Schlagwortarchiv für: Gav’s

Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update V

I was woken by Vitalik’s call at 5:55 this morning; pitch black outside, nighttime was still upon us. Nonetheless, it was time to leave and this week had best start on the right foot.

The 25-minute walk in darkness from the Zug-based headquarters to the train station was wet. Streetlights reflecting off the puddles on the clean Swiss streets provided a picturesque, if quiet, march into town. I couldn’t help but think the rain running down my face was a very liquid reminder of the impending seasonal change, and then, on consideration, how fast the last nine months had gone.

Solid Foundations

The last week was spent in Zug by the Ethereum foundation board and ÐΞV leadership: Vitalik, Mihai and Taylor who officially form the founation’s board, Anthony and Joseph as the other official advisors and Aeron & Jutta as the ÐΞV executive joined by Jeff and myself wearing multiple hats of ÐΞV and advisory). The chief outcome of this was the dissemination of Vitalik’s superb plan to reform the foundation and turn it into a professional entity. The board will be recruited from accomplished professionals with minimal conflicts of interest; the present set of “founders” officially retired from those positions and a professional executive recruited, the latter process lead by Joseph. Anthony will take a greater ambassadorial role for Ethereum in China and North America. Conversely, ÐΞV will function much more as a department of the Foundation’s executive rather than a largely independent entity. Finally, I presented the release strategy to the others; an event after which I’ve never seen quite so many photos taken of a whiteboard. Needless to say, all was well received by the board and advisors. More information will be coming soon.

As I write this, I’m sitting on a crowded early commuter train, Vinay Gupta in tow, who recently took on a much more substantive role this week as release coordinator. He’ll be helping with release strategy and to keep you informed of our release process. This week, which might rather dramatically be described as ‘pivotal’ in the release process, will see Jeff, Vitalk and me sit around a table and develop all the PoC-9 changes, related unit tests, and integrations in three days, joined by our indomitable Master of Testing, Christoph. The outcome of this week will inform our announcement which will come later this week outlining in clear terms what we will be releasing and when.

I’m sorry it has been so long without an update. The last 2 months has been somewhat busy, choked up with travel and meetings, with the remaining time soaked up by coding, team-leading and management. The team is now substantially formed; the formal security audit started four weeks ago; the bounty programme is running smoothly. The latter processes are the exceedingly capable hands of Jutta and Gustav. Aeron, meanwhile will be stepping down as the ÐΞV head of finance and operations and assuming the role he was initially brought aboard for, system modelling. We’ll hopefully be able to announce his successors next week (yes, that was plural; he has been doing the jobs of 2.5 people over the last few months).

We are also in the process of forming partnerships with third parties in the industry; George, Jutta and myself managing this process; I’m happy to announce that at least three exchanges will be supporting Ether from day one on their trading platforms (details of which we’ll annouce soon), with more exchanges to follow. Marek and Alex are providing technical supprt there with Marek going so far as to make a substantial reference exchange implementation.

I also finished the first draft of ICAP, the Ethereum Inter-exchange Client Address Protocol, an IBAN-compatible system for referencing and transacting to client accounts aimed to streamline the process of transfering funds, worry-free between exchanges and, ultimately, make KYC and AML pains a thing of the past. The IBAN compatibility may even provide possibility of easy integration with existing banking infrastructure in some future.

Developments

Proof-of-Concept releases VII and VIII were released. NatSpec, “natural language specification format” and the basis of our transaction security was prototyped and integrated. Under Marek’s watch, now helped by Fabian, ethereum.js is truly coming of age with a near source-level compatibility with Solidity on contract interaction and support for the typed ABI with calling and events, the latter providing hassle-free state-change reporting. Mix, our IDE, underwent its first release and after some teethng issues is getting good use thanks to the excellent work done by Arkadiy and Yann. Solidity had numerous features added and is swiftly approaching 1.0 status with Christian, Lefteris and Liana to thank. Marian’s work goes ever forward on the network monitoring system while Sven and Heiko have been working diligently on the stress testing infrastructure which analyses and tests the peer network formation and performance. They’ll soon be joined by Alex and Lefteris to accellerate this programme.

So one of the major things that needed sorting for the next release is the proof-of-work algorithm that we’ll use. This had a number of requirements, two of which were actually pulling in opposite directions, but basically it had to be light-client-friendly algorithm whose speed-of-mining is proportional to the IO-bandwidth and which requires a considerable amount of RAM to do so. There was a vague consensus that we (well.. Vitalik and Matthew) head in the direction of a Hasimoto-like algorithm (a proof-of-work designed for the Bitcoin blockchain that aims to be IO-bound, meaning, roughly, that to make it go any faster, you’d need to add more memory rather than just sponsoring a smaller/faster ASIC). Since our blockchain has a number of important differences with the Bitcoin blockchain (mainly in transaction density), stemming from the extremely short 12s block time we’re aiming for, we would have to use not the blockchain data itself like Hashimoto but rather an artifcially created dataset, done with an algorithm known as Dagger (yes, some will remember it as Vitalik’s first and flawed attempt at a memory-hard proof-of-work).

While this looked like a good direction to be going in, a swift audit of Vitalik and Matt’s initial algorithm by Tim Hughes (ex-Director of Technology at Frontier Developments and expert in low-level CPU and GPU operation and optimisation) showed major flaws. With his help, they were able to work together to devise a substantially more watertight algorithm that, we are confident to say, should make the job of developing an FPGA/ASIC sufficiently difficult, especially given our determination to switch to a proof-of-stake system within the next 6-12 months.

Last, but not least, the new website was launched. Kudos to Ian and Konstantin for mucking down and getting it done. Next stop will be the developer site, which will be loosely based on the excellent resource at qt.io, the aim to provide a one-stop extravaganza of up to date reference documentation, curated tutorials, examples, recipes, downloads, issue tracking, and build status.

Onwards

So, as Alex, our networking maestro might say, these are exciting times. When deep in nitty gritty of development you sometimes forget quite how world-altering the technology you’re creating is, which is probably just as well since the gravity of the matter at hand would be continually distracting. Nonetheless, when one starts considering the near-term alterations that we can really bring one realises that the wave of change is at once unavoidable and heading straight for you. For what it’s worth, I find an excellent accompaniment to this crazy life is the superb music of Pretty Lights.

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Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update IV

Time for another update! So quite a bit has happened following ÐΞVcon-0, our internal developer’s conference. The conference itself was a great time to get all the developers together and really get to know each other, dissipate a lot of information (back to back presentations for 5 days!) and chat over a lot of ideas. The comms team will be releasing each of the presentations as fast as Ian can get them nicely polished.

During the time since the last update, much has happened including, finally, the release of the Ethereum ÐΞV website, ethdev.com. Though relatively simple as present, there are great plans to extend this into a developer’s portal in which you’ll be able to browse the bug bounty programme, look at and, ultimately follow tutorials, look up documentation, find the latest binaries for each platform and see the progress of builds.

As usual I have been mostly between Switzerland, the UK and Berlin, during this time. Now that ÐΞV-Berlin is settled in the hub, we have a great collaboration space in which volunteers can work, collaborate, bond and socialise alongside our more formal hires. Of late, I have been working to finish up the formal specification of Ethereum, the Yellow Paper, and make it up to date with the latest protocol changes in order that the security audit get underway. Together we have been putting the finishing touches on seventh, and likely final, proof-of-concept code, delayed largely due to a desire to make it the final PoC release for protocol changes. I’ve also been doing some nice core refactoring and documentation, specifically removing two long standing dislikes of mine, the State::create and State::call methods and making the State class nicer for creating custom states useful when developing contracts. You can expect to see the fruits of this work in Milestone II of Mix, Ethereum’s official IDE.

Ongoing Recruitment

On that note, I’m happy to announce that we have hired Arkadiy Paronyan, a talented developer originally from Russia who will be working with Yann on the Mix IDE. He’s got off to a great start on his first week helping on the front-end with the second milestone. I’m also very pleased to announce that we hired Gustav Simonsson. Being an expert Erlang with Go experience with considerable expertise in network programming and security reviewing, he will initially be working with Jutta on the Go code base security audit before joining the Go team.

We also have another two recruits: Dimitri Khoklov and Jason Colby. I first met Jason in the fateful week back last January when the early Ethereum collaborators got together for a week before the North American Bitcoin conference where Vitalik gave the first public talk about Ethereum. Jason, who has moved to Berlin from his home in New Hampshire, is mostly working alongside Aeron and Christian to help to look after the hub and looking after various bits of administration that need to be done. Dimitri, who works from Tver in Russia is helping flesh out our unit tests with Christoph, ultimately aiming towards full code coverage.

We have several more recruits that I’d love to mention but can’t announce quite yet – watch this space… (:

Ongoing Projects

I’m happy to say that after a busy weekend, Marek, Caktux, Nick and Sven have managed to get the Build Bot, our CI system, building on all three platforms cleanly again. A special shout goes out to Marek who tirelessly fought with CMake and MSVC to bend the Windows platform to his will. Well done to all involved.

Christian continues to power through on the Solidity project, aided now by Lefteris who focuses more on the documentation side. The latest feature to be added allows for the creation of new contracts in a beautiful manner with the new keyword. Alex and Sven are beginning to work on the project of introducing network well-formedness into the p2p subsystem using the salient parts of the well-proven Kademlia DHT design. We should begin seeing some of this stuff in the code base within before the year-end.

I’m also happy to announce that the first successful message was sent between Go & C++ clients on our messaging/hash-table hybrid system, codenamed Whisper. Though only at an early proof-of-concept stage, the API is reasonably robust and fixed, so largely ready to prototype applications on.

New Projects

Marian is the lucky guy who has been tasked with developing out what will be our awesome web-based C&C deck. This will provide a public website whose back-end connects to a bunch of nodes around the world and displays real-time information on network status including chain length and a chain-fork early warning system. Though accessible by anyone, we will of course have a dedicated monitor on at all times for this page at the hub.

Sven, Jutta and Heiko have also begun a most interesting and important project: the Ethereum stress-testing project. Designed to study and test the network in a range of real-life adverse situations prior to release, they will construct infrastructure allowing the setup of many (10s, 100s, even 1000s of) nodes each individually remote-controllable and able to simulate circumstances such as ISP attacks, net splits, rogue clients, arrival and departure of large amounts of hash-power and measure attributes like block & transaction propagation times and patterns, uncle rates and fork lengths. A project to watch out for.

Conclusions

The next time I write this I hope to have released PoC-7 and be on the way to the alpha release (not to mention have the Yellow Paper out). I expect Jeff will be doing an update concerning the Go side of things soon enough. Until then, watch out for the PoC-7 release and mine some testnet Ether!

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Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update III

I’m Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum and, along with Vitalik Buterin and Jeffrey Wilcke, one of the three directors of the Eth Dev, the NFP organisation that is managing the development (under contract from Ethereum Suisse) of the Ethereum blockchain. This is a small update to let you all know what has been going on recently.

I sit here on an immaculate couch that has been zapped forward in time from the 1960s. It is in the room that will become the chillout & wind-down room of the heart of the (C++) Ethereum development operation. Surrounding me is Alex Leverington on a Bond villain’s easy chair, and Aeron Buchanan stuck behind a locker that looks as though it was an original prop from M*A*S*H. Lighting equipment from a Soviet Blade Runner, now forgotten except in Berlin’s coolest districts where renaissance chemistry and 60s luxury breath Frankensteinesque life into it, provides an unyielding glow to the work in progress. There is still much to be done here (I feel a little like I’m on the set of Challenge Anneka) but it is undeniably taking shape. This is thanks mostly to our own Anneka Rice, Sarah O’Neill, who is working around the clock to get this place ready for ÐΞVcon-0, our first developer symposium. Helping her, similarly around the clock, is the inimitable Roland, a hardened international interior outfitter whose memoirs I can’t wait to read.

On a personal note, I must say these last few months have been some of the busiest of my life. I spent the last couple of weeks between Switzerland and the UK, visiting Stephan, Ian and Louis. Despite the draws of the north of England, it’s nice to be back in Berlin; the combination of great burgers and cocktails, beautiful surroundings and nice people makes it difficult to leave. Awesome C++ coders are welcome to take that as a hint: we’re still hiring (-:

Technicals

During the last couple of weeks we’ve made a number of important revisions to the protocol, mostly provisions for creating light-client ÐApp nodes. There will be a directors’ post in due course detailing these, but suffice it to say we are as committed as ever that the Ethereum blockchain make possible the massively multi-user decentralised applications for all sizes of devices. The seventh in our proof-of-concept series is awaiting imminent release and the final in the series, PoC-8 will be starting development shortly.

Fresh meat

As time goes on, our team moves from strength to strength. I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Sven Ehlert has joined us. He will be leading development operations; cleaning up the build process, making the build as robust as possible, assisting Caktux in our CI systems and, most importantly, helping architect a stress-testing harness in which we’ll be simulating a series of extreme situations, measuring and analysing. He’s also a scrum aficionado and will be helping us streamline some of our development processes as our team grows.

It is with great pleasure I can also announce that Dr. Jutta Steiner will also be working closely with us in the capacity of managing our security audit. As well as being an enthusiastic ÐApp-developer, she comes with an excellent track record of handling projects and a superb understanding of not only this cutting edge technology but also the human processes that must go on behind it.

I must also shout out to Dr. Andreas Lubbe; though a long-time member of the Berlin Ethereum community and having worked on Ethereum-related code (a notable devotee of node.js), we have recently started working much more closely together on the secure Ethereum contract documentation (SECDoc) framework and the associated natural language specification format, NatSpec. I look forward to some great collaboration.

Aside from Lefteris, who began his first official day with us today (working with Christian on Solidity, and more specifically on the SECDoc and NatSpec portions of it), we have two new developers joining us: Yann Levreau and Arkadiy Paronyan. Yann, a recent arrival in Berlin from his native France will be joined by Arkadiy who is travelling all the way from Moscow to become part of the team. Both have substantial experience in C++ and related technologies and will be helping us flesh out the developer tools and in particular pave the way to the IDE vision.

Finally, I’m happy to report that Christoph Jentzsch, though originally joining us for only 2 months (while taking time out from his doctoral studies), will be joining the project full time in the new year and continuing his much appreciated work on our tests and the general C++ health and robustness.

ÐΞVcon-0

As time rushes by, Sarah, Roland and their team rush even more to finish our hub. For they know that come Monday the 24th, Berlin will have some new arrivals. Developers and collaborators from around the globe will descend on 37a Waldemarstraße, Berlin 10999 for a week of getting everybody on the same page. It is DEVcon-0: ethereum’s first developer symposium.

Conceived by myself and Jeff on a sleepy train from Zug to Zurich as a means of getting the Amsterdam/Go guys on the same page as the Berlin/C++ guys it has evolved into a showcase, set of seminars and workshops of all of ÐΞV, our technologies, our personnel and some of our close collaborators. It is a chance for us each to build lasting professional relationships and bond in what will become a project that may if not define, certainly form a hallmark, on our professional lifes.

Our hub will play host to around 40 people, the vast majority of which are accomplished technical minds that Jeff, myself or Vitalik has at one point or another mentioned, and for the period of a week we will be chatting, mingling and sharing our ideas, hopes and dreams for everything blockchain, decentralised and disruption related. It’s going to be awesome: look out for the videos!

Ever closer

Aside from the continuing work towards starting PoC-8 and the alpha series, I’m glad to report that the Solidity project storms onwards under the stewardship of Christian: the first contracts compiled with Solidity have been delivered and tested working on the testnet, and as I write this I see another Pull Request for state mappings. Great stuff.

Alex has also been working tirelessly on our crypto code and is now beginning work on the p2p layer, the full strategy for which we’ll be seeing in his address at ÐΞVcon. Marek and Marian have also been busy on the Javascript API, and I can assure any Javascript ÐApp developers that they will have a lot to look forward to in PoC-8.

Summing Up

There are also a few other developments and personnel I’d love to announce, but I fear, once again, it will have to wait until next time. Watch this space for a post-ÐΞVcon update!

Gav.

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Gav’s Ethereum ÐΞV Update II

Well… what a busy two weeks. I thought it about time to make another update for any of you who might be interested in how we’re doing. If you don’t already know, I’m Gavin, a founder of Ethereum and one of the three directors (alongside Vitalik and Jeffrey) of Ethereum ÐΞV, the development entity building Ethereum and all the associated technology.

After doing some recruitment on behalf of DEV in Bucharest with the help of Mihai Alisie and the lovely Roxanna Sureanu I spent the last week at my home (and coincidentally, the Ethereum HQ) in Zug, Switzerland. During this time I was able to get going on the first prototype of Whisper, our secure identity-based communications protocol, finishing with a small IRC-like ÐApp demonstrating how easy it is to use. For those interested, there is more information on Whisper in the Ethereum Github wiki and a nice little screenshot on my twitter feed. In addition to this I’ve been helping finalise the soon-to-be-announced PoC-7 specification and working towards a PoC-8 (final). Finally, during our brief time together in Zug, Jeffrey, Vitalik and I drafted our strategy concerning identity and key management; this will be developed further during the coming weeks.

ÐΞVHUB Berlin

In Berlin, Sarah has been super-busy with the builders getting the hub ready. Here’s a couple pictures of the work in progress that is the Berlin hub. It might not look like much yet, but we’re on target to be moved in by mid-November. I’m particularly happy with Sarah’s efforts to find a genuine 70′s barrista espresso machine (-:

I’m excited to announce that Christian Vömel is joining the team in Berlin to be the Office Manager of ÐΞVHUB Berlin. Christian has many years experience including having worked in an international environment and has even taught office management! He’ll be taking some of the load from our frankly much-overworked company secretary Aeron Buchanan.

The Team Grows

We’ve finalised a number of new hires over the past couple of weeks: Network engineer Lefteris Karapetsas will be joining the Berlin team imminently. Having considerable experience with state-of-the-art network traffic analysis and deep-packet inspection systems, he’ll be helping audit our network protocols, however (like much of our team) truly multidisciplinary, he’ll also be working on NatSpec, the code name for our Natural Language Formal Contract Specification system, a cornerstone of our transaction security model.

I’m happy to announce that Ian Meikle, the accomplished videographer who co-authored the impressive “Koyaanis-glitchy” Ethereum brand video has been moved to ÐΞV to help with the communications team. He who shall be known only as Texture has also joined the comms side with Stephan to help with the strategy stateside and coordinate the worldwide meetup and hackathon network. Great to see such a capable and passionate designer on the team; I know he has a good few ideas for ÐApps!

Two more hires under Stephan in the comms team include Ken Kappler, handling the developer education direction, hackathons, ethereum curriculum and university partnerships. George Hallam has also been employed to evangelize ethereum to startups and partners, boost the reach of our formal network and generally help Stephan in the quest of having everybody know what Ethereum is and how it can help them.

Jeff’s team has also been expanded recently too; he’ll be telling you about his developments in an imminent post.

Further Developments

Aside from the aforementioned progress with Whisper and PoC-7, Christoph has been continuing his great work with the tests repository. Christian has been making great progress with the Solidity language having recently placed the first Solidity-compiled program onto the testnet block chain only a few days ago.

Marek has studiously been moving C++ over to a JSON-RPC and Javascript front-end fundamentally unified and bound to the Go client. Alex meanwhile has been grappling with the C++ crypto back-end and has done a great job of reducing bloat and extraneous dependencies.

Of late, the comms team has some good news brewing, in particular, it is in contact with some world-class education establishments regarding the possibility of eduction partnership and the formation of a network of chapters both in the UK and internationally. Watch this space (-:

Finally, our Polish partners at IMAPP (Paweł and Artur) have completed their first implementation of the JIT-compiled LLVM-based EVM implementation. They are reporting an average of 30x speedup (as high as 100x!) for non-external EVM instructions over the already best-in-class basic C++-based EVM implementation. Brilliant work and we’re looking forward to more improvements and optimisations yet.

And the rest…

So much to come; there are a couple of announcements (including a slew of imminent hires) I’d love to make but they need to be finalised before I can write about them here. Look out for the next update!

Gav ().

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Gav’s ÐΞV Update I: Where Ethereum’s at

Who are you?

I’m Gav – together with Jeffrey Wilcke and Vitalik Buterin, I’m one third of the ultimate leadership of Ethereum ÐΞV. ÐΞV is a UK software firm that is under a non-profit-making agreement with the Ethereum Foundation to create version 1.0 of the Web Three software stack. We three directors—who are ultimately responsible that the software is built and works—are the same three developers who designed and implemented the first working versions of the Ethereum clients.

ÐΞV is geographically split between London (where our comms operation is based) and Berlin (which hosts the main hub of ÐΞV). Though I’m based in Zug, Switzerland (being an Ethereum employee), I have been involved most recently in putting together the Berlin side of things.

Since its inception in summer, we have been working to set up the technical side of the project, under which we include our communications, education and adoption team lead by Stephan Tual and helped by Mathias Grønnebæk for the organisation of operations.

A Berlin Who’s Who

Aeron Buchanan, though originally brought on as a mathematical modeller, has been very successful in coordinating Berlin’s various operations including helping set up the arduous process of getting a bank account, recruitment, financial juggling to get people paid, technical interviews and other tedious administration tasks; more recently he has also been helping sort out the UK side of things, too.

I must acknowledge Brian Fabian Crane who helped connect us while in Berlin and made it possible for us to have a legal structure in place quickly. At present, the operation in Berlin is directed by our major PyEthereum contributor, Heiko Hees, with Aeron being the essential point of control for all operations. Over time, we expect Aeron to get back to modelling and to find a suitable candidate for the day-to-day management of the hub.

During our time in Berlin we’ve been very active in hiring (which as a process is considerably more arduous that you might think): Alex Leverington was our first hire and he flew to Berlin all the way from Texas to join the team. Alex has been engaged helping out with the Mac builds and making volunteer contributions since early in the year, so it’s great that he wanted to step forward into a permanent role. Now Alex has been working on some of the internals of the C++ client (specifically the client multiplexing, allowing multiple Web Three applications to coexist on the same physical machine).

Over the past few months we’ve recruited a few more people: Dr. Christian Reißweiner and Christoph Jentszch joined not long ago. Christian, who holds a PhD in Multiobjective Optimization and Language Equations is now engaged in prototyping and implementing the new domain-specific contract-authoring language that I proposed a while ago, Solidity. It didn’t take me long to realise that Christoph, currently finishing his PhD in physics and who utterly loves writing unit tests, would be a great hire for sorting out our clients’ interoperability issues. He has been leading our recent surge in getting the protocol in alignment for all clients through a comprehensive code-covering set of unit tests for the virtual machine operation.

Our newest recruit, Marek Kotewicz, journeying to Berlin from Poland, was an early Ethereum volunteer and enjoyed making contracts on some early C++ client prototypes. Coming from a Web-technology background (though being perfectly competent in C++), he has now started working on our C++/Javascript API, aiming towards full node.js integration to facilitate backend integration with existing web sites. Working alongside Marek is Marian Oancea, the feathers in whose cap include much of the technical prowess behind the highly successful ether sale. He has been developing out some of the first Web apps to use Ethereum as its backend.

I look forward to welcoming three more hires in the coming weeks, including some personnel with rather impressive and uniquely relevant backgrounds. More news on that next time.

And More…

Back in London, we’ve hired design outfit Proof-of-Work, headed by Louis Chang, to put together our new website and brand. We’re ecstatic with how things are coming along there and look forward to unveiling it soon. Once this is in place we’ll have a much clearer way of getting our updates and information out regarding what’s happening at ÐΞV.

Externally to ÐΞV but supported by it are a number of other individuals and projects: I am very grateful to Tim Hughes, who continues to consult on our efforts at an ASIC-resistant proof-of-work algorithm, also implementing it in C++. Similarly, Caktux an early volunteer and maintainer of the Ncurses-based C++ Ethereum front-end neth has been invaluble (alongside Joris and Nick Savers) in getting a continuous integration system up and running. We are pleased to support both of them in their endeavours to make this project a success.

Furthermore the guys at IMAPP, a software firm in Warsaw specialising in advanced languages and compilers deserve a great nod for their on-going efforts at using their considerable expertise in implementing a just-in-time (JIT) compiled version of the Ethereum virtual machine and making computationally-complex contracts a reasonably affordable possibility.

Finally, I must thank the EthereumJ (Java client) volunteer developers Roman Mandeleil and Nick Savers, both of whom have visited us in our prototype hub here in Berlin, and who work tirelessly to find different and innovative new ways of interpreting the formal protocol specification.

The California Connection

Over in Silicon Valley, we have made two hires, Joseph Chow and Martin Becze; Joseph will be leading the efforts there and concentrating on developing some of our core Ðapps that will help demonstrate the potential of Ethereum. Martin is leading the effort to create a pure Javascript implementation of Ethereum, a lofty goal, and thus all the more impressive that the project now has a core that is compatible with PoC-6.

We are also looking forward to working with the Agreemint Foundation (ie. Mintchalk), with their effort to create an online contract development environment, to provide a simple and highly accessible interface for the beginner and intermediate level users to learn about contract development and create and deploy Web Three Ðapps.

In the future we hope to expand our operations there, particularly over January and February when Vitalik and I will be staying there, we in particular look forward to spending some time discussing the future of data sharing and online publication with Juan of IPFS and are optimistic about the possibility of finding some synergy between our projects.

On Go-ing Development

Though I’m sure Jeff will make his own post on the goings-on over at his Golang-orientated end, I will say that on a personal note I’m very happy that Alex van de Sande (aka avsa) has joined us on a permanent basis. Alex is well known on the Ethereum forums and his mockups of what Web Three could look like were simply incredible in insight, technical knowledge and polish. As an accomplished UI & UX engineer, he’ll be joining Jeff in taking Mist, the Web Three browser, forward and making it into what I am sure will simultaneously be the most revolutionary and pleasing to use piece of new software in a very long time.

So what’s happening in Berlin then?

When we arrived at first we needed somewhere to be based out of: thanks to Brian, we were invited to the Rainmaking Loft, an excellent space for tech startups that need somewhere to spread their rug prior to world domination. Since August we’ve had a nice big desk there for our developers to work alongside our inimitable location scout, hub outfitter, project manager and interior designer rolled into one; Sarah O’Neill.

Sarah has worked tirelessly in finding our perfect location, our perfect contractors and our perfect fixtures and fittings and making it actually work. Right now as I write this at 4am EEST, she’s probably up on eBay looking for a decent deal for office chairs or costing a well-placed dry wall. And what a job she has done thus far. We will be based in probably the most perfect place we could hope for. Walking distance to two U-bahn stations, we’re located on a quiet street adjacent to Oranienstraße and a central point of Kreuzberg. We’re a short cycle ride from the centre of Berlin’s mass and, in the opposite direction, from the beautiful canal and Neukölln. We have some lovely quiet bars and cafés on our sexy little street and the bustling new-tech area that is Kreuzberg at the end of it.

Our new hub, designed and outfitted by her will be a 250m² cross of office, homely relaxation environment and (self-service) café—a new (and German-building-law-friendly) twist on the notion of the holon. We’ll be able to host meetups and events, have a great area for working and have ample collaboration space for any other Ethereum-aligned operations that would prefer not to pay coffee-tax for their power & wifi.

Not to be forgotten, helping Aeron and me with administration, procurements and organisation, not to mention general German-speaking tasks, Lisa Ottosson has been invaluable during this period.

And what have we been doing?

Since beginning, ÐΞV’s time has inevitably been wast^H^H^H^H spent wisely in bureaucracy, administration and red tape. It is impressive how much of a pain doing business in a perfectly well developed nation like Germany can be. Slowly (and thanks in no small part to Aeron) this tediousness is starting to let up. When not engaged in such matters, we’ve been pressing to get our most recent proof-of-concept releases out, PoC-5 and PoC-6. PoC-5 brought with it a number of important alterations to the Ethereum virtual machine and the core protocol. PoC-6 brought a 4-second block time (this is just for stress-testing; for the mainet we’re aiming for a 10 second block time) and wonderfully fast parallel block-chain downloading. Furthermore we’ve been talking with various potential technology partners concerning the future of Swarm, our data distribution system, including with our good friend Juan Batiz-Benet (Vitalik & I got to know him while staying at his house in Silicon Valley for a week back in March).

Speaking at a few meetings and conferences has taken time also. In my case, the keynote speaker at both Inside Bitcoin and Latin America’s popular tech-fest Campus Party was an honour, as was the invitation to address the main hall at the wonderful University San Francisco of Quito. I hesitate to imagine the number of such engagements Vitalik has done during the same time period.

In addition to his impressive public speaking schedule, Vitalik has been putting in considerable efforts into research on potential consensus algorithms. Together with Vlad Zamfir, a number of potential approaches have been mooted over the past few weeks. Ultimately, we decided to follow the advice of some in our community, like Nick Szabo, who have urged us to focus on getting a working product off the ground and not try to make every last detail perfect before launching. In that regard, we’ve decided to move many of our more ambitious changes, including native extensions, auto-triggering events and proof of stake, into a planned future upgrade to happen around mid-to-late 2015.

However, during a two-week visit to London Vitalik made major progress working with Vlad on developing stable proof-of-stake consensus algorithms, and we have a few models that we think are likely to work and solve all of the problems inherent in current approaches. The two have also begun more thoroughly laying the plans for our upcoming upgrades in scalability.

More recently, I have been hard at work rewriting much of the networking code and altering the network protocol to truly split off the peer-to-peer portion of the code to make an abstract layer for all peer-to-peer applications, including those external to the Web Three project that wish to piggyback on the Ethereum peer network. I’ve also been getting PoC-7 up to scratch and more reliable, as well as upgrading my team’s development processes which predictably were becoming a little too informal for an increasingly large team. We’ll be moving towards a peer-reviewed (rather than Gav-reviewed) commit review process, we have a much more curated GitHub issue tracker, alongside an increasingly scrum-oriented project management framework (a switch to Pivotal Tracker is underway – everything public, of course). Most recently I’ve been working on the Whisper project, designing, developing, chewing things over and prototyping.

Finally, we’ve also been making inroads into some well-known and some other not-so-well-known firms that can help us make our final core software as safe and secure as humanly possible. I’m sorry I can’t go into anything more specific now, but rest assured, this is one of our priorities.

So there you have it. What’s been happening.

And what’s going to happen?

Aside from the continuing hiring process and our inroads into setting up a solid security audit, we will very soon be instituting a more informal manner for volunteers and contributors to be supported by the project. In the coming days we will be launching a number of ÐΞV schemes to make it possible for dedicated and productive members of the Ethereum and Web Three community to apply for bursaries and expenses for visiting us at one of our hub locations. Watch this space.

In terms of coding, ÐΞV, at present, has one mission: the completion of version 1.0 of the Ethereum client software which will enable the release of the genesis block. This will be done as soon as possible, though we will release the genesis block only when we (and many others in the security world) are happy that it is safe to do so: we are presently aiming to have it out sometime during this winter (i.e. between December 21st and March 21st). This will include at least a basic contract development environment (the focus of the work here in Berlin under myself), an advanced client based around Google’s Chromium browser technology and several core Ðapps (the focus of the work under Jeff), and various command-line tools.

In specifics, after we have PoC-7 out, we’ll be making at most one more proof-of-concept release before freezing the protocol and moving into our alpha release series. The first alpha will signal the end of our core refactoring & optimisation process and the beginning of our security audit; we aim to have this under way within the next 4-6 weeks. The security audit will involve a number of people and firms, both internal and external, both hired and incentivised, analysing the design and implementations looking for flaws, bugs and potential attack vectors. Once all parties involved have signed off on all aspects of the system will we move to organise a coordinated release of the final block chain. We expect the auditing process to take 2-3 months, with another couple of weeks to coordinate the final release.

During this process we will be developing out the other parts of the project, including the Whisper messaging protocol, the contract development environment and Solidity, the Ethereum browser, Mist and the core Ðapps, all in readiness for the genesis block release.

We will take a very much fluid attitude to software development & release and incrementally roll out updates and improvements to our core suite of software over time. We don’t want to keep you waiting with the release of the blockchain and so that is our development priority. So you may be assured, it will be released just as soon as it is ready.

So hold on to your hats! You’ll be coding contracts and hacking society into new forms before you know it.

Gav.

The post Gav’s ÐΞV Update I: Where Ethereum’s at appeared first on ethereum blog.

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