First of all, I would like to thank the community, and especially the people close to the project who in many cases have left their jobs to dedicate their time to it, for their extreme patience regarding the launch of the ether sale. We have been promising the sale would come in two weeks for six months, and many team members have endured substantial hardship due to the expectations we set regarding when we would be able to provide the financing. We certainly miscalculated the sheer difficulty of navigating the relevant legal processes in the United States and Switzerland, as well as the surprisingly intricate technical issues surrounding the creation of a secure selling website and cold wallet system. However, the long wait is finally over and we are excited to announce the launch of the sale.
In the intervening six months, our time has been spent on the following:
- Developing the Ethereum clients, to the point where we now have four complete implementations of the protocol, of which two are fully supported and the other two are nearly. Originally, the intent was for only three implementations; however, a community member (Roman Mandeleil) has independently submitted a working Java client. PoC5 has been released today.
- Developing the Ethereum programming languages and compilers, to the point where we have moderately stable versions of Serpent, LLL, and Mutan.
- Development of the Ethereum protocol. The main changes between February and June include:
- The transaction-pay-by-computer system, where a transaction specifies the amount of “gas” you are allowed to consume and pays a fee for it in advance. Originally, contracts paid per calculation, which required each contract to have a security “wrapper” that required a minimal fee to prevent balance starvation attacks.
- The concept of a recursive virtual machine, where contracts can “call” other contracts like functions and receive “return values” in response. This allows for a high level of generalization and code reuse on the blockchain, which reduces overhead.
- A block time of 10-20 seconds, down from 60. This will be added in PoC6.
- The concept of “microchains”, where the top-level block header will only contain information relevant to PoW, reducing the minimum storage and bandwidth requirements for a lightweight node by 4 times (although fast block time will again increase these requirements in 4x). This will be added in PoC6.
- The placement of transactions in a Merkle tree, allowing the development of a thin client protocol for verification of individual transaction execution.
- The concept of memory as a byte array, making it easy to port existing compilers to compile Ethereum scripts.
- Intermediate stage developments in the mining algorithm thanks mainly to the work of Vlad Zamfir. More details will be posted soon.
- Develop a growing repertoire of test facilities to help ensure compatibility between clients.
- Establishment of our legal organizational structure in Switzerland.
- Legal due diligence processes in the United States.
Ether can be purchased directly through our website at https://ethereum.org. There are also a number of documents giving more details about the sale, including a development plan (DEVELOPMENT PLAN), road map, Intended Use of Revenue Document, Terms and conditions of the sale of Ethereum Genesis, Ether Product Purchase Agreement, and updated White paper Y yellow paper. In particular, please note the following:
- Ether will NOT be usable or transferable until the release of the genesis block. Meaning, when you buy ether and download your wallet, you won’t be able to do anything with it until the genesis block is released.
- The price of ether is initially set at a discounted price of 2000 ETH per BTCand will stay that way for 14 days before decreasing linearly to a final rate of 1337 ETH per BTC. sale will last 42 daysconcluding at 23:59 Zug time on September 2.
- The expected release time for the genesis block is winter 2014-2015. This date has been continually pushed back largely due to funding delays, but development should start moving much faster soon.
- ether is a product It is NOT an offer of security or investment. Ether is simply a useful token for paying transaction fees or building or buying decentralized application services on the Ethereum platform; it does not give you voting rights on anything, and we do not guarantee its future value.
- After all, we are not blockading the United States. He hurrah.
- Alternative versions of Ethereum (“alt-etherea” or “forks”) will most likely be released as separate blockchains, and these chains will compete against official Ethereum for value. The successful purchase of ETH from the Genesis Sale only guarantees that you will receive ETH on the official network, not on forks.
- The Ethereum Genesis Terms and Conditions of Sale and the Ether Product Purchase Agreement are the only authoritative documents with respect to the sale. Any statements we have made up to this point are null and void. The ethereum.org website, blog posts since Taylor Gerring’s recent tutorial, and other posts we’ve made on various forums, including our forum and reddit, should be treated as informal communications designed to keep the community up to date on what’s going on. with Ethereum.
- The annual emission rate is 0.26x the initial amount of ether sold, reduced from the 0.50x that had been proposed in January. We may later choose to adopt alternative consensus strategies, such as hybrid proof-of-stake, so future patches may reduce the issuance rate to a lower level. However, we make absolutely no promises in this regard, except that the issuance rate will not exceed 26.00% per annum of the amount of ether sold in the Genesis Sale.
- exist two endowments, each 0.099x the initial amount of ether sold, which will be allocated in the first case to early contributors to the project and in the second case to a long-term endowment for our non-profit foundation (see sale documents for more information). This is down from our April proposal of 0.075x for early contributors and 0.225x for a foundation.
- We reserve the right to use up to 5000 BTC from the presale while the presale is running to speed up development. We may or may not take this option depending on the response from the community; if it is done, it will be done transparently.
- If you are eligible for late payment or a part of the early filer class, we will contact you soon.
- DO NOT refresh the page while using the ether selling website.
- If you buy ether, DO NOT lose your wallet file or your password or you will never be able to access your ether. Also, make sure download your wallet first.
The direction of the exodus is 36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2EogxLo2; Nevertheless, DO NOT send BTC to this address directly, since transactions that do not have the proper format will not be valid and will be treated as gifts for Ethereum Switzerland GmbH. Use the sales application on the website. However, unlike other projects, paying with BTC using our selling app from a Coinbase account or an exchange account does not pose any problems. The BTC address you are sending from does not matter.
For advanced users and those who are not comfortable purchasing through a website, a Python library is also available for making purchases on https://github.com/ethereum/pyethsaletool.
The address is a 3-of-4 cold storage, multisig setup, between four hubs that are protected through mechanisms like m-of-n Shamir’s Secret Sharing. Check this transaction on blockchain.info, enter 4, to see proof that we are able to spend management funds. We’ll be posting a more detailed description of the cold storage policy soon, though strategically important variables (eg precise site locations, passwords, vault combinations) will unfortunately be kept secret.
More information will be released during the sale and we will have an AMA on Reddit soon. We look forward to continuing this exciting journey together!
