Topic: [ANN] Ethereum: Welcome to the Beginning - page 1235. (Read 2007125 times)

thanks for it

It's quite well under development now; a couple of hardware people we're talking to are saying good things about our general approach, and the main thing it's missing is a really rigorous professional review, which we'll obviously be able to much more easily attract post-sale. If we are not satisfied, we can always use SHA3 as a fallback.

In the long term, I don't think botnets are an issue; they may prove an inconvenience to certain specific individuals, but it's very hard to see how one can get over 50% assuming a sufficiently strong network. In general, the reason why botnets are scary is that botnet activity tends to be directed toward anti-DDoS tasks, where the limiting variable is how many pings the network can do against a particular site or the number of IP addresses; because of this, only the number of nodes is relevant. In mining, however, it's not just the number that counts, it's also the hardware strength. With this in mind, note that the average "legitimate" miner has several advantages over the average botnet computer:

1. A botnet computer tends get infected at least partially because it runs older and insecure OSes, eg. Windows XP, implying the computer is old and therefore weaker
2. Miners are predominantly run by technically skilled people, whereas botnet computers are owned by technically unskilled people, once again implying that botnet computers are going to be weaker in raw CPU power than average
3. Miners don't care if their mining takes up 100% CPU power, whereas botnet computers will need to cap to a fairly low percentage to avoid getting caught
4. (3) will eventually include during the night, because antivirus software will adapt to detect high CPU usage as a warning sign

Now, in the short term, it's a somewhat different question, since antiviruses have not fully adapted to the existence of malicious miners and the network is also fairly weak in the big scale so 1000000 * 0.1 can still overwhelm it. However, in the short term it's not really avoidable; even if we make it ASIC-friendly no matter what algo we use it will take a while for it to get ASIC'd (and if we use SHA256 then we make ourselves vulnerable to Bitcoin mining pools and if we use Scrypt then we make ourselves vulnerable to that one guy in China who is producing 50% of Litecoin hashpower), so I would submit that it's an empirical question to what degree botnets at that stage are a problem. Existing history seems to suggest that while botnets can earn a moderate amount of income there aren't too many examples of them trying 51% attacks.

Finally, if it is deemed a problem, there is a chance our algo will be GPUable in any case (it may be a necessary sacrifice to accomplish very high levels of ASIC resistance), in which case bots would not be a problem at all.

Thank you Stephan!

Since the algo is cpu centric, is it possible for Ethereum to prevent a large botnet from taking a large share of the mining?

Ah, good question! Ashton showing an interest in ethereum was really a 'wow' moment, because I'm not sure if you looked into his career, but he has rarely been wrong in the past in his bets on technology. And come on, he played Jobs in 'Jobs', how neat is that! . I'd love working with him in the future if he has cools ideas for Dapps.

PS: Plus, after his tweet, my wife finally got to think all this geeky crypto stuff could maybe be 'cool', after all. So thank you Ashton

What do you think of Ashton Kutcher (Hunk) being interested in your project. I believe he has millions of followers on Twitter . could be interesting al though Nem and Nxtl  interest me most at this point in time.

Hello bitcoincal,

The presale is going to come soon(tm).

The purpose of running the client at the moment is to try your hand at developing dapps in HTML, QML and javascript, or help with its development at http://github.com/ethereum.

Cheers!

Thanks for the feedback MasterOfCoin!

In terms of user friendliness, well, I can only use my own story: I was blown away by Mike Hearn's presentation at the turing festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4PAMFPo5Y back mid last year, and immediately wanted to build these autonomous, self-owned agents he was talking about. I tried my hand at hacking the core client but quickly found it way too complex for my liking, and while there are some good APIs and alternatives (https://libbitcoin.org/libbitcoin-manifesto.pdf), it was still too much for me to get into with a full time day job that required very long extra hours to boot.

While the underlying technologies that power ethereum can be also very advanced, our main goal has always been to make the power of ethereum trivial to leverage by developers. HTML skills, some javascript is all that's needed to build most of a decentralized application: the underlying 'crypto' layer is neatly abstracted behind user-friendly APIs. As for end users, well, if they are comfortable with using a web browser, they certainly will be comfortable using the EtherBrowser.

Of course, at the moment, halfway in the development process, things are far from user friendly. The four reference clients have rather obtuse interfaces (we haven't started on the GUI/browser work yet), the documentation is sparse, out of date, or non-existent, and you are confronted with messages about 'canonical blocks' when booting up the CLI for the first time. Not exactly friendly, in fact, more like the opposite of it!!!

There's a saying, "Those on the 'bleeding edge' bleed a lot". That's true. I get a kick out of using alpha software that could crash at anytime, and has no documentation. But it's certainly not for everyone, and certainly not our end goal. It's however the consequence of having a totally transparent and open source development process: anyone can try the develop branch of the github. (and developers, please do! the repos need all the pull requests they can get).

So anyway, answering your question: the mining algo is not finalized yet, however we have a vision to make it CPU-friendly, and ASIC resistant, if not completely ASIC-proof (that would be nice). We intend to develop this algorithm, and perhaps with the addition of hybrid proof of stake, as the consensus algorithm for Ethereum 1.0.

Cheers!

i believe the success of dogecoin was in part due to the inclusiveness of the community surrounding the coin. it's not intimidating. not full of savvy people who attitude is along the lines of - i learned cyrpto on my own, why can't you do the same?... or the answer is out there, you're just not looking hard enough. looking at the ethereum forum you can tell that the community is not inclusive to the general public, at least not right now it isn't. and i understand.

the willingness of the community to answer "stupid questions" and to help guide / make clear to those who are a little lost is one indication of the attitude of ethereum and the attitude of the early adopters/inverters. how this will effect this crypto is anyone's guess.

to answer my own question... as far as i have seen, the mining algo works on the test client... i've mined some ether.  but like vitalik have mentioned, ether, in theory, can be mined with cpu, gpu, memory and bandwidth. i would like to have something more concrete, more finalized in therms of the mining algo since we are no more than 6months away from launch. pref to have something before the sale. unless i am wrong, and the algo is already something finalized, please enlighten me. thank you.

When is the pre-sale going to happen?

What's the purpose of running the client right now?

no one else is concerned with Ethereum not having a mining algorithm yet?

Good point Dooglus, things are very much in a state of flux so tutorial content tends to go out of date very quickly (and I mean very quickly, a week or two at most). I'll update the link.

As for your other technical problems, please ask on http://forum.ethereum.org/ - we have various sections dedicated to help solve this type of issues.

Thank you!

On https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum/wiki/Using-AlethZero

"You can also watch video instructions (YouTube: Joel's First Time Using the Ethereum AlethZero Client) for version v3.11" looks like a link, but isn't.

Maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXGH6q43i_k should be the target.

So I read https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/30/advanced-contract-programming-example-schellingcoin/ and found what I think are a few issues with the contract script, but comments are disabled.

So there's a wiki that I can't edit and a blog I can't comment on.

It kind of looks like my feedback isn't wanted. What's the deal here?

In case feedback is accepted, I was wondering about this:


j potentially goes up by 2 for each increment of i, and I goes up to N-1, so j could go up to 2N-2.

j is used to index array o, which only has N slots.

This looks like a potential array bounds overflow error.

Edit: I was also wondering about "low = call(contract.address, low, lsz, lsz)".  I've read https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-Serpent-programming-language-operations but it has no mention of "call". What are the 3rd and 4th parameters for? Where is call() documented? I had assumed I was looking at Serpent code, but maybe this is something different.

I'm having more serious problem now:

1) I checked out the cpp-ethereum repo and tried following the wiki page to built the serpent client:
  https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum/wiki/Serpent-LLL-only-build

It failed to mention that I needed to build Cryptopp 5.6.2 from source first, and so the instructions fail completely. I wonder if there's even a need for that whole page - it's out of date, and is just a subset of the instructions on the main build page.

2) Then, on:
   https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum/wiki/Building-on-Ubuntu
it says that building cryptopp from source is "NOT NEEDED IF YOU JUST WANT SERPENT/LLL TOOLS" - but that seems to be untrue.

I wonder if it's worth getting someone who knows what they're doing to take a look at all the build instruction pages and fixing them so they're right.

3) Next, I saw:

    If later, you change your mind and you want to build the full version with the GUI, use:
    cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && make

I tried that after building the serpent/lll stuff only, and it didn't do anything. I have to delete and remake the build directory before it would build the full version.

4) And finally, once I had the full 'alethzero' thing built, I ran it, connected to a peer, and it reliably segfaults after downloading around 227 blocks. I'm now building a debug version so I can submit a more proper issue.

I have been running the test client and am looking forward to the launch

Is there a already a date set when Goldman Sachs will release this coin?

Fixed, thank you.

As for future fixes and revisions, github wikis can't be PR'ed, so the best way would be to contact me in any of our forums (forum.ethereum.org, reddit, this thread, etc).

Cheers!

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-Serpent-programming-language-operations has a typo on it, making it look like this:



It looks like the wiki github repo has "Issues" disabled.

I don't see any way to make a "pull request" since I'm unable to clone the wiki.

What's the recommended way of submitting a fix?

It's just a missing backtick here:

* `msg(to, value, gas, datastart, datalen, outputstart, outputlen)` - sends a message [...]

wow that London presentation is embarrassingly horrible... awesome sound too ;/