In November, we created a quick survey for the Ethereum community to help us gauge how we’re doing, what can be improved, and how best to engage with all of you as we move toward the genesis block launch in March. We believe that it is very important to allow the community to interact with Ethereum and with itself, and we look forward to offering new and exciting tools to do so using the survey results as a guide.
The survey itself consisted of 14 questions divided into two sections; Ethereum as “Organization” and Ethereum as “Technology”. There were a total of 286 responses. This represents 7.8% of the current ethereal returns population, or 2.4% of the current @ethereumproject followers.
In which country do you currently reside?
So this is where everyone lives. Summarizing by continent – of the 286 respondents there are 123 (43%) in North America, 114 (40%) in Europe, 30 (10%) in Asia, 13 (5%) in Oceania and 6 (2%) in South America. No surprises there, though it does show how we, and the crypto space in general, have a lot of work to do in areas south of the brandt line. One way to do this is to generate more international Ethereum meetups. You can see a map of all current Ethereum meetups here (We have 81 in total around the world, from London to New York to Tehran, with over 6,000 members participating.) If you’d like to start one yourself, send us a message and we can offer further assistance: [email protected].
It is understood that our transparency is very important to the community. To that end, we strive to make much of our inner workings freely available on the Internet. As indicated in the chart, most people agree that we are doing just that. However, you can always do more. We are currently working on an update to the ethereum.org website ready for genesis block launch. Expect much more content and information as we complete this towards the end of January. In the meantime, take a look at the Ethereum GitHub Repositoryor head to the new ΞTH ÐΞV website for a better understanding of the entity that is delivering Ethereum 1.0, as well as their truly amazing team.
We have always tried to provide the community with as much information as possible about our financial situation, and from the results, it seems that many of you agree. For more information on how Ethereum intends to use the proceeds generated from the sale of Ether as we move forward, please see the road map and the DEVELOPMENT PLAN. For more information on the ether sale itself, take a look at Vitalik’s Introduction to selling etherthe Bitcoin Ethereum Walletor the Statistical summary of ether sales.
Although most people agree that the use cases for Ethereum in society are clear, I wouldn’t be so sure that we’ve figured them all out yet. Every day we talk to developers and entrepreneurs via Skype or on IRC (Join in your browser – #ethereum / #ethereum-dev) who have thought of exciting new ideas that they are looking to implement on top of Ethereum, many of which are completely new to us. For a brief overview of some of the use cases we’ve encountered, check out Stephan Tual’s recent presentation at NewFinance.
We are doing our best to keep everyone up to date with the myriad of changes, updates, and general project progress that has taken place over the past few months. Gavin Wood and Jeff Wilcke especially have written excellent blog updates on how things are going at their respective ÐΞV Hubs in Berlin and Amsterdam.
ΞTH ÐΞV Mission Statement it is now proudly featured on the ΞTH ÐΞV website for all to see. In detail, it explains what should be achieved over time, but can be summarized as “Research, design, and build software that best facilitates, in a secure, decentralized, and fair manner, the communication and agreement of automatic fulfillment between the parties”.
Like the crypto space in general, Ethereum is somewhat difficult to understand initially. There’s no question about that, and it’s our job to make the process of gaining understanding and enabling participation as easy and intuitive as possible. As mentioned above, the new ethereum.org website will be an invaluable tool in helping people access the right information that applies to their own set of knowledge and skills. Also, over time, our goal is to create a utility similar to Udemy/Codacademy that will allow people with skills ranging from none to Jedi Master to learn how Ethereum works and how to implement their ideas. In the meantime, a great place to start for those who want to use Ethereum is the recent report by Ken Kappler. tutorials.
This was an important question as it gave a lot of perspective on what needed to be focused on before genesis and what (albeit useful) could be developed after. From a user interface standpoint, the Go team in Amsterdam is working on creating Mist, the Ethereum “Ðapp Navigator”. Mist’s initial design ideas are presented by Lead UI Designer Alex Van de Sande at this video.
Ease of installation will be a big factor in user adoption – we can’t have people recompiling the client every time a new update is pushed! Therefore, binaries with internal update systems are in the works. Customer reliability (errors) is being addressed by Jutta Steiner, manager of our internal and external security audits. we wait for the community bug bounty project will be available in mid-January, so stay tuned and get ready for epic 11-figure Satoshi rewards, leaderboards, and more “1337” prizes!
Developer tools are also on the way. Specifically, the “Mix” project. Mix supports some amazing features, including documentation, a compiler, debugger integration for writing code state information, valid invariants, code structure and code formatting, as well as variable values and assertion truth annotations. It is a long-term project that is expected to be delivered in the next 12-18 months, right now we are very focused on completing the blockchain. Once complete, we can reallocate our resources to other important projects. You can know more in the Presentation of the mixture of ÐΞVcon-0. For now, documentation is constantly being generated on the Ethereum GitHub Wiki.
The blog and social media engagement will continue to deliver Ethereum content on relevant channels with the goal of reaching as wide a range of people as possible.
With more people have smartphones than computers ya, imagine how prolific they will be like time goes on? This will be the case especially in emerging markets like India and Nigeria, they are likely to overtake PCs to some extent and gain wide adoption very quickly. A mobile thin client it will be very important for the usability of Ethereum. As part of the joint project of IBM and Samsung “Adept” (a internet of things platform that is currently being presented in CES 2015), an Android version of the Ethereum Java client – ethereumj, is going to be open source on GitHub. This will go a long way towards getting Ethereum Mobile!
It is interesting to see a very mixed mix of responses to this question. As stated above, Ethereum use cases are as broad as they are varied, and it’s great to see how many different types of services people are looking to implement on top of Ethereum. The emphasis on governance-based Ðapps highlights Ethereum’s ability to facilitate interactions between the digital world and the physical world and create autonomously governed communities that can compete with both governments and corporations. Primavera De Filippi and Raffaele Mauro investigate this further in the Internet Policy Review Magazine.
This graph shows a reasonably even distribution, we have done our best to make different clients available on different operating systems. You can find the Alethzero binaries hereand the binaries of the Mist here. However, these become outdated very quickly and may not connect to the testnet as development continues, so if you’re considering using Ethereum before launch, it’s worth reviewing the client creation tutorials to get the most up-to-date versions of clients.
With Mist (Go), Alethzero (C++), Pythereum (Python) Node-Ethereum (Node.js) and Ethereumj (Java), Ethereum already has a large number of clients available. He yellow paper written by Gavin Wood is a great reference for the community to build their own clients, as seen with those still in development, such as the Clojure and Objective C iterations.
As Gavin Wood has mentioned in a previous blog post, Mutan and LLL as smart contract languages will be discontinued. Serpent will continue to be developed by Vitalik with his team, and Soldity will continue to be the primary development language for Ethereum contracts. you can try Solid in your browseror view the recent vision and roadmap presentation by Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin at ÐΞVcon-0.
Thanks to Alex Van de Sande for helping with the implementation of the survey and the graphs of the tables. Icons recovered from icons8. If anyone would like a copy of the raw survey results please feel free to email [email protected].
