Links and Quick Hits
- The Ethereum Foundation has about 17m USD left at current ETH prices.
- We are likely heading for a hard fork to fix the DoS attacks. Ahem:
DoS Spam attack
- Two geth releases this week; one Parity release. Current Geth: 1.4.16. Current Parity: 1.3.5.
- There were quite a few different attacks this week. Whereas previous attacks mostly targeted the Geth client, late in the week the attacker targeted a weakness in the way Parity relays transactions.
- As of 5 days ago, hacker had spent about 350 ether on the DoS, per Martin Swende.
- As of 5 days ago, hacker had spent about 350 ether on the DoS, per Martin Swende.
- Gavin Wood called for a hard fork to fix the computational mispricing of opcodes. He believes we can achieve a 10x performance gain on the virtual machine.
- Jeff Wilcke announced that he has begun coding the hard fork in the Geth client.
- Jeff Wilcke announced that he has begun coding the hard fork in the Geth client.
- What goes in the hard fork? Check out EIP 150, as well as Vitalik’s Reddit thread on the subject for opcode repricing and other details. [In the future, potentially flexibile gas cost.]
- The question is whether to hardfork and fix this now or wait until the Metropolis hard fork. I’d say the writing is on the wall: we’ll hardfork to fix the mispricings.
Tech
- A visualization of Ethereum’s Yellow Paper.
- Colony released SolCover: a Solidity code coverage tool
- TestRPC 3.0.0 released.
Ecosystem
- Video of Vitalik’s talk at the Hong Kong meetup. Audio isn’t great, but it’s particularly interesting to hear him talk about how Microsoft is the only big tech company interested in blockchains.
- It’s important to seek opinions and evidence which counter your assumptions.
- As such: of BigTech, why is only Microsoft getting into blockchains? There’s some interesting discussion.
- It’s important to seek opinions and evidence which counter your assumptions.
- Will Crypto disrupt Venture Capital? by William Mougayar
- Golem and Microservices
- Provenance updates us on where they are.
- Gnosis is understandably getting substantial community pushback on their plans for an uncapped ICO.
- Cold storage guide.
- Martin Swende’s practical tips for security.
- Martin Swende’s practical tips for security.
- I haven’t thought about it much, but I kneejerk towards agreeing that it’d be great if ICOs could adopt a Dutch auction.
Media
- Why JPMorganChase is building its blockchain project on Ethereum (Fortune). WSJ version.
- Gavin Wood does the Changelog podcast.
Dates of note
- Oct 12 – Inchain crowdsale begins. [First I’d heard of it]
- Oct 20 – ether.camp ICO begins
- Nov 1 – Beyond the Void game crowdfunding begins
- Nov 14 – SEC has a fintech/blockchain meeting
- November TBA – .ETH name system goes live
Iconomi’s Poorly Constructed Cryptocurrency Index
Iconomi released their cryptocurrency index:
Why it’s bad:
- Bitcoin is 80% of crypto market cap, yet only 15% of the index. Functionally, this means that this is a (poorly structured) Crypto 2.0 index, though it is called a general crypto index.
- Dash, Steem and Monero are weighted about the same as Ethereum.
- Steem has daily volume magnitudes lower than other projects (thus, possibly masking the true price)
- Dash and Monero combined have a market cap about 10% of Ethereum’s. Yet each of them are almost as equally weighted as Ethereum and Bitcoin? That beggars belief.
- Steem has daily volume magnitudes lower than other projects (thus, possibly masking the true price)
- Digix’s market cap is just $25m, yet its index weighting is almost half of Ethereum’s. You can’t make this up.
- No Litecoin. The number 2 crypto project for years isn’t even in the crypto index?
I could go on.
Iconomi’s plan for an index is one reason why I think they might succeed , even though I didn’t care to put value at risk. However, their current index methodology is simply not good enough. Getting it right is a big opportunity.
ICO Standards Working Group
Recent crowdsales have left many in the Ethereum community feeling that we need to do a better job setting standards for what we expect from founders.
If you’re interested in joining, email: weekinethereum@gmail.com
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