[ANN] Ethereum: Welcome to the Beginning

[Vitalik Buterin]

Welcome to the New Beginning

When the grand experiment that is bitcoin began, the anonymous wizard desired to test two parameters- a trustless, decentralized database enjoying security enforced by the austere relentlessness of cryptography and a robust transaction system capable of sending value across the world without intermediaries. Yet the past five years years have painfully demonstrated a third missing feature: a sufficiently powerful Turing-complete scripting language. Up until this point, most innovation in advanced applications such as domain and identity registration, user-issued currencies, smart property, smart contracts, and decentralized exchange has been highly fragmented, and implementing any of these technologies has required creating an entire meta-protocol layer or even a specialized blockchain. Theoretically, however, each and every one of these innovations and more can potentially be made hundreds of times easier to implement, and easier to scale, if only there was a stronger foundational layer with a powerful scripting language for all of these protocols to build upon. And this need is what we seek to satisfy.

Ethereum is a modular, stateful, Turing-complete contract scripting system married to a blockchain and developed with a philosophy of simplicity, universal accessibility and generalization. Our goal is to provide a platform for decentralized applications - an android of the cryptocurrency world, where all efforts can share a common set of APIs, trustless interactions and no compromises. We ask for the community to join us as volunteers, developers, investors and evangelists seeking to enable a fundamentally different paradigm for the internet and the relationships it provides.

Who is Behind Ethereum?

Our primary core devs are:

• Vitalik Buterin → Inventor of Ethereum, protocol developer and researcher
• Gavin Wood →Lead C++ developer
• Jeffrey Wilcke → Lead Go developer

Primary non-development members include:

• Anthony Di Iorio → Founder and Executive Director of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, Bitcoin Decentral, KryptoKit
• Mihai Alisie → Founder of Bitcoin Magazine and Egora
• Joseph Lubin → Software engineer, Quantitative Analyst
• Stephan Tual → Founder of Ursium, Communications

A more extensive but non-exhaustive list of team members can be found here.

Our ether sale is available at http://ethereum.org ; the site contains all needed instructions.

The Next Step: Some Links

Welcome to the Ethereum Ecosystem:

• http://ethereum.org/
• http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html
• Enjoy the Code: https://github.com/ethereum
• Whitepaper: https://ethereum.org/pdfs/EthereumWhitePaper.pdf
• Yellowpaper: https://ethereum.org/pdfs/EthereumYellowPaper.pdf
• Blog: http://blog.ethereum.org
• Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/ethereum

Contact Us:

General Queries
info@ethereum.org

[bitkoof]

Good luck - looks very interesting

CoinDesk is now live BTW - http://www.coindesk.com/ethererum-launches-cryptocurrency-2-0-network/

[Seth Otterstad]

Hi Vitalik, I'll see you at the Miami conference.  If you could give your thoughts on these questions, it would be much appreciated.  I am very interested in this project.

NECESSITY OF A NEW BLOCKCHAIN
The whitepaper states that colored coins inherit the same limitations as the bitcoin protocol.  Metacoins do not, but they cannot be truly secure without having a copy of the blockchain.  How big of a problem is this?  Hasn't the Electrum model worked for Bitcoin?  Is there a big issue with just querying a bunch of supernodes to see if they all give the same result?  Is it necessary to have absolute security with every contract, or only very high value transactions?  Is it correct that metacoin clients won't need the first 14gb of the blockchain?

BITCOIN BLOCKCHAIN SIZE
Bitcoin Magazine's analysis showed that since storage capacity and internet bandwidth follow Moore's law, the blockchain size will not be a problem to store on phones.  How many years from now should we predict that the blockchain size will become irrelevant?  If the blockchain size were irrelevant, would ethereum still be necessary?  How much demand is there for blockchain contracts at this time, and how fast should we expect demand to accelerate?

ETHEREUM BLOCKCHAIN
How fast should we estimate the ethereum blockchain size will grow?  What will be the effects of ethereum blockchain size growth several orders of magnitude greater than Bitcoin?  Will this lead to more mining centralisation?

TURING COMPLETENESS
Is it reasonable to think the client can be sandboxed?  What will be the effects of these, since the protocol is Turing complete:  viruses, malware, adware, keyloggers, scam contracts, wallet stealers

ILLEGAL CONTRACTS
What will be the effects of illegal contracts? An assassination market, for example?  Will the Silk Road be able to run on ethereum?  Will a database of child porn be able to be stored?  If there is child porn stored on the blockchain that is easily accessible, will it be legal to store the blockchain in any country?  What will be the effects of running all the clients over Tor by default?  Can a 60s block time with huge blocks work over Tor?

SATOSHI'S ARGUMENTS
In 2010, satoshi succesfully argued against including Namecoin into bitcoin, suggesting merge-mining instead.

     "Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.
     Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.
     The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."  -- Satoshi

You can view the rest of his arguments in the thread here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0;all

DEVELOPER COMMENTS
I have not seen any core bitcoin developers comment on ethereum.   Is there somewhere besides the reddit and the thread on bitcointalk about it?
I am not very technical, so sorry if some of my questions are invalid or stated incorrectly.  I also posted this on reddit.com/r/ethereum.

[ripper234]

Good luck on the upcoming IPO and more importantly on executing!

My preliminary thoughts are summarized on my blog.

[Akka]

Maybe a nice Idea, but again it's an investment scheme in it due to the limited supply of Etheres.

That are all nice functions, but I don't see, why in order to use them one has to buy into a highly speculative currency. In fact smart property, smart contracts, decentralized exchange, etc. Would all work better if issuers and and users of these wouldn't need to buy into a currency that is intended to get more and more expensive in order to use it.

I see really nice developments in crypto and it's cool that so many obviously smart people get involved in it.

But it's utterly disappointing, that everything build is at is core build only to make the early adopters rich. (Same thing with: Mastercoin, ProtoShares, Nxt, etc)

What all this people could accomplish if they would help develop Bitcoin?  

[mamucik666]

In my opinion, the idea of giving most coins to the investors, instead of miners, is just plain stupid. This is not the proper way to distribute a currency. It is not fair.

[Uniqueorn]

In my opinion, the idea of giving most coins to the investors, instead of miners, is just plain stupid. This is not the proper way to distribute a currency. It is not fair.

Yeah... because rich people buying high end mining gear and mining everything is sooo much more fair

[Vitalik Buterin]

> Hasn't the Electrum model worked for Bitcoin?

Yes, it has. But I describe in my whitepaper why it doesn't work for protocols on top of Bitcoin.

> Is there a big issue with just querying a bunch of supernodes to see if they all give the same result?

That is potentially very problematic because it breaks down the no-trust property; instead, you're getting data from a small pool of centralized entities. It's possible, and people do it with blockchain.info, but it somewhat weakens the whole attraction of a cryptocurrency.

> How many years from now should we predict that the blockchain size will become irrelevant? 

That's an interesting question that I don't know the answer to. Perhaps if that happens the blockchain size will simply keep on growing, as people keep putting more and more memory-intensive applications on top and reach an equilibrium. In the medium term, I personally am more worried about the possibility that Ethereum's disk and computational load will be too high; I think that is the more pressing question that we at the Ethereum team are more focused on.

> What will be the effects of ethereum blockchain size growth several orders of magnitude greater than Bitcoin?

I don't think the blockchain will be that large. There are ways to combine Ethereum with off-chain protocols to mitigate most of the issues if people do want to put terabytes of data into Ethereum-based systems.

> Is it reasonable to think the client can be sandboxed?

The security model for Ethereum is similar to that of web browsers with Javascript; we'll design our sandbox accordingly.

> What will be the effects of illegal contracts? An assassination market, for example?  Will the Silk Road be able to run on ethereum? 

Theoretically those use cases are possible, but it is important to point out that you can crowdfund assassinations and create a decentralized Silk Road marketplace with Bitcoin too, even directly on the blockchain using assurance contracts. So the regulatory challenges there are fairly similar to BTC, although we do realize that the legal status of second-generation cryptoledgers is less clear; that is why we are interested in working with CODA.

> Will a database of child porn be able to be stored?  If there is child porn stored on the blockchain that is easily accessible, will it be legal to store the blockchain in any country? 

Just like Bitcoin, the memory fees are prohibitively high to store a JPEG.

> What will be the effects of running all the clients over Tor by default?  Can a 60s block time with huge blocks work over Tor?

Maybe. Wait for the testnet and try it yourself.

> [ Satoshi's arguments ]

The nice thing about having a Turing-complete scripting language is that you can integrate many interesting models for how one currency can be integrated into another:

(1) The sub-currency can be fully stored as a contract (space heavy, time heavy)
(2) The Merkle root of the sub-currency state tree can be stored in a contract, and the leaves off-chain. Each update to the tree is validated by the contract (space light, time heavy)
(3) Two blockchains, but where the Ethereum chain includes an SPV client of the other chain (space light, time light)

If one way of doing things is too inefficient, we can always fall back on other ways.

Hi Vitalik, I'll see you at the Miami conference.  If you could give your thoughts on these questions, it would be much appreciated.  I am very interested in this project.

NECESSITY OF A NEW BLOCKCHAIN
The whitepaper states that colored coins inherit the same limitations as the bitcoin protocol.  Metacoins do not, but they cannot be truly secure without having a copy of the blockchain.  How big of a problem is this?  Hasn't the Electrum model worked for Bitcoin?  Is there a big issue with just querying a bunch of supernodes to see if they all give the same result?  Is it necessary to have absolute security with every contract, or only very high value transactions?  Is it correct that metacoin clients won't need the first 14gb of the blockchain?

BITCOIN BLOCKCHAIN SIZE
Bitcoin Magazine's analysis showed that since storage capacity and internet bandwidth follow Moore's law, the blockchain size will not be a problem to store on phones.  How many years from now should we predict that the blockchain size will become irrelevant?  If the blockchain size were irrelevant, would that remove the need for ethereum?  How much demand is there for blockchain contracts at this time, and how fast should we expect demand to accelerate?

ETHEREUM BLOCKCHAIN
How fast should we estimate the ethereum blockchain size will grow?  What will be the effects of ethereum blockchain size growth several orders of magnitude greater than Bitcoin?  Will this lead to more mining centralisation?
TURING COMPLETENESS
Is it reasonable to think the client can be sandboxed?  What will be the effects of these, since the protocol is Turing complete:  viruses, malware, adware, keyloggers, scam contracts, wallet stealers

ILLEGAL CONTRACTS
What will be the effects of illegal contracts? An assassination market, for example?  Will the Silk Road be able to run on ethereum?  Will a database of child porn be able to be stored?  If there is child porn stored on the blockchain that is easily accessible, will it be legal to store the blockchain in any country?  What will be the effects of running all the clients over Tor by default?  Can a 60s block time with huge blocks work over Tor?

SATOSHI'S ARGUMENTS
In 2010, satoshi succesfully argued against including Namecoin into bitcoin, suggesting merge-mining instead.

     "Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.
     Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.
     The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."  -- Satoshi

You can view the rest of his arguments in the thread here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0;all

DEVELOPER COMMENTS
I have not seen any core bitcoin developers comment on ethereum.   Is there somewhere besides the reddit and the thread on bitcointalk about it?
I am not very technical, so sorry if some of my questions are invalid or stated incorrectly.  I also posted this on reddit.com/r/ethereum since it seems like Vitalik responds there more often.

[coins101]

Good luck - looks very interesting

CoinDesk is now live BTW - http://www.coindesk.com/ethererum-launches-cryptocurrency-2-0-network/

@CoinDesk says part of the aim is to combat ASIC?

That's what Litecoin tried to do. Once the value went up, vultures moved in to develop ASIC-Scrypt hardware, forcing people to accept them and start pre-ordering.

1. Why won't that happen again with ethererum? Are you offering a centralised or hosted mining?
2. Will there be any need and would you change any code if someone figures out how to develop ASIC? - something the Litecoin developers seem to want to avoid despite the community showing a two-thirds informal vote for a coding change to avoid ASIC.

[Terpie]

Great, another illegal securities offering. How hard is it to hire a lawyer for one hour? I know I'll be investing heavily knowing Sec. 12(a)(1) of the Securities & Exchange Act of 1933 essentially gives me a put right should the value of Ethereum go down whatsoever. And don't think being located outside the US is going to help you.

[Seth Otterstad]

Thanks for the excellent response, Vitalik!  Since you're a lot smarter than me, I'll just take your word for it that jpeg files will be too expensive to store on ethereum, unless a bitcoin dev comes in here and disputes it.  So that takes care of the child porn concern.  Could a script could still act as a thumbnail browser and download the images from a Tor server if a cryptocurrency payment was made to an address?  

I am also not quite sold on the need for ethereum.  It seems to me that the blockchain.info trust model or the "query a bunch of servers" model for low value transactions works just fine for bitcoin.  Are there any instances where this has been abused yet?  For high value transactions, getting a blockchain copy isn't that big a deal, and will continue to be less and less of a problem as Moore's Law for storage and bandwidth continues to outpace blockchain growth (which is continuing to grow linearly despite massively increased usage).

> What will be the effects of illegal contracts? An assassination market, for example?  Will the Silk Road be able to run on ethereum?  

Theoretically those use cases are possible, but it is important to point out that you can crowdfund assassinations and create a decentralized Silk Road marketplace with Bitcoin too, even directly on the blockchain using assurance contracts. So the regulatory challenges there are fairly similar to BTC, although we do realize that the legal status of second-generation cryptoledgers is less clear; that is why we are interested in working with CODA.

It seems to me that, just like bitcoin, the first major use case for ethereum will be to make the Silk Road more usable.  Instead of having to download Tor Browser Bundle and find a weird random character string to type into a browser, people will just be able to download ethereum and run it to browse and conduct illegal commerce.  It will vastly improve the usability of the Silk Road.  Can we really expect to be able to run drug marketplaces in the clearnet just because it is decentralized?  It seems to me that this will be illegal in every jurisdiction in the world, which is not the case with bitcoin.  It seems likely to me that the ethereum website will be seized and people will be prosecuted.

> Is it reasonable to think the client can be sandboxed?

The security model for Ethereum is similar to that of web browsers with Javascript; we'll design our sandbox accordingly.

I don't know a lot about web browser security, but this does not make me feel safe.  Exploits are demonstrated often that can break out of the chrome browser sandbox to claim the bug bounty.  There is going to be one hell of a reward for finding an exploit and breaking out of the ethereum sandbox.

[Vitalik Buterin]

> Could a script could still act as a thumbnail browser and download the images from a Tor server if a cryptocurrency payment was made to an address?  

Scripts can't download anything, so no.

> I don't know a lot about web browser security, but this does not make me feel safe.  Exploits are demonstrated often that can break out of the chrome browser sandbox to claim the bug bounty.  There is going to be one hell of a reward for finding an exploit and breaking out of the ethereum sandbox.

I'll avoid talking more about the legal questions at this point; I am not a lawyer, and we are talking with people who are who are in the process of crafting our legal positions.

Most critical vulnerabilities that we hear of don't actually break out of the sandbox; they are actually of the sort where Javascript code from one website manages to get executed inside of another webpage, and sends user data off to some third party server. There is no equivalent of that here. As for the vulnerabilities that do break into system memory somehow, I think our main defenses will be simplicity and abstraction. We have less than 60 instructions, and there are no operations that affect memory directly; everything is done by making database calls and modifying 256 bit integer objects. Our language has no power, even in theory, to handle input, output, HTTP requests or file system accesses; it's all purely internally focused. If we decide that it's necessary, we also have stronger options  like running the scripts with a zero-permission user or even inside a virtual machine.

[Seth Otterstad]

Thanks Vitalik, you made me feel a lot better about the security.  Since I am not technical I was under the mistaken impression that Turing-complete meant the script would be able to do absolutely anything on a computer.

Will you make a legal opinion available to investors?  I think that ethereum's main first usage will be things that are hard or illegal to do with existing systems (Silk Road), and that when Senator Schumer demands that something be done about it, the website will be seized.  Bitcoin got around this problem by functioning only as a currency and externalizing the Silk Road to the Tor network.  I don't see how ethereum can compete with bitcoin if it is driven underground.

For what it's worth, I really hope this succeeds.  Self-regulating markets are far superior to what we currently have.  I am just not convinced this has a reasonable chance of success yet.

[bananahunter67]

Good luck!

I am definately in. 

A few questions here:

1.

Early investors for taking a great risk due to the uncertainty of investment will be rewarded by a bonus of 2*initial investment for the first week and then this bonus decays by 2 percent per day for the remainder of the fundraiser until it reaches a floor of the base exchange rate of 0.001 BTC per 1 Ether

Could you please put some more light on this statement, for example, if I invest 1 BTC within the first week, how much Ethers will I end win at the end of the fundraising period?

2. Where can I find a client for Linux and install it, if it is still not created, how can I get the ethers I am going to buy from the IPO?

Thanks and good luck again!   

[charleshoskinson]

Will you make a legal opinion available to investors?  I think that ethereum's main first usage will be things that are hard or illegal to do with existing systems (Silk Road), and that when Senator Schumer demands that something be done about it, the website will be seized.  Bitcoin got around this problem by functioning only as a currency and externalizing the Silk Road to the Tor network.  I don't see how ethereum can compete with bitcoin if it is driven underground.

For what it's worth, I really hope this succeeds.  Self-regulating markets are far superior to what we currently have.  I am just not convinced this has a reasonable chance of success yet.

We will have a legally vetted prospectus available on the first day of the fundraiser that will contain our terms and conditions as well as the risks and uncertainties as we understand them in the ecosystem. Obviously no one has the ability to fully understand the long term uses and misuses of their systems; however, legally speaking, ownership of ether and use of the reference client itself should be classified the same as use of bitcoin and bittorrent. Thus you are liable for the things you do whereas the developers, speculators and general users in the ecosystem are not.

Distributive ownership of dubious things is another fascinating legal topic that is quite relevant to people in the bittorrent sync and tor communities as well. It is really unclear how the law addresses an actor that simply relays content without purpose or direct knowledge- especially if the content is encrypted for example. In a client server model, generally this concern is addressed by a central entity compelling the server to shutdown usually on a sliding scale. This course isn't possible in decentralized networks nor have campaigns to attack random nodes been terribly effective.

All this said, bad actors will quickly learn- as they are with bitcoin- that the transparency of a blockchain will remove any long term sense of anonymity from their activities. The blockchain is a perfect, honest accountant that will keep accurate books. The blockchain is considered an admissible ledger. Nodes can collect IP addresses of their peers in distributive networks. Yes there are defenses, yet in an age of prism, one must have considerable domain skills to keep everything hidden. Thus most won't and this is why law enforcement as a whole are warming up in certain respects to things like bitcoin and blockchain based ecosystems.

[Seth Otterstad]

Good points Charles, and I hope you succeed.  But how long do you think ethereum.org will stay online when the media runs an article titled "Silk Road 3.0 Launches on Ethereum" with instructions in the article?

1) Go to Ethereum.org
2) Download Ethereum
3) Click Silk Road app

I think this whole project will get forced underground onto the Tor network in short order because the illegal stuff will be in the blockchain instead of externalized.  It will have to directly compete with bitcoin with both hands tied behind its back because it will be hard for people to even find a safe copy of the program to download.  Am I to understand that you will not have a legal opinion supporting what you are doing?

[dacoinminster]

Obviously since the Master Protocol has many of the same goals, I'm keeping an eye on this project.

Regardless of which technology stacks survive and/or thrive, I think we can all agree that the financial world is in for some major upheaval!

[romanticon]

Obviously since the Master Protocol has many of the same goals, I'm keeping an eye on this project.

Regardless of which technology stacks survive and/or thrive, I think we can all agree that the financial world is in for some major upheaval!

Sure, it's obvious that the protocol is only a tool
to achieve freedom based economy.

[LiquidNitrogen]

How can ethereum be illegal its just new technology what people do with the technology could be illegal, same goes for a browser, bitcoin, a chainsaw, a car, a hammer...

[OOO]

Along with the legal aspects, there are many risks with this project.  However, there is a solid team in place and it is the people that interest me.

At what time (please also state the timezone) will the IPO start on Feb 1st?