So first some background. We’ve already covered a bit about what to expect from Frontier in the Ethereum launch process blog post and Gav has given us a overview of the state of the development effort. You can also read about some of the ongoing security work, including bug bounty system. The bug bounty program has found my favorite bug so far: jonas nickis the discovery that you could send a negative payment to someone moving value from their account to yours!
As bug bounty goes, an absolute gem. Well done!
Gav has a new blog post outlining a bit more about what the thorny end of the development process looks like: creating an accurate specification for Ethereum keeping three different implementations in sync, rather than having a canonical implementation that implicitly defines the protocol specification and what other versions it becomes compatible with bug by bug. This is a pretty hardcore and comprehensive approach to putting together a system, and it’s worth a read to get an idea of how the engineering work is going.
By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what the development process looks like and the various threads of work that are being woven into the release. So let’s talk about what really needs to be done between now and Frontier.
exist four specific challenges for us to meet at Frontier.
- Security
- network stability
- Mining
- Exchange
Two of them, Mining and Sharing, are partnership efforts: people have to take our software and run it, along with their own tools in some cases, to provide services as part of the ecosystem. Remember, we are launching an ecosystem, not just a product: everything is part of that ecology. Each of these aspects of the release process have to work, both on their own and with each other, for the ecosystem to really get a proper test under load.
Also:
- All software has to be reasonably easy to install, including mining.
- We need to support partners, particularly exchanges, to provide services.
- We need to build our blockchain and checkpoint integrity testing services
- All within the context of the Frontier environment where we offer strong guarantees on network integrity (more on that later) at the cost of network rollbacks if/when we discover unexpected network behavior or other issues.
Reasonably good progress is being made on all fronts. Rather than give you a release date and then risk that, under the pressure of meeting that date, something will slip through the gaps that another day’s work would have caught, we’re going to mark things off in the release process to as we progress. This will allow you to get an idea of how far away we are from launch on any given day, without us basically having to guess how long it will take, post our guess, and then hope that we can make the schedule come true. : As we said before, this is a safety driven process and not a schedule. We can make that process pretty transparent to you and give you summary information so you don’t have to look at repositories, but we’d rather have you participate in the process so you understand what’s going on and how the work is going rather than give you an aggregate date and it keeps you guessing at the actual status of the job. We believe this approach is more transparent, more suitable for a crowdfunding development process, and generally just more realistic.
If you’d like to see the current state of affairs, Jeffrey Wilcke (lead in Go client and the Amsterdam hub) has a Go to the customer issue tracker for Frontier.
This problem list is the best reference for the launch of Frontier: at this moment, 10 closed issues, 26 open. New issues will pop up and of course the issue count is just a very rough indicator of “ship time” but work done is the best indicator so look there if you want to forecast.
Please note: this does not mean that we are running on “valve timing(Although Valve Time produces some amazing products!) We have open development processes, you can see how the code is written, download the latest branches, participate in testing. Not everything is hidden behind a wall of company PR. But we are running at the time of “innovative software release with huge associated security processes”, and estimating the schedule for things that have never been done before won’t help anyone – part of the benefit of the way Ethereum was funded about conventional financing models is that we can do the right thing in the medium to long term, instead of being under constant market pressure for next quarter’s numbers.
We’ll say this: there will be at least two weeks’ notice before anything is released. You’ll get a lot of news from blog posts, you’ll see the issue count drop, and we’ll start saying positive things about security audit feedback, etc. We will keep you informed!
What about the list of functions? We covered this extensively in the Release Processes post, but to reiterate, Frontier will…
- Be only command line client
- Mine at 10% of the normal rate, but this will be real Ether
- Include the full set of blockchain features, including smart contracts and logs, though everything except account balances will be wiped when Homestead starts.
- We are working with exchanges to make ETH convertible during Frontier
- For security, the blockchain will be manually monitored every 24 hours and any reported anomalies will be investigated.
- Official exchanges will use this checkpoint service to protect traded assets from possible blockchain reversals
- In particularly severe cases of failure, the Foundation may cease control of Frontier altogether and release a client update.
In short, we are doing everything we can to make Frontier a safe place to try Ethereum with real value, but we are also strongly discouraging people from using Ether on Frontier’s network, which they are not willing to lose.
Frontier is primarily intended for people who are writing and testing tools for mining and trading, and perhaps some of the more resilient dApp developers. It’s not a general release that we expect ordinary users to interact with at all, although you can download a client and mine some Ether just because you can. The show actually begins in Homestead, and we’ll have more news on Homestead’s features later.
I already have more news, and keep watching the sky!
