website seems down
On my side, every thing is working fine! I am pretty busy at the moment because I have an important talk next week, but I try to use every free minute for the project.
I am pretty sure that I can provide some new pictures and videos of the current state this weekend of what I personally have done during the last week.
I would say we are 95% through with the wallet. I am right now thinking about a better way to write the user provided proof-of-work algorithms than using LUA. The problem
with complex turing complete, object orientated languages is that it's impossible to foresee all possible cases that might or might not lead to problems.
But in order to have a safe and secure system, we have to be absolutely sure that nothing bad can happen. On the contrary, an attacker only needs to succeed once.
The best example of "too-complex-to-fully-understand" is Solicity, Ethereum's internal js-like language: it went well for quite a time, until a malfunction (some might call it a "feature" or the "contract programmer's fault" but lets face it ... its a bug) was identified.
The result is awful: Of 1618 contracts that use the "send feature", 1498 are vulnerable to an attacker. Reference]http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ethereum-contracts-for-bugs/]ReferenceI have been experimenting with a self designed programming language, similar to bitcoin's scripting language but a lot more complex lately. My goal is to be able to
formally prove that we have strict upper bounds for memory usage (Ethereum solves the memory issue with "gas" that is burned during the execution, but we cannot do this as we burn "gas" (from the proof of work fund of each work pagage) for solutions!) and to prove that certain "evil" things are just not possible (like escape the jail, replace callable functions, and so on).
I will take some time this weekend to write a bit more about this. Even if writing pow functions becomes a bit more complicated (at first, because later we can make cross compilers that can transform C code for example into Elastic's proof of work language), I think this is neccessary to be absolutely sure nothing can go wrong.
The "Elastic Language" will be powerful enough to do what Elastic is intended to do and will not include anything that we either not understand or that is too complex to be absolutely sure we have identified and mitigated "all possible side effects" in it.Regarding the website... Yeah, the website seems down! I will write Lannister on bitmessage now! He should fix that quickly i think.