I was woken up by Vitalik’s call at 5:55 this morning; pitch dark outside, night still upon us. However, it was time to go and this week it was better to start on the right foot.
The 25-minute walk in the dark from the Zug headquarters to the train station was wet. Streetlights reflected in the puddles on the clean Swiss streets provided a picturesque, if sedate, march into the city. I couldn’t help but think that the rain streaming down my face was a very liquid reminder of the impending change of seasons, and then considering how quickly the last nine months had passed.
solid foundation
The last week was spent in Zug by the Ethereum foundation board and ÐΞV leadership: Vitalik, Mihai and Taylor who officially form the foundation board, Anthony and Joseph as the other official advisers and Aeron & Jutta as the executive of ÐΞV along with me and Jeff wearing multiple ÐΞV hats and advice). The main result of this was the spread of Vitalik’s superb plan to reform the foundation into a professional entity. The board will be recruited from accomplished professionals with minimal conflicts of interest; the current group of “founders” were officially removed from those positions and a professional executive was recruited, the latter process led by Joseph. Anthony will take on a greater role as an ambassador for Ethereum in China and North America. Rather, ÐΞV will function much more as a department of the Foundation executive than as a largely independent entity. Finally, I presented the launch strategy to the others; an event after which I have never seen so many photos taken from a whiteboard. Needless to say, everything was well received by the board and advisers. More information coming soon.
As I write this, I’m sitting on a crowded commuter train, Vinay Gupta in tow, who recently took on a much larger role this week as launch coordinator. He will help you with the launch strategy and keep you informed about our launch process. This week, which could be dramatically described as “pivotal” in the release process, will see Jeff, Vitalk, and I sit around a table and roll out all of PoC-9’s changes, related unit tests, and integrations in three days, along with our indomitable Test Master, Christoph. This week’s outcome will inform our announcement, coming later this week, outlining in no uncertain terms what we’re launching and when.
I’m sorry it’s been so long without an update. The last 2 months have been quite busy, full of travel and meetings, with the remaining time spent coding, team leading and managing. The team is now substantially formed; formal security audit started four weeks ago; the rewards program works smoothly. The latest processes are in the extremely capable hands of Jutta and Gustav. In the meantime, Aeron will step down as ÐΞV’s head of finance and operations and assume the role he initially joined, systems modeling. We look forward to announcing his successors next week (yes, that was plural; he’s been doing the work of 2.5 people in the last few months).
We are also in the process of forming alliances with third parties in the industry; George, Jutta and I manage this process; I am happy to announce that at least three exchanges will support Ether from day one on their trading platforms (details to be announced soon), with more exchanges to follow. Marek and Alex provide technical support there and Marek goes as far as doing a substantial reference exchange implementation.
I also finished the first draft of ICAP, the Ethereum Inter-Exchange Client Address Protocol, an IBAN-compliant system for referencing and transacting with client accounts aimed at streamlining the worry-free fund transfer process between exchanges and, in Ultimately, do KYC. and AML pains are a thing of the past. IBAN support may even provide the possibility of easy integration with existing banking infrastructure sometime in the future.
developments
Proof-of-concept versions VII and VIII were released. NatSpec, “natural language specification format” and the foundation of our transaction security was prototyped and integrated. Under Marek’s watch, now with Fabian’s help, ethereum.js is really coming of age with near source level compatibility with Solidity on contract interaction and support for the ABI written with calls and events, the latter provides seamless state change reporting. . Mix, our IDE, experienced its first release and after some teething problems it is seeing good use thanks to the excellent work done by Arkadiy and Yann. Solidity has had numerous features added and is rapidly approaching 1.0 status with Christian, Lefteris and Liana to thank. Marian’s work continues on the network monitoring system, while Sven and Heiko have been working diligently on the stress testing infrastructure that analyzes and tests the formation and performance of the peer network. They will soon be joined by Alex and Lefteris in accelerating this program.
So one of the biggest things that needed to be sorted out for the next release is the proof-of-work algorithm that we’ll be using. This had a number of requirements, two of which actually pulled in opposite directions, but basically it had to be a client-friendly algorithm whose extraction speed was proportional to IO bandwidth and required a considerable amount of RAM. to do so. There was a vague consensus that we (well… Vitalik and Matthew) were headed in the direction of a Hasimoto-like algorithm (a proof-of-work designed for the Bitcoin blockchain that purports to be tied to IO, which which means, roughly, that to get it to go faster, you would need to add more memory rather than just sprinkling a smaller/faster ASIC). Since our blockchain has a number of important differences from the Bitcoin blockchain (mainly in transaction density), stemming from the extremely short block time of 12 seconds we are after, we would have to use not the chain data of blocks itself like Hashimoto, but an artificial form. created dataset, made with an algorithm known as Dagger (yes, some will remember it as Vitalik’s first and failed attempt at a memory proof of work).
While this seemed like a good direction, a quick audit of Vitalik and Matt’s initial algorithm by Tim Hughes (former CTO of Frontier Developments and an expert in low-level CPU and GPU operation and optimization) showed major flaws. With their help, they were able to work together to design a substantially more airtight algorithm which, we’re sure to say, should make the job of developing an FPGA/ASIC difficult enough, especially given our determination to move to proof-of-stake. within the next 6 to 12 months.
Last but not least, the new website was launched. Kudos to Ian and Konstantin for cleaning up and getting it done. Next stop will be the developer site, which will be loosely based on the excellent qt.io resource, aiming to provide a unique spectacle of up-to-date reference documentation, curated tutorials, examples, recipes, downloads, issue tracking, and build the state.
Forward
So as Alex, our network master, would say, these are exciting times. When you’re deep in development, you sometimes forget how revolutionary the technology you’re creating is, which is probably for the best, since the seriousness of the matter at hand would continually distract you. However, when one begins to consider the short-term disruptions that we can actually bring, one realizes that the wave of change is inevitable and is headed right for you. For what it’s worth, I find an excellent accompaniment to this crazy life is the superb music of Pretty Lights.
