Ethereum: Now Going Public | Ethereum Foundation Blog

I wrote the initial draft of the Ethereum whitepaper on a cold day in San Francisco in November, the culmination of months of thinking and often frustrating work in a field we have come to call “cryptocurrency 2.0” — in short, using the Bitcoin blockchain for more than Just money. In the months leading up to the development of Ethereum, I had the privilege of working closely with several projects trying to implement colored currencies, smart ownership, and different types of decentralized exchanges. At the time, I was excited about the enormous potential these technologies could bring, as I was keenly aware that many of the major problems that still plagued the Bitcoin ecosystem, including fraudulent services, unreliable exchanges, and an often surprising lack of security, were not… Caused by Bitcoin’s unique property of decentralization; Rather, these problems are a result of the fact that there is still a great deal of residual centralization, in places that could easily be removed.

But what I quickly realized was the enormous difficulty many of these projects were facing, and the often ugly technological breakthroughs that were required to make them successful. Once one looks at the problem carefully, the culprit becomes clear: fragmentation. Each individual project was trying to implement its own blockchain or meta layer on top of Bitcoin, and significant effort was duplicated and interoperability was lost as a result. Ultimately, I realized that the key to finally solving the problem was a simple insight first pioneered by the field of computer science in 1935: there was no need to build separate infrastructure for each individual feature and implementation; It is even possible to create a Turing-complete programming language, and allow everyone to use that language to implement any feature that can be defined mathematically. This is how our computers work, and this is how our web browsers work; And with Ethereum, this is how our cryptocurrencies can work.

Since then, Ethereum has come a long way over the past couple of months. The Ethereum team has expanded to include dozens of developers including Gavin Wood and Jeffrey Wilcke, lead developers of C++ and Go applications, respectively, as well as others including Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, Mihai Alisie, and dozens of incredibly talented individuals. Unfortunately, there are too many to mention. Many of them have come to understand the project so deeply that they are better at explaining Ethereum than I am. There are now over fifteen people in our developer chat rooms actively working on C++ and Go applications, which are already surprisingly close to having all the functionality needed to run in the testnet. Aside from development efforts, there are dozens of people working around the world on our marketing and community outreach team, developing the non-technical infrastructure needed to make the Ethereum ecosystem the strong, robust community it deserves. Now, at this point, we have made a collective decision that we are willing to make our organization more public than we have been before.

What is Ethereum?

In short, Ethereum is a next-generation cryptographic ledger that aims to support many advanced features, including user-issued currencies, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, and even what we believe is the first suitable application for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) or corporations (DACs). However, this is not what makes Ethereum special. What makes Ethereum special is the way it does it. Rather than trying to support every type of functionality specifically as a feature, Ethereum includes a built-in Turing-complete scripting language, which allows you to code features yourself through a mechanism known as “contracts.” A contract is like an independent agent that runs a certain piece of code every time a transaction is sent to it, and this code can modify the contract’s internal data storage or send transactions. Advanced contracts can also modify their code.

A simple example of a contract is the Basic Name Registration System, which allows users to register their name along with their address. This contract will not send transactions; Its sole purpose is to create a database that other nodes can then query. The contract is written to our high standard C-like language (CLL) (or perhaps more accurately a Python-like language), looks like this:

If tx.value[tx.data[0]]or tx.data[0] <100: Stop contract.storage[tx.data[0]]= tx.data[1]

And there you have it. Five lines of code, executed simultaneously by thousands of nodes around the world, and you have the beginnings of a solution to a big problem in cryptography: human-friendly authentication. It is important to note that when the original version of Ethereum’s scripting code was designed, we did not have name registry in mind; Rather, the fact that this is possible comes as an emergent property of Turing completeness. We hope this gives you an insight into what makes Ethereum possible; For more applications, with code, see White paper. Just some examples include:

• User-issued coins / “colored coins”
• Decentralized exchange
• Financial contracts, including leveraged trading and hedging
• Crop insurance
• Savings wallets with withdrawal limits
• Peer-to-peer gambling
• Decentralized data storage similar to Dropbox
• Decentralized autonomous organizations

Maybe now you see why we’re excited.

Who is Ethereum?

The Ethereum core team includes four members:

We also have an excellent team of developers, entrepreneurs, marketers and evangelists:

• Dr. Gavin Wood: Core C++ developer
• Giving ambiguous: Primary developer
• Dr. Emmanuel Costa: Quantitative Analyst; Scrum Master
• Joseph Lubin: Software Engineering, Quantitative Analyst
• Eric Lombroso: software engineer
• Max Kay: Developer
• Jonathan Mohan: Media, Marketing and Evangelism (BitcoinNYC)
• Wendell Davis: Strategic partner and brand (Hive Wallet)
• Anthony D’Onofrio: Logos, branding, and web development (Hive Wallet)
• Taylor Gearing: Network development
• Paul Snow: Language development, software development
• Chris Odom: Strategic partner, developer (open transactions)
• Jerry Liu and Ben Lu: Chinese strategy and translations (http://www.8btc.com/ethereum)
• Hi Nguyen: accounting
• Amir Sheetrit: Business Development (Colored Coins)
• Steve Duck: Developer (Cryptokit)
• Kyle Korbegovic: Media (Cointalk)

He looks forward

I personally will be presenting at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami on January 25-26. Shortly thereafter, on February 1, the Ether pre-sale will begin, at which point anyone will be able to acquire some pre-allocated initial Ether (the internal currency of Ethereum) at the rate of 1,000-2,000 Ether for 1 Bitcoin by 2020. Go to http://fund.ethereum.org. The pre-sale will continue throughout February and March, and early backers will receive higher rewards; Anyone sending money in the first seven days will receive a full 2,000 ETH, then 1,980 ETH on the eighth day, 1,960 on the ninth day, and so on until the base rate of 1,000 Ether per Bitcoin is maintained for the final three days of the pre-sale.

We will be able to develop fully functional and robust Ethereum clients with at least 500 BTC funding at current rates; The core implementations in Go, C++, and Python are already close to testnet quality. However, we seek to go much further. Ethereum is not “just another altcoin”; It’s a new way forward for cryptocurrencies, and ultimately for peer-to-peer protocols as a whole. To that end, we would like to be able to invest a significant amount of money in securing the best talent to improve the security and scalability of the Ethereum network itself, but also support the strong Ethereum ecosystem that we hope will bring other cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer. – Peer projects in our fold. We’re already in good conversations with KryptoKit, Humint, and OpenTransactions, and we’re interested in working with other groups like Tahoe-LAFS, Bitmessage, and Bitcloud as well.

All of these projects could benefit from integration with the Ethereum blockchain in some way, simply because the layer is so global; Due to Turing completeness, an Ethereum contract can be created to incentivize almost anything, and even completely non-financial uses such as public key logging have very wide-ranging benefits for any decentralized crypto product that aims to include, for example, a social network. All of these projects will add great value to the Ethereum ecosystem, and we hope that the Ethereum ecosystem will add great value to it. We do not wish to compete with any organization. We intend to work together.

Throughout the fundraising campaign, we will work hard on development; We will be releasing a centralized testnet, a server that anyone can push contracts and transactions to, very soon, and we will then follow up with a decentralized testnet to test networking features and mining algorithms. We also intend to host a competition, similar to those used to define the algorithms for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2005 and SHA3 in 2013, in which we invite researchers from universities around the world to compete to develop the best possible specialized hardware. – Resistant, centralized and fair mining algorithms, and will also explore alternatives such as Proof of Stake, Proof of Burn and Proof of Excellence. Details about this will be published in February.

Finally, to promote local community development, we also intend to establish public community centers and incubators, which we will tentatively call “holons,” in several cities around the world. The first holon within Bitcoin Decentral will be based in Toronto, and much of the Ethereum development will be carried out there; Anyone seriously interested in getting heavily involved in Ethereum should consider visiting us within the next month. Other cities we are looking at include San Francisco, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and some cities in Asia. This part of the project is still in a very early stage of development, and more details will be revealed over the next month.

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I replied: http://reddit.com/r/ethereum