coinwatcher

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I've read all 357 comments so far and created a sorted and categorized overview of all questions that were answered by the team:

I've posted the formatted versions on Reddit (and here is a Pastebin):

INDEX - Please click here to see the rest of all answers by the team:

Part 1: All answers were posted by the Ethereum team in this AMA.

########### LAUNCH ###########

When/where and what can we use to buy ether? When does the fundraiser begin?

A: A few weeks from now is the best guess.

A. Originally, we actually wanted the fundraiser to last 2 months, from Feb 1 to Mar 31. Because we're giving much more advance warning, we might cut this a bit shorter, but it'll certainly be longer than 1 week.

A: Our official website fund.ethereum.org when we are ready alongside our partner wallets. Bitcoin only

Pre-sale: Will it be relatively easy for a non expert to understand where to send my Bitcoin investment and how I will receive my Ether?

A: Our goal is to make the procedure frictionless using wallets such as KryptoKit and Hive wallet.

A: When the pre-sale is going live you will be able to purchase ether by sending Bitcoin to the generated address and providing an email address. The email address will allow you to recover the funds in case of a disastrous event with your device as long as you can provide the password or the wallet file.

Any idea how much 1 ether will cost?

A: 1 BTC = 1000 ether, during the first week you will have a 2X multiplier (i.e. 1 BTC = 2000 ether). The purchase period is planned to last ~60 days.

A. 1 BTC will be valued at 1000 ether during the fundraiser.

I read some info that early buyers can get 2000 ETH for 1 BTC if purchased early, is this a be awake at 4am thing or is this a buy at your leisure as long as its within the 60 days grace period? In other words will panic buys in the opening hours affect price etc. and if so will we get fair warning / do we need to pre register interest now etc.

A: First week investors will realize 2x the product value.

Fundraiser question: Assuming that there will be a cap on the maximum Bitcoins that any given person may invest, how do you plan do deal with individuals creating multiple identities ( i.e. Email addresses) to get around the cap. If there is no cap, what is to stop a Whale investor from snatching up the whole supply?

A: There will be no cap.

A: You have the option to buy as much ether as you wish. The fundraiser will be open ended.

A: There are methods of using a cap with refund to ensure that everyone has some part of the distribution. We could also tune the economics a bit to allow for a much higher cap, but better ROI. There are three ways to get ether: mine it, buy it off an exchange or participate in the presale. If you miss one window, then there are still two others. My hope is that we can come up with something that is as fair as possible, but sadly years of political fundraising have taught us all that limiting investments by a single actor is really hard to do. {Charles}

If you found my work of sorting all answers useful: mBTC donations are always welcome:) 1GqYFbfvvyPaGUTVXf1kYjsM9KU6jE1p8C

coinwatcher4 karma

Part 5. All answers were posted by the Ethereum team in this AMA. See more here:

INDEX - Please click here to see the rest of all answers by the team:

########### Blockchain, PoW/PoS & Mining Pools ###########

Does Ethereum run on a separate blockchain, and if so, how are miners incentiviced to participate?

It's on a different blockchain with an entirely complete turing language. Ether can be mined just like other cryptocurrencies. Mining is essential to secure the network and reward the miners.

How does Ethereum confront the problem of collusion of mining pools. To avoid an aggregation as the Bitcoin ecosystem. Can there will be deployed a ethereum contract for the setup to use a p2pool and POS to vote in the future of that cooperative of miners?

A: Yes, you theoretically definitely can do a P2Pool contract on the Ethereum blockchain, where the P2Pool mines directly into a contract which distributes the funds to members based on share rates. So there are lots of solutions.

Recently I decided to get into the gpu mining side. I understand peoples concerns about centralization with asics, but gpu mining seems so archaic with the large carbon foot print. Is there a focus within the team about a way to handle network distribution without such a waste of resources. GPU mining just doesn't seem sustainable or future driven to me

A: We're looking at hybrid PoW/PoS options, and Dagger (our PoW) algorithm will be GPU/ASIC/FPGA resistant.

Have you determined Ethereum's proof of work algorithm, and is it possible to describe in laymans terms? :)

A: We are planning on holding a contest in the style of NIST's AES contest for both the academic and open source communities to participate in. Our goal is to offer

a large bounty for the first team to produce a PoW/PoS hybrid that meets certain parameters and goals we set. We feel that the best way to get things done well is

through incentivized competition and I’d love to see MIT competing with Caltech on this one. Details will be announced about this contest sometime in April.

A: Just to clarify: that's "contest in the style of NIST's AES contest", not "NIST contest in the style of the AES contest". We are not affiliated with NIST in any way.

A: We have not yet determined it completely. However, our latest line of thought is a memory-hard proof of work based the blockchain data itself. The precise algo would be: H[i] = SHA3(block header ++ nonce)[12:] for i in [0...7] A[i] = first address in blockchain state tree after H[i] B[i] = balance(A[i]) H = SHA3(block header ++ nonce ++ A[0] ++ B[0] ++ ... ++ A[7] ++ B[7]) SUCCESS = 1 if H < 2256 / difficulty else 0 This has the following advantages: Extremely memory hard to compute; makes Dagger look like a child toy Extremely easy to verify (ie. constant space / constant time) Incentivizes miners to act as full nodes storing the entire blockchain ASIC-unfriendly If ASICs do succeed, then we just have a bunch of very powerful full nodes, so our scalability problems are gone Gets rid of the need for centralized mining pools, since if you're a full node you might as well just use p2pool. The general principle is Gregory Maxwell and Andrew Miller-approved, so this might actually pretty much be what we end up using, although we are also looking into proof of stake.

########### Security ###########

If Ethereum is going to be Turing complete, Is it possible to be 100% certain that there wont be exploits uncovered in the code since its so robust.

A: Just like an exploit in Bitcoin is not 100% certain. The same will apply for Ethereum. Bitcoin was the initial experiment, the "0" on the crypto axis of innovation. Almost nothing in this world is 100% certain, we're merely continuing the experiment started by Satoshi hoping to inspire people joining us in this crypto adventure.

At the Turing Complete vs No turing complete thread on Bitcointalk, Mike Hearn talked about SNARKS. Does this technology can be incorporate in the future of Ethereum?

A: Yes, SCIP/SNARKs are potentially a very promising technology. The scalability is not quite up to where it needs to be at this point to include them in a cryptocurrency, but give it a year and we'll be able to do things like having miners verify contracts and then simply provide a proof of computation instead of requiring every node to run the contracts again. I'm very excited.

-how do you unit test / step debug contracts? We'll release tools to make this easier. We already have an alpha compiler open at http://multisig.info:3000 ; we'll also have a sort of built-in single-node local testnet in our clients later on so you can test contracts -and send transactions to them.

-how do you update buggy code in the blockchain? You can't, unless you build the contract in such a way that there's a mechanism to modify it. what about malicious updates?

See above.

-how do you pull in external data? (eg. weather, EURUSD cross, etc.) The data feed source needs to release a signed data feed, and then the contracts will verify the signature with the data feed's public key in script code.

-how will you protect against malicious code/data - eg. buffer overflows?

Have very good researchers/pentesters and make the language as simple as possible.

-what about RNG? How do you create betting contracts without revealing the PRNG seed?

Previous block hashes are the PRNG.

-how do you fire actions to the outside world?

Centralized gateways. A very recent interesting possibility is to use code obfuscation (see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/02/cryptography-breakthrough/ ) to build contracts, so contracts can contain private keys / passwords internally and then contracts would be able to produce and interpret HTTPS packets and even carry out entire sessions with entities like VPSes and banks. Obviously some computer would need to act as an intermediary, but no trust is required.

If you found my work of sorting all answers useful: mBTC donations are always welcome:) 1GqYFbfvvyPaGUTVXf1kYjsM9KU6jE1p8C

coinwatcher2 karma

Are you going to repeat this AMA in two months to address more questions that came up meanwhile? That would be fantastic!

coinwatcher2 karma

Part 2. All answers were posted by the Ethereum team in this AMA.

INDEX - Please click here to see the rest of all answers by the team:

########### Comparisons of Ethereum to other related projects/ideas ###########

How would you explain ethereum to someone who never heard of bitcoin?

A: Take a few steps back from "crypto" and think of the device you just used to type that message. At the physical level it's just a bunch of transistors, silicon and chips. What makes the hardware usable it's the operating system. Then on top of that you have apps. All of this would have been impossible without programming language(s).

Will ethereum complement bitcoin or will ether be a competitor that will rival bitcoin?

A: Definitely compliment Bitcoin. We are all huge fans of the beast that is Bitcoin and it will be the king for a long long time.

Bitcoin = Cryptocurrency Ethereum = Platform (that cryptocurries can be built upon)

Ether is the currency that is needed to run the contracts. Think of it as the oil that makes Etheruem run.

Can you explain in more detail how you see Ethereum and the bitcoin network coexisting in the future?. isn't there a risk that Ethereum renders bitcoin obsolete?

A: Bitcoin = Gold Ether = Oil different use cases and economic models. Our hope is that bitcoin becomes the long term preferred store of value and ether becomes the fuel of distributive trustless computation. {Charles}

A: As Andreas states: Bitcoin will own a large percentage of the market for the foreseeable future. The remaining quality alternatives will duke it out for smaller part of the pie.

What kinds of uses for turing completeness do you imagine people will come up with?

This is more like asking the question: "What can I build on top of windows?" My job is to make the foundation awesome and the development experience insanely great. Your job is to build something cool. Your Turn {Charles}

How is Ethereum different from Mastercoin? What advantages does it have over it?

A: They live on different levels. Mastercoin is an example of an application of our contract system and could quite easily be built on top of Ethereum. Mastercoin and colored coins are examples of why we feel the space needs Ethereum.

They are difficult and costly to deploy on top of bitcoin and have some SPV related drawbacks. {Charles}

########### Advantages of Ethereum ###########

What are the characteristics of applications that benefit significantly from Ethereum?

A: While bitcoin is great for sending payments, Ethereum contracts will be able to tackle any other financial transaction.

If you found my work of sorting all answers useful: mBTC donations are always welcome:) 1GqYFbfvvyPaGUTVXf1kYjsM9KU6jE1p8C

coinwatcher2 karma

Part 3. All answers were posted by the Ethereum team in this AMA.

INDEX - Please click here to see the rest of all answers by the team:

######## Ethereum showcase, tech demos / Future apps that run on top of Ethereum ########

How close is Ethereum to the Android toolkit metaphor?

We are modeling the reference client after android and google chrome extensions. As it stands right now, our hope is to allow people to use javascript, HTML5 and CSS3 to deploy anything they desire in the catalog. This could include gambling applications, full games like MMORPGS and even specialized web browsers. Apps make use of contracts, but don’t live on blockchain.

Have you seen any projects starting to be built with Ethereum yet?

http://bitcongress.org is the first one I know of that has absolutely no connection to our core team; it's just a group of people on the internet that decided to build on top of our platform. We also have people working on refining our five-line-Namecoin implementation and making it more fully featured. There's also a group interested in using Ethereum to make a trust-free multisig wallet, using Ethereum contracts to provide bank-like consumer protection (withdrawal limits, they have the power to freeze the account with your permission if your key gets stolen, etc) but in such a way that you're still 100% in control of your funds. And then there are projects that are going to be working heavily with us, like Egora and OpenTransactions.

What applications or services is Ethereum planning on building itself, besides the protocol, clients, blockchain explorer, etc?

A: Stage 1 is to develop the protocol and refine the contract, fee and security model. Stage 2 is to build the reference client. Stage 3 is to develop the application ecosystem. I would love to see gambling, OT, Ripple, voting systems, wall street contracts and trading system as well as DAOs living on our blockchain and in our app store at launch. I'd also love to see an online game using Ether as an ingame currency. {Charles}

Q: Are you saying that Ethereum itself will build those applications (gambling, OT, Ripple, etc)? Or that you're hoping other people will build them? Also, are you saying Ethereum itself will build an app store? What will that look like?

A: We are building the app store and it is inspired from the chrome and android stores. We would love to partner with the bittorrent guys on some things for that store. In terms of who builds the apps, some we make ourselves, some our partners make and some organically come.

Q: Thanks. What advantages, if any, will apps created in-house or by partners have over apps created by other developers?

A: The (D)app store will be like a plugin module/function for the reference clients. Just think of clicking a button, and then looking through a selection of Dapps that can extend the functionality of your wallet to pretty much anything from encrypted chat via Bitmessage to drag-n-drop decentralized file storage. Easy.

Any plans for micropayments? Will that be supported?

A: We've had several conversations with a few innovators in this space at Miami and over the web. Micropayments are not just possible with ethereum, but are also enabled with cryptocurrencies. This is where I see software like KryptoKit and apps for our reference client coming into play. Micropayments has much more to do with user experience than technology can this point. Lot of money to be made for the person who gets it right.... {Charles}

Q: Will the tx-fee model make it possible? Or will the network costs for maintaining all be too high to make micropayments usable like normal payments?

A: Fees are something you figure out once you have test applications running. The goal is to get an idea what is profitable to run on blockchain and what has to be done offchain. In terms of microtransactions, I think we shouldn't have any issues.

Did you study Zerocoin? As far as I understand, you make provable unspendable escrow transactions, which can then later be spent using zero-knowledge proof into a new coinbase transaction. Would that be compatible with Ethereum and if the Zerocash proof-of-concept proves to be successful, would you consider implementing it given the regulatory consequences?

A: This can be done as a contract and a subcurrency. we reached out to Dr. Green and hopefully can collaborate on something in the future. Preserving fungibility and anonymity ought to be a priority for the infrastructure builders in this space. It's always on my mind. I think we also have an obligation to make more effective use of the keypairs everyone in the ecosystem has for all kinds of CINA applications. I think we are just a few years away from a really good blockchain based web of trust. {Charles}

Could you elaborate about how a decentralized dropbox-esque service could be built on top of Ethereum?

A: Suppose that you have a 1 GB file, with 225 blocks of 32 bytes each. The first step is to construct a Merkle tree out of the file. Then, you create a contract which, every 100 blocks, randomly picks a branch of the merkle tree based on the parent block hash, and gives X ether to the first node that provides that branch. This contract basically incentivizes nodes to hold on to your file. When you actually want to download the file again, you can use some kind of micropayment channel-based per-packet approach. And that's basically it, at least for the simple version.

If I use Ethereum to create my own cryptocurrency, do the transaction fees in that new cryptocurrency have to be paid in ether? Or can they be paid in the new currency? Is the new currency made of fractional pieces of ether (like colored coins, in a sense)?

You can set up the currency contract (say, for Microsoft shares) so that you pay the transaction fee in ether, but then the contract takes a transaction fee in Microsoft shares, auctions the shares off to get ether, and then sends you your ether back (likely the contract will keep a running balance so you get your ether back immediately). Thus, you would need an initial deposit of something like 0.1 ether to "activate" your account, but once it's activated you only really need to worry about Microsoft shares.

What are the things you are most excited about Ethereum being able to accomplish? Best case scenario in 5 years what is it being used for?

The examples in the whitepaper (section 4) are a good starting point; if we can have people trading financial contracts on shares of decentralized autonomous organizations in decentralized blockchain-based markets mediated by a decentralized reputation system and using decentralized Dropbox to store their data I think it would be quite exciting all by itself. But for me personally the most exciting part of being in the Ethereum project is seeing people come up with new ideas of what they want to run on top of it that I hadn't even thought up of. It's like Javascript; Brandon Eich did not envision anyone writing Gmail or Facebook or Bitcoin wallets on top of his language, and yet here we are.

If you found my work of sorting all answers useful: mBTC donations are always welcome:) 1GqYFbfvvyPaGUTVXf1kYjsM9KU6jE1p8C