Great to see you here.

The Ethereum reference wallet will be far more secure than QT from day 1 (launch of mining). We will have it pen tested thoroughly and even take it to DEFCON next year with a big treasure pot (you hack it; you own it). On a personal note, Bitcoin theft or loss really makes me sad and also I believe is a significant roadblock for mainstream adoption. Mainstream consumers need better security and more tools to protect themselves from themselves. 

Check out our latest hire: http://www.ethereum.org/#who

Seems like you're on to something 

I've met Charlie at several events and had a chance to work with him at the Foundation when I was bootstrapping their education committee. Charlie seemed to me to be an intelligent and passionate man who fell into a role beyond his skill set and years. He definitely was trying hard, but he apparently didn't learn the lessons all entrepreneurs need to know- surround yourself with good, reliable people, protect yourself from the consequences of success, admit you don't know it all (compliance officer?) and be careful with the law.

I really hope this matter can be resolved quickly and without drama to the ecosystem. For what it's worth, I think he will eventually recover and continue to be an entrepreneur. I also see this as a transition stage for bitcoin from its early mtgox, silkroad, bitinstant and 10000 btc pizza days to a more mature and regulated ecosystem. When I was in Miami, I couldn't help but feel that some of the magic was lost, but I did like seeing Rassah manning the bitcoin experts booth.

Our goal and what we try to do every single day. But we have an obligation to work within the legal framework. If the United States wants to make the deployment of Ethereum difficult, then we can't change that reality. We just have to work around it as best as we can and eventually get Ethereum launched.

I still think there is some confusion about fees here. Fees do not go to ether holders nor the project developers. The fee structure has no impact on who owns what.

Exactly, and even if we wanted one, then we'd get forked. The market has no incentive to pay a tax even if its good for the network. One and done and then get it done.

IP blacklisting, similar to Satoshi dice. It's not an effective means technologically, but legally it satisfies our end. I am working very hard to make sure we can accept US investment; however, it's still a topic for debate.

The premine is used to pay current and future developers as well as serve as a long term endowment for the project after the bitcoin reserves run low. As for a turn off, silicon valley has been accepting that people who start companies have equity in the company for over 50 years. This is what built apple and google. It makes people work harder and have a vested interest in the long term growth of the market. If I just pay you a salary, then you can walk away with a clean slate.

We are not a company but we are not a traditional open sourced project. It's really something new and a test for a different way of doing VC. My hope is that our model can eventually be refined and become a permanent part of the startup landscape for projects that don't have equity in a traditional sense and are more mission oriented than profit.

No more questions will be addressed in this thread. Please refer to the Q&A thread.

It's turing and we had to delay the IPO because we were offered too much money. If that's failure, then I like to fail

I've been working with lawyers from three different countries and this is a difficult issue because no government has taken the necessary regulatory steps to clearly define Bitcoin as an asset. Also crowdfunding laws are still immature as its a recent development invoked by technology. We hope to include US Citizens in the ether sale (I'm from the United States myself and I'd like to invest 50 percent of my net wealth into this project), but ultimately this has to be decided by our analysis of the legal landscape.

Our goal is to ship Ethereum with a strong ecosystem in as many markets as possible. Therefore, if we can't accept US purchases, then we will build out a lot of infrastructure there alongside hire as many US personnel as possible to ensure ether still gets distributed in that market.


Our chain is Bitcoin aware and will be able to communicate with the Bitcoin blockchain via the data layer's APIs through the reference client, but more generally this is possible for all blockchains. One can also deploy an SPV client via the contract system. The issue isn't ethereum --> blockchain it's actually the other way around. Bitcoin is blind and deaf in this respect.


Higher risk of hard forks damaging returns to early investors. One and done with an endowment.


First, here is why SCRUM is awesome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU0llRltyFM and here is the tool we are using: http://www.scrumdo.com/

These are solid reads http://it-ebooks.info/book/494/, http://it-ebooks.info/book/2803/

I agree with you completely and as a person who preordered a butterfly labs miner I understand this concern. Ethereum is a massively interactive and rapidly evolving project. You should factor the appreciation of bitcoin into your investment model; however, the goal here is to build a long term ecosystem, not make you 150x in the short term. You have to ask a question, Do you want to own an asset at a 35 million dollar market cap with lots of growth potential or an asset at the 10 billion dollar market cap with lots of growth potential? The former has a lot of room for rapid growth, the latter has to necessarily slow down. UX, scalability issues and also long adoption arc will retard the growth of bitcoin. Getting to 100 billion is going to be a lot harder than getting to 10 billion in my opinion. For us to grow the same amount is a lower barrier.  

Also in terms of things like miners, the VP is front loaded. You miners doesn't magically grow in value over time. It is a depreciating asset like most preordered products. Ether has to either die fast or grow fast.

I'm pushing us into SCRUM and really hammering down the development process. Once we have those operations where they need to be, we will have significantly better predictivity in our development flow. This said, we have a checklist that needs to be resolved prior to the value chain being launched. That will be the ultimate guide for when things get launched. Q3-Q4 seem reasonable, but cannot be committed to until a later date.

There has been a lot of discussion about what to replace dagger with. We love PoW as a distribution mechanism. There are other mechanisms for security that fare well. Also if one can find ways to enable socially beneficial PoW, then this would be the optimal solution. There is a proposal for refined ether, but nothing is yet set is stone. The process we will use is as follows:

• Fix distribution goals and economic parameters
• Decide on the proper level of security the network requires for population
• Discuss integration of consensus mechanisms into the network (necessary for DAOs)
• Hold a NIST AES style contest in academia to produce a hybrid PoW/PoS replacement for slasher
• Test winner and integrate into Ethereum

Ask your question here: http://forum.ethereum.org/categories/code-and-builds

Yes this is the goal. To ensure ether compatibility, regardless of chain version.  


Deeper versions like 4.0 and 5.0 a decade away may require this mechanic to restore the endowment; however with the fundraiser we are planning and the premine structure, Ethereum should be paid in full for a long time. My hope is that eventually the applications in the ecosystem will simply cover the cost of future development after they are well established, but this is hard to guarantee thus you have to plan ahead. 

Similar to Intel with a tick tock style, we'd like to have a process to seed the cryptocurrency research group for a period of time (say 3 years) and then release all innovations in a 2.0, 3.0, 4.0... chain. The idea would be a soft fork from one to the other that honors all positions. Think of it like windows without ever having to pay for an upgrade. You can choose to stay on one chain or migrate to the new one. We'll engage the community at a later date for suggestions about what the best approach is for this process. Some suggest a PoB system whereas others suggest a rollover. Clearly some economic modeling needs to be done, but once proven, it would be quite nice to use on bitcoin itself.


Our future director of communications.

Under the original model we proposed in the whitepaper for ether supply followed this function:
TS(t) = 1.5X + 0.5X*t with x being the supply created from the initial ether sale and t being time in years. This function is not bounded, but the rate of ether supply growth decreases monotonically. The goal was to divest percentagewise the initial participants in the ether sale via inflation assuming the demand would increase non-linearly thus inferring an increase in the price of ether relative to the initial sale price.

We are now investing a great deal of time in modeling the ether supply and have been considering a model that consumes ether in Txs instead of reallocation. This would eventually result in a supply equilibrium point. Once we have a bit more maturity in the mathematical models, we'll post them on github and you're welcome to review them. We'd also like to get a clear sense of ROI to demand and how our business strategy fits with increasing demand so I can list ranges of potential outcomes in the prospectus prior to the launch of the ether sale.  


Reserved for V