I was woken up by Vitalik’s call at 5:55 am this morning; Pitch black outside, the night was always on our doorstep. Nevertheless, it was time to leave and this week had started better to start the right foot.
The 25 -minute walk in the darkness of Zug’s headquarters at the station was wet. The lampposts reflecting on the puddles of water in the clean Swiss streets provided a picturesque, so calm walk in town. I could not help but think that the rain that flowed on my face was a very liquid reminder of the imminent seasonal change, then, in consideration, at what speed the last nine months had disappeared.
Solid foundations
Last week was spent in Zug by the board of directors of the Ethereum Foundation and Leadership ðV: Vitalik, Mihai and Taylor who officially form the board of directors of La Fontaine, Anthony and Joseph like the other official advisers and Aeron & Jutta as director of ðV joined by Jeff and myself carrying multiple hats of ðv and advise). The main result of this was the broadcast of the superb plan of Vitalik to reform the foundations and make it a professional entity. The council will be recruited from professionals accomplished with a minimum of conflicts of interest; The current set of “founders” officially withdrew from these positions and a recruited professional executive, this last process led by Joseph. Anthony will play a greater role as ambassador for Ethereum in China and North America. Conversely, ðV will work much more as the executive department of the foundation rather than a largely independent entity. Finally, I presented the Liberation Strategy to 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 of directors and the advisers. More information will soon be available.
As I write this, I am sitting on a high -plan suburban train, Vinay Gupta in a trailer, which recently played a much more substantial role this week as an exit coordinator. It will help the Liberation Strategy and will keep you informed of our publication process. This week, which could be considerably described as “pivot” in the publication process, will see Jeff, Vitalk and I sit around a table and develop all POC-9 changes, related unit tests and three-day integration, joined by our indomitable master of tests, Christoph. The result of this week will shed light on our announcement which will come later this week describing in clear terms what we will publish and when.
I’m sorry it was so long without updating. The last 2 months have been somewhat occupied, stifled with travel and meetings, with the remaining time imbued with coding, team lead and management. The team is now significantly formed; The official security audit started four weeks ago; The Bounty program works well. These last processes are the extremely capable hands of Jutta and Gustav. Aeron, on the other hand, will withdraw as manager of finance and ðV operations and assuming the role for which he was initially brought aboard the modeling of the system. We hope that we can announce his successors next week (yes, it was plural; he has done the work of 2.5 people in recent months).
We are also training partnerships with third parties in industry; George, Jutta and I managed this process; I am happy to announce that at least three exchanges will support the ether from the first day on their trading platforms (the details of which we will announce soon), with more exchanges to follow. Marek and Alex provide technical deletion with Marek going so far as to carry out a substantial reference exchange of exchange.
I also finished the first draft of ICAP, the customer address protocol between Ethereum, an IBAN compatible system for reference and transaction to customer accounts aimed at rationalizing the fund transfer process, without concern between exchanges and, ultimately, to make KYC and AML pain. IBAN compatibility can even offer an easy integration of the existing banking infrastructure in the future.
Developments
The proof of concept of concept VII and VIII were released. Natspec, “natural language specification format” and the basis of our transaction security has been prototyped and integrated. Under the surveillance of Marek, now helped by Fabian, Ethereum.js really arrives in adulthood with compatibility in the source with the solidity on contractual interaction and support for Abi Tapped with calls and events, the latter providing reports of change of state -free state. Mix, our IDE, underwent its first version and after certain teeth problems, it is good thanks to the excellent work carried out by Arkadiy and Yann. Solidity had many characteristics added and quickly approaches status 1.0 with Christian, Lefteris and Liana to thank. Marian’s work continues on the network’s monitoring system while Sven and Heiko have worked with diligence on the constraint test infrastructure which analyzes and tests the training and performance of the peer. They will soon be joined by Alex and Lefteris to accelerate this program.
Thus, one of the main things that required sorting for the next version is the evidence that we will use. This had a number of requirements, two of which really drove in opposite directions, but basically, it had to be an algorithm adapted to the light of customers whose extraction speed is proportional to the IO band width and which requires a considerable amount of RAM to do it. There was a vague consensus that we (finally .. Vitalik and Matthew), the head of a Hasimoto type algorithm (a work proof of work designed for the Bitcoin blockchain which aims to be linked to IO, which means roughly an ASIC smaller / Faster). Since our blockchain has a number of important differences with the Bitcoin blockchain (mainly in the transaction density), resulting from the extremely short 12s blocking time that we are targeting, we must use the blockchain data itself like Hashimoto, but rather a set of artificial created data, made with a known algorithm under the name of Dugery (yes).
Although it looked like a good direction to follow, a rapid audit of the initial algorithm of Vitalik and Matt by Tim Hughes (ex-director of technology in Frontier Developments and Expert in CPU and low level GPU) has shown major faults. With his help, they were able to work together to design a much more waterproof algorithm which, we are convinced to say, should make sure that the FPGA / ASIC is sufficiently difficult, especially given our determination to move on to a system of evidence in the next 6 to 12 months.
Finally and above all, the new website has been launched. Congratulations to Ian and Konstantin to make fun and do it. The next judgment will be the developer’s site, which will be vaguely based on the excellent resource at QT.IO, the objective of providing an extravagance at one -way shopping documentation up to date, organized tutorials, examples, recipes, downloads, monitoring of problems and construction status.
Ahead
Thus, as Alex say, our networking maestro, these are exciting moments. When deeply in the development of development, you sometimes forget how the technology you create, which is probably as well because the gravity of the question in question would be continuously distracing. Nevertheless, when we start to consider the short -term changes that we can really make, we realize that the wave of change is both inevitable and goes to you. For what it’s worth, I find excellent accompaniment to this crazy life is the superb music of pretty lights.
