Cryptocurrency

[ad_1] So first some background. We've already covered a little bit about what to expect from Frontier in Ethereum launch process Blog post Gav gave us a file An overview of the state of development efforts. You can also read about some of the security work in progress, Including bug bonus system. The bug bounty program found my favorite bug so far: jonas nickdiscover it You can send a negative payment to someone to transfer the value from their account to yours! It also discovers bug bounty, an absolute gem. I did well! Gav has a new blog post describing more about what the thorny end of the development process looks like: Create accurate specifications for Ethereum by keeping three different applications in sync, rather than having a base implementation implicitly defining the proto...

[ad_1] Special thanks to Andrew Miller for skipping this attack, and Zac Hess, Vlad Zamfir and Paul Stork for discussion and responses. One of the most interesting surprises in cryptoeconomics came in the final weeks of the attack shillingcoin Andrew Miller got pregnant earlier this month. Although it has always been understood that SchellingCoin and similar systems (including the most advanced ones) truthcoin consensus), relying on what has hitherto been considered a new and untested assumption of crypto-economy security - that one can safely rely on people who act honestly in a concurrent consensus game just because they think anyone else will - the problems raised thus far must deal With relatively marginal issues such as the attacker's ability to exert small but increasing amounts...

[ad_1] Special thanks to Vlad Zamfir and Jae Kwon for many of the ideas described in this post Aside from the primary debate around weak subjectivity, one of the important secondary arguments raised against proof of stake is the issue that proof of stake algorithms are much harder to make light-client friendly. Whereas proof of work algorithms involve the production of block headers which can be quickly verified, allowing a relatively small chain of headers to act as an implicit proof that the network considers a particular history to be valid, proof of stake is harder to fit into such a model. Because the validity of a block in proof of stake relies on stakeholder signatures, the validity depends on the ownership distribution of the currency in the particular block that was signed, and s...

[ad_1] Back in November, we created a quick survey for the Ethereum community to help us gauge how well we're doing, what could be improved, and how best we can communicate with all of you as we move toward the release of the genesis suite in March. We feel it is very important to enable the community to interact with Ethereum in addition to itself, and we hope to offer new and exciting tools to do so using the survey results for guidance. The survey itself consists of 14 questions divided into two parts; Ethereum as “Organization” and Ethereum as “Technology”. There were a total of 286 responses. This represents 7.8% of the current Ethereum Reddit Population, or 2.4% of the current Tweet embed Followers. In which country do you currently reside? So, this is where everyone lives....

[ad_1] One of the criticisms that many people have made about the current direction of the cryptocurrency space is the increasing amount of fragmentation that we are seeing. What was earlier perhaps a more tightly bound community centered around developing the common infrastructure of Bitcoin is now increasingly a collection of "silos", discrete projects all working on their own separate things. There are a number of developers and researchers who are either working for Ethereum or working on ideas as volunteers and happen to spend lots of time interacting with the Ethereum community, and this set of people has coalesced into a group dedicated to building out our particular vision. Another quasi-decentralized collective, Bitshares, has set their hearts on their own vision, combining their...

[ad_1] The crypto 2.0 industry has been making strong progress in the past year developing blockchain technology, including the formalization and in some cases realization of proof of stake designs like Slasher and DPOS, various forms of scalable blockchain algorithms, blockchains using "leader-free consensus" mechanisms derived from traditional Byzantine fault tolerance theory, as well as economic ingredients like Schelling consensus schemes and stable currencies. All of these technologies remedy key deficiencies of the blockchain design with respect to centralized servers: scalability knocks down size limits and transaction costs, leader-free consensus reduces many forms of exploitability, stronger PoS consensus algorithms reduce consensus costs and improve security, and Schelling conse...

[ad_1] 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 turns out, however, the problems are solvable, and one can make a rigorous argument that proof of stake, with all its benefits, can be made to be successful - but at a moderate cost. The purpose of this post will be to explain exactly what this cost is, and how...

[ad_1] 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 a monopoly position in the cryptocurrency scene. Note that this is distinct from a simple desire to support Bitcoin and make it better; such motivations are unquestionably beneficial and I personally continue to contribute to Bitcoin regularly via my python library pybitcointools. Rather, it is a stance t...