**** Official Ethereum QA thread ****

[Ursium]

*THIS THREAD IS OUT OF DATE - PLEASE USE LINKS BELOW*

Main site: https://www.ethereum.org
Forums: https://forum.ethereum.org
Github: https://github.com/ethereum

Blog: https://blog.ethereum.org
Wiki: http://wiki.ethereum.org
Meetups: http://ethereum.meetup.com

Whitepaper: http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html
Yellow Paper: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ethereumproject
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/ethereumproject
Google+: http://google.com/+EthereumOrgOfficial
IRC Freenode: #ethereum (http://bitly.com/IRC_ethereum for weblink)

[Ursium]

reserved

[charleshoskinson]

Ursium represents us in this thread.

[_ingsoc]

Let me do the honours: Is Goldman Sachs involved in this venture?

[Ursium]

Let me do the honours: Is Goldman Sachs involved in this venture?

Categorically, no.

From Charles Hoskinson:

"We have two people on our team who started their financial careers- as many thousands have done- at Goldman Sachs. They have both since left and started other ventures. In both cases those were hedge funds. Joe retired and moved to Jamaica to be in the music industry and came out of retirement to join us. Costa went to university of Edinburgh to study LCS's relationship to finance for a PhD in Quantitative Finance. He is now running a hedge fund in Kyrgyzstan as well as building a full clearing house in etherscript.

We have no relationship with Goldman Sachs nor are they an investor. I wouldn't take their money if offered. I have great respect for their knowledge of the financial industry as well as quality of talent, but no respect for their business practices or questionable conduct."

[charleshoskinson]

Let me do the honours: Is Goldman Sachs involved in this venture?

Goldman Sachs has no involvement in our venture. We have no current GS employees nor intend on hiring any nor establishing a partnership. We will not accept investment from goldman sachs nor collaborate with them as a partner at any time.

[BldSwtTrs]

What prevents to make a fork of Ethereum and reset all the fees to zero?

[charleshoskinson]

hat prevents to make a fork of Ethereum and reset all the fees to zero?

The same thing that prevents a bitcoin fork or any other fork of an open sourced project. The social consensus of the community as a whole. Should the community feel the team, parameters and infrastructure behind Ethereum is optimal, then they will stay on Chain A. If not then they will migrate. You, as a community, should have this freedom. It keeps everyone accountable.

[Zzzack]

hat prevents to make a fork of Ethereum and reset all the fees to zero?

The same thing that prevents a bitcoin fork or any other fork of an open sourced project. The social consensus of the community as a whole. Should the community feel the team, parameters and infrastructure behind Ethereum is optimal, then they will stay on Chain A. If not then they will migrate. You, as a community, should have this freedom. It keeps everyone accountable.

Is there a 50% premine of ethereum or is that a rumor? 

[Ursium]

What prevents to make a fork of Ethereum and reset all the fees to zero?

I'll add that if you meant 'what prevents someone/a team from forking the github repos and launch an identical project without the requirement for the raising of funds', the answer is nothing.

We're open source wall-to-wall - https://github.com/ethereum/ (fork is top right button at the top).

Cloning the team might be a lot harder as Charles hinted at

More importantly, the release of Ethereum 1.0 is not the be all and end all of this project. We have plans for Ethereum 2.0, 3.0 etc via soft forks. Decentral-type incubators around the world to support innovation and many other brilliant open source projects. We've already partnered with OT and there are going to be some exciting announcement in the next few weeks.

The scope of Ethereum extends far beyond the realm of tech, and that can't be forked.

[charleshoskinson]

Is there a 50% premine of ethereum or is that a rumor?

We are testing an endowment and new type of VC model with the Ethereum launch and thus some of the initial Ethereum supply with be premined to allow for compensation of early stakeholders, strategic partners and also the long term health of the Ethereum Project. There numbers will all be disclosed in the business plan and prospectus released prior to the fundraiser for community review alongside a full explanation why we think they are necessary and the vesting terms. Our hope is to leave a template for future projects in this space to use to do things in a fair, accountable and transparent way without having to soliciting funding from angels, VCs or other actors traditionally inaccessible to many billions of people.

We will also release our plans for the conversion of the Ethereum Project's fiduciary hub into a decentralized autonomous organization living completely on the Ethereum blockchain. This also is another template we are planning on well distributing. We want people to use the DAO model for their business and NPO pursuits and use our funding model to get them bootstrapped.  

[BldSwtTrs]

hat prevents to make a fork of Ethereum and reset all the fees to zero?

The same thing that prevents a bitcoin fork or any other fork of an open sourced project. The social consensus of the community as a whole. Should the community feel the team, parameters and infrastructure behind Ethereum is optimal, then they will stay on Chain A. If not then they will migrate. You, as a community, should have this freedom. It keeps everyone accountable.

Well, I think there is a pretty big difference with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin address consumers needs. Whereas Ethereum address a market of profit-driven DAC.

A DAC will seek to maximize its profit and therefore minimize its costs. So if an Ethereum-free exists, odds are that alternative will be deemed optimal by the market.

[charleshoskinson]

Well, I think there is a pretty big difference with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin address consumers needs. Whereas Ethereum address a market of profit-driven DAC.

A DAC will seek to maximize its profit and therefore minimize its costs. So if an Ethereum-free exists, odds are that alternative will be deemed optimal by the market.

A feeless system would be vulnerable to the halting problem and thus cannot compete with a fee system. Also a fork of this nature would likely honor the original ownership structure and thus have no impact upon purchasers and early stakeholders of ethereum.

I would also like to point out that Ethereum does more than just enable DAOs. It also can be used for things like gambling, smart property, contracts and linking cryptocurrency infrastructure together.  Larger DAOs will likely have independent economic models and use ether to link to other entities in a trustless way.

[Ursium]

Well, I think there is a pretty big difference with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin address consumers needs. Whereas Ethereum address a market of profit-driven DAC.

A DAC will seek to maximize its profit and therefore minimize its costs. So if an Ethereum-free exists, odds are that alternative will be deemed optimal by the market.

A feeless system would be vulnerable to the halting problem and thus cannot compete with a fee system. Also a fork of this nature would likely honor the original ownership structure and thus have no impact upon purchasers and early stakeholders of ethereum.

BldSwtTrs, for clarity: the fees used by the contract aren't a 'tax' from the Ethereum project, and none of that goes to the team. The fees are 'fuel' for contracts, just like you have trx fees in Bitcoin.

[Come-from-Beyond]

In Ethereum, you have entities called contracts, where contracts have their own balances, and are activated every time you send a transaction (think: money with an optional message attached) to them. The contract has 16 computational steps for free to give it wiggle room to determine whether a transaction is even worth processing; after this, every computational step that the contract takes costs it 1x BASEFEE (or more for specialized data access or crypto ops). If the contract goes bankrupt halfway through the computational process, it just stops halfway through.

How r blockchain reorgs handled? Computational steps can't be rolled back nor blockchain can be re-rolled from block 0, so u r supposed to store blockchain snapshots each N-th block, which is quite expensive.
Can't a Finney attack be combined with a very long-running transactions to DoS all nodes? If a miner earns all block fees then even without a Finney attack a malicious miner could include a lot of long-running transactions into their block to slow down processing of the next block / transactions.

[TruthTaco]

How many total Ethereum coins will there be at launch and overall? I expect you don't have an exact answer but could you give us a ballpark answer at least?

[charleshoskinson]

How many total Ethereum coins will there be? I expect you don't have an exact answer but could you give us a ballpark answer at least?

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.  

How r blockchain reorgs handled? Computational steps can't be rolled back nor blockchain can be re-rolled from block 0, so u r supposed to store blockchain snapshots each N-th block, which is quite expensive.
Can't a Finney attack be combined with a very long-running transactions to DoS all nodes? If a miner earns all block fees then even without a Finney attack a malicious miner could include a lot of long-running transactions into their block to slow down processing of the next block / transactions.

Reserved for V

[houseo]

More importantly, the release of Ethereum 1.0 is not the be all and end all of this project. We have plans for Ethereum 2.0, 3.0 etc via soft forks. Decentral-type incubators around the world to support innovation and many other brilliant open source projects. We've already partnered with OT and there are going to be some exciting announcement in the next few weeks.

Does this mean ether 2.0 and ether 3.0 or will there only be 1 currency across the platforms?

We know who Charles Hoskinson is. Who is Ursium?

[BldSwtTrs]

Thanks for the clarification about the fees, I get it know.

Do you still plan to lock in initial investors for at least 1 year and prevent them to sell more than 1/3 per year? If so what's the purpose of doing that? Is it not inconsistent with inflating the money supply in order to divest initial investors?

[Vitalik Buterin]

In Ethereum, you have entities called contracts, where contracts have their own balances, and are activated every time you send a transaction (think: money with an optional message attached) to them. The contract has 16 computational steps for free to give it wiggle room to determine whether a transaction is even worth processing; after this, every computational step that the contract takes costs it 1x BASEFEE (or more for specialized data access or crypto ops). If the contract goes bankrupt halfway through the computational process, it just stops halfway through.

How r blockchain reorgs handled? Computational steps can't be rolled back nor blockchain can be re-rolled from block 0, so u r supposed to store blockchain snapshots each N-th block, which is quite expensive.
Can't a Finney attack be combined with a very long-running transactions to DoS all nodes? If a miner earns all block fees then even without a Finney attack a malicious miner could include a lot of long-running transactions into their block to slow down processing of the next block / transactions.

The current design does have you store blockchain snapshots for every block. That's not that expensive actually; the reason is that we're using functional data structures (specifically, Patricia trees) that automatically provide optimal deduplication, so if blocks N and N+1 are both 1 GB in size but only 100 KB of that is actually different between the two blocks then only 1 GB + 100 KB of space is required; and the savings obviously compound for many blocks (eg. 50 blocks = 1.005 GB, 500 blocks = 1.05 GB, etc.