DevCon2 News
- For DevCon2 play-by-play, the best writeups for each day are at David Burela’s blog. Highly recommended.
- Different blog with less commentary, but tons of notes on Day 1 slides.
- Different blog with less commentary, but tons of notes on Day 1 slides.
- At Ethereum Mega-Event, the ‘Church of Vitalik’ Sobers Up: Coindesk’s Pete Rizzo overall report on DevCon2.
- Nasdaq Veteran Joins Ethereum Foundation as Security Lead. I thought the name Martin Swende sounded familiar – he’s the guy with the $5000 blog posts that made Ethereum safer.
- Nasdaq Veteran Joins Ethereum Foundation as Security Lead. I thought the name Martin Swende sounded familiar – he’s the guy with the $5000 blog posts that made Ethereum safer.
- This long, stream-of-consciousness DevCon2 trip report captured the zeitgeist. The challenge is to turn those feelings and beliefs into reality.
DoS Spam attack
Overall: This attack is making Ethereum stronger. Event better, the attacker is paying into the ecosystem (by paying gas costs) to make Ethereum more resilient. Annoying short-term; big win in the long-term.
- When: Sept 22, but more or less ongoing
- Who: unknown, we all assume (like Vitalik) ideological motivation, because the attacker is spending hundreds of USD per day on this attack.
- What: Transaction spam using opcode EXTCODESIZE
- How: Opcode EXTCODESIZE was underpriced in gas terms, because it required a disk read instead of living in memory, but wasn’t priced accordingly.
- Immediate fix: Change Geth and Parity flags
- Short-term fix: Geth upgrades and Parity upgrades
- Mid-term fix: Low-level protocol changes, including replacing levelDB.
- Immediate fix: Change Geth and Parity flags
- The gas limit is/was too low to support FirstBlood’s current crowdsale contract. They need 1.5m gas and as of 6:30pm EST the network is just shy of 1.5m.
Tech
- What sucks about Ethereum in one Buterin slide.
- Ethereum’s vision in a different Buterin slide.
- Solidity tools, IDEs, and integrations.
- Solgraph: “Visualize Solidity control flow for smart contract security analysis” by Raine Revere.
- Oyente smart contract analyzer.
- Teth: Testing and deployment framework for Ethereum smart contracts in Ruby.
- Dapple dev workflow
- New Mist 0.8.3 release.
- $180 USD in the latest Glasshunt hacking challenge
- Péter Szilágyi DevCon presentation: Ethereum from Go and beyond
- New and future features of Solidity, Devcon presentation.
Ecosystem
- PayPal for the blockchain: Santander is building a platform to tokenize fiat. It’s currently live on the Morden testnet. If this catches on, it eliminates the problem that stablecoins are trying to solve.
- IPFS’ Filecoin will be on Ethereum.
- Microsoft releases Bletchley – an easy way for enterprises to spin up multi-node consortium chains in a few minutes. Part of that is Cryptlets to get external data onto the chain (eg, LIBOR or results from an algorithm run off-chain). In other words, oracles for enterprise.
- Uport won DemoDay. Check out their whitepaper on identity management and DevCon2 presentation.
- Infura launched at DevCon2. Infura allows Ethereum projects to outsource the configuration and maintenance of IPFS and Ethereum nodes.
- First DevCon2 video! Digix. It’s not official, so sound quality isn’t great.
- Golem embraces the idea of being the platform for building applications on top of computing power.
- WeiFund is live on the testnet.
- World’s Largest Mining Company (BHP) to Use Blockchain for Supply Chain. Checkout Burela’s writeup for more clarity. Very interesting stuff – BHP is working with BlockApps who also partnered with China’s Minsheng Life Insurance to create an employee appreciate program.
- Slock.It (!) has a peer to peer energy sharing project in live beta.
- Avatar-based cryptocommunity CryptoClans is planning on an IPO “soon.”
- Another week, another bank experiment with Ethereum: Royal Bank of Scotland releases its white paper. Their performance testing used a private consortium chain but they seemed open to using the public Ethereum chain if tech progress allows them.
- Consensys DevCon2 presentations: Truffle, ProvID, Gnosis, Etherloan.
- At DevCon and couldn’t figure out the string puzzle at Devcon2? Here’s the solution, h/t heltok whose posts I appreciate on a variety of internet message boards.
Media
- Vitalik makes Fortune’s 40 under 40.
- William Mougayar: How Blockchain Applications Will Get Deployed
- MIT FinTech Innovation Paper on Prediction Markets.
- How Ujo wants to dirsupt the $15 billion nusic industry
- Coindesk talks Ethereum, Swarm, and Whisper: the three fundamentals of web 3.0.
Dates of note
- 9/26 – eSports First Blood crowdsale begins
- 9/28 – Hong (similar to The DAO) closes.
- 9/29 – Iconomi closes
- 9/30 – Coinbase to release ETC, presumably meaning many DAO investors will sell their ETC for ETH.
- 10/1 Kibo lotto crowdsale opens
- September TBA – Golem crowdsale begins
- September TBA – SingularDTV crowdsale (“within a few weeks” as of 9/13)
- November TBA – .ETH name system goes live
ICO thoughts – First Blood
First Blood more or less fits into my investing thesis. It’s an eSports platform for players who want to bet money against each other, seemingly solving things on the blockchain that might not work well currently or in a centralized manner. Potentially with clients so motivated that they’ll figure out blockchains.
The fundamental mistake of investing is to put money into things you don’t understand. I don’t understand this space well enough. I’d never be a customer (I’m not a gamer), I don’t really know what competitors are out there.
The people: the team seems decent enough – a bunch of young go-getters fresh out of Boston University. One of the things I look for is whether I think they’d really sacrifice for the vision (see my ICO framework) and…I think I haven’t really done enough due diligence to be convinced that they would.
Bottom line: I haven’t been able to figure out if First Blood more or less fits the investing thesis.
Bad crowdsale structure = lost my appetite to do due diligence and learn more about eSports
First Blood has a “power hour,” where you get a pretty large bonus for giving them your money in the first hour.
I HATE IT. As I talked about in my ICO framework, this really prejudices me against. It suggests that the team doesn’t have enough confidence in the opportunity, so they structure a FOMO deal. Maybe it will work – they’ll raise a huge chunk of their crowdsale in the first hour. It’s possible.
But think about it: if getting some press due to “power hour” gets you more investors, who will those investors be? They’ll be FOMO investors, who aren’t really interested in the project and who are much more likely to go complain to regulators if their investment is at any time losing money (ie, because the project release date keeps getting pushed back).
Plus, a power hour probably loses people like me who were interested, but didn’t decide to put money in for the power hour. If I have to take a haircut because I missed the first hour, then I’m out.
Front-loaded bonuses like “power hour” will only hurt most of the crowdsales who offer them. They’ll raise less money, and the people who do invest money will be much less “bought in” to the concept.
[Also FirstBlood might have issues with the gas limit during their power hour]
ADDENDUM: a few weeks ago I discussed ICO investing strategies. I neglected to mention a strategy I’ve thought of but do not have the risk tolerance for (I’m quite risk averse, it all has to do with the marginal value of money and my utility curve).
Essentially, the strategy would be Spray and Pray with Bonus and then Pick the Winners with Liquidity. The idea would be to buy into all crowdsales immediately at their highest bonus levels. Then, when those tokens became liquid only keep the ones that you believe in.
Given ICO history so far, we seem to see that tokens are valued higher when they eventually become liquid. Thus, you could invest with the highest bonus, then sell on liquidity.
There’s a few behavioral psych reasons why this makes sense. However, I personally am not inclined. If you are so inclined, then I wish you luck.
Disclaimer: This is not investing advice. Nothing I write in this newsletter is investing advice. Make your own decisions and be responsible for them. I don’t know your portfolio, tax considerations, goals, tolerance for risk, etc so I can’t possibly even be close to giving you investing advice. Also, it’s expensive.
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