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So first some background. We’ve already covered a little about what to expect from Frontier in Ethereum launch process Blog post and Gav has given us a A comprehensive overview of the status of development efforts. You can also read about some of the security work being done, Including a bug bounty system. Check out my favorite bug bounty program so far: Jonas NickDiscover it You can send a negative payment to someone which transfers value from their account to your account!
As you discover the bug bounties, it’s an absolute gem. I did well!
Gav has a new blog post describing more about what the sticky end of the development process looks like: Create an exact specification for Ethereum by keeping three different applications in sync, rather than having a core implementation that implicitly defines protocol specifications and other versions that then become fault-compliant. This is a very rigorous and comprehensive approach to assembling a system, and is worth reading to get an idea of how the engineering works.
You should now have a good idea of what the development process looks like, and the disparate threads of work that are woven together in the release. So let’s talk about what to actually do between now and Frontier.
there Four specific challenges To meet at the border.
- protection
- Network stability
- Mining
- exchange
Two of them, Mining and Exchange, are partnership efforts: people have to take our software and run it, in coordination 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 ecosystem. Each of these aspects of the release process must work, both alone and with the others in order for the ecosystem to get adequate testing under load.
In addition:
- All software should be reasonably easy to install, including mining
- We need the support of partners, especially exchanges, to provide services
- We need to build our own services to checkpoint and test the integrity of the blockchain
- All in the context of a Frontier environment in which we provide strong guarantees on network integrity (more on this later) at the expense of the risk of network downtime if/when we detect unexpected network behaviors or other issues.
Reasonably good progress is being made on all fronts. Instead of giving you a release date, and then risking that under pressure to meet that date, something will slip through the gaps that another business day would otherwise have missed, we’ll flag items in the release process as we go. This will allow you to get an idea of how far away we are from launch on any given day, without basically guessing how long it will take, publishing our guess, and then hoping we can hit the ground running on the calendar: As we said before, this is a safety-based process, not a practical one. Depends on a schedule. We can make this process fairly transparent for you, providing concise information so you don’t have to monitor warehouses – but we’d rather involve you in the process so you understand what’s happening and how the business is going rather than give you a total history answer and keep you guessing as to the actual status of the business. We feel this approach is more transparent, better suited to the crowdfunded development process, and simply more realistic overall.
If you would like to see the current state of play, Geoffrey Wilkie (Lead on Go client And Amsterdam Center) has Go to the Frontier Customer Issue Tracker.
this Case list It is the best reference for the Frontier version: at the moment, 10 issues are closed, and 26 are open. New issues will be introduced, of course the number of issues is only a very loose proxy for “shipping time” but work completed is the best indicator, so look there if you want to predict.
Please note: This does not mean that we are working on “LED time“(Although Valve Time produces some great products!) We have open development processes, you can see the code being written, download the latest branches, and participate in testing. Not everything is hidden behind the company’s PR wall. But we are working on “software releases.” “Innovative with huge security operations associated with it,” and estimating a timeline for things that have never been done before won’t help anyone: Part of the benefit of the way Ethereum has been financed via traditional financing models is that we can do what’s right in the medium term. And the long term, instead of being subjected to constant market pressure for the next quarter’s numbers.
We’ll say this: There will be at least two weeks’ notice before anything goes live. You’ll get a lot of news from blog posts, you’ll see a decrease in the number of issues, we’ll start saying positive things about security audit comments, etc. We’ll keep you in the loop!
What about the feature list? We’ve pretty much covered this in our launches post, but to iterate on Frontier we’ll…
- Be a command line client only
- Mine is 10% of normal, but that would be real ether
- Include the full blockchain feature set including smart contracts and ledgers, although everything except account balances will be erased when Homestead launches
- We are working with exchanges to make ETH transferable through Frontier
- For security purposes, the block chain will be manually scanned every 24 hours, and any reported anomalies will be investigated
- Official exchanges will use this checkpoint service to protect traded assets from possible downturns from the blockchain
- In particularly severe failures, the organization may stop scanning Frontier altogether and issue an upgrade to the client
In short, we do everything we can to make Frontier a safe place to test Ethereum with real value, but we also strongly discourage people from using Ether on the Frontier network that they don’t want to lose.
Frontier is designed largely for people who write and test tools for mining and exchanges, and perhaps for a few more aggressive decentralized application developers. It’s not a public release that we expect regular users to interact with at all, although you can download a client and mine a little ether just because you can. The show actually starts at Homestead, and we’ll have more news about Homestead features later
More news as I have it, and keep watching the skies!
