Zoran Skoda Ethereum

Literature

Ethereum is a public blockchain which is established as a sequel to bitcoin with intention to include smart contracts and distributed applications as envisioned by Vitalik Buterin in 2013. This platform is considered as the main platform of blockchain 2.0 stage in blockchain technology development; as of 2019 it still uses proof of work. As of 2019, Ethereum mainnet, which supports the Ether cryptocurrency is still officially beta and many improvements in 2019 and 2020 are planned, called Ethereum 1.x, including replacing the present Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) with ewasm virtual machine for WebAssembly bytecode. Somewhere in 2020 or 2021, a new release of Ethereum based on proof of stake with sharding and many other improvements (including a rent for smart contracts) is planned to be created; the new platform is called Ethereum 2.0 and will qualify for 3rd generation blockchain platform in terms of scalability and speed, and possibly some level of interoperability. Migration of users from the Ethereum 1.x beta chain will be performed via smart contracting, without hard forks. The old net is likely to stay as a read only record of old history and be attached to the new net as a shardchain. The implementations of Ethereum 2.0 are being coded simultaneously by 9 different teams in several different programming languages.

Ethereum 1.0 platform has largely influenced development of many subsequent platforms; in particular, Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain developed by IBM and Linux Foundation on the basis of Ethereum.

Most important clients for Ethereum are

See also about setting your own private Ethereum net

  • Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood, Mastering Ethereum: building smart contracts and DApps, O’Reilly Media, 2018. The book is also on github together with sourcecode.

Literature

See also blockchain, smart contract, bitcoin, high performance DLs and wikipedia Ethereum.

Official page ethereum.org and developer resources there.

General

  • V. Buterin, Ethereum in 25 minutes, youtube; Blockchain and Ethereum security on the higher level, youtube 1:21h
  • Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform, pdf
  • Gavin Wood, Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger, Ethereum, Tech. Rep. 2017. pdf
  • Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood, Mastering Ethereum: building smart contracts and DApps, O’Reilly Media, 2018
  • parity blockchain infrastructure for the decentralised web
  • Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
  • Ethereum JavaScript-API, github
  • Ethereum clients, tools, wallets github
  • Zokrates - a toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum. It helps you use verifiable computation in your DApp, from the specification of your program in a high level language to generating proofs of computation to verifying those proofs in Solidity.

Plans for Ethereum future from Ethereum Foundation as of May 2019:

Protocol improvements

Whisper

According to Mukhapadhyay, Ethereum smart contract development

When Gavin Wood? laid down the specifications for whisper as a peer-to-peer communication protocol, in his whitepaper on GitHub, he designed one of the most interesting technologies in the field of cryptography. At a considerable cost of bandwidth and latency, whisper is able to deliver a 100% dark operation. By completely dark operations, we mean that there is zero leakage of metadata during peer-to-peer By technical definition, whisper is a messaging system with multi distributed hash table (DHT), with routing privacy acting as a companion protocol to the Ethereum blockchain.

Whisper operates in a user-configurable manner with regard to how much information the communicating nodes are willing to leak concerning the decentralized application content that ultimately tracks the user activities.

Whisper is based on two key concepts: messages and envelopes. If whisper is considered a datagram messaging service, then an envelope represents an un-encrypted data format, comprehensible by a node, which carries the encrypted message datagram inside it. An envelope consists of original time to live (TTL, in seconds), the absolute time to expiry (UNIX system time), the encrypted message data field, which is the actual payload, topics (cryptographically secure, probabilistic partial classifications of message), and nonce, an arbitrary value. This nonce is used for the PoW to judge the efforts of a peer. The message has a binary flag for signature with an unfixed payload.

Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), storage and smart contracting

EVM is a stack-based interpreter.

Others

Vitalik proposed a privacy mixer for Ethereum to enhance anonymity via groupings

Last revised on June 23, 2019 at 13:33:23. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.