be displayed on our website at https://www.ethereum.org for the duration of the sale. What is it? The ether sale is an HTML/JavaScript web application that enables people and organizations to pre-purchase ether tokens with bitcoin. Ether may be purchased by parties interested in using it in their development of distributed applications on the Ethereum platform or simply to pay…

One of the annoyances of the blockchain as a decentralized platform is the sheer length of delay before a transaction gets finalized. One confirmation in the Bitcoin network takes ten minutes on average, but in reality due to statistical effects when one sends a transaction one can only expect a confirmation within ten minutes 63.2% of the time; 36.8% of the time it will take longer than ten minutes, 13.5% of the time longer than twenty minutes and 0.25% of the time longer than an hour. Because of fine technical points involving Finney attacks and sub-50% double spends, for many…

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche Ethereum as a project is more than just a technology, even if technology is at its core. In the rush of creating, co-creating and debugging everything you sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. You need stop for a second, take a step back and observe in order to fully appreciate what’s going on. The project started as an idea in Vitalik’s mind. Ethereum, has now expanded into thousands and thousands of other minds around the world, thanks to…

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 someone wants to send a message to the contract, they would send the message to the oracles. The oracles would…

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. We certainly miscalculated the sheer difficulty of navigating the relevant legal processes in the United States and Switzerland, as well…

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 sure you have it down correctly. For all of these situations, the user experience is unfortunately going to be a…

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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 17.3MUSDvs17.3M USD vs 17.3MUSDvs15.5M. A total of 6670 transactions have been made, with values ranging from the minimum 0.01 BTC to a high of 500 BTC, and purchases continue to come in every hour. Additionally, the ether sale marks the largest use…