Gavin Wood

Gavin Wood is the designer of solidarity and the founder of Parity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidity http://gavwood.com/

If you have time to read up on the technicals, the following introductory paper (dubbed 'the yellow paper') is highly informative with regards to the technology and related work Ethereum is based upon: http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

> Right, but the gas cost cannot be distributed over _all_ nodes All computation on the Ethereum blockchain is done through the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The protocol defines a gas cost for each opcode in the EVM, hence the gas cost is distributed across all nodes. Any singular node can change the gas cost in their client, but if they pay less than the cost that the miners expect then their transactions will not be processed - as it typical with distributed consensus systems. > I'll keep looking around for more info, but I do hope Ethereum people realize that YouTube videos are not the same thing as proper documentation There is a lot of documentation on their Github page. I would recommend starting with the white paper, then check the wiki and if you are still not convinced (and also brave) check the yellow paper: -https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper -https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Design-Rationale -https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/FAQ -http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

> there's a lot of people building things for ethereum. Are you sure it's ready? There seem to be critical pieces missing in the execution model. Specifically, arbitrary code execution by strangers. From the white-paper: http://www.gavwood.com/Paper.pdf "the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a quasi-Turing- complete machine; the quasi qualification comes from the fact that the computation is intrinsically bounded through a parameter, gas, which limits the total amount of com- putation done." This all sounds very interesting and novel. You buy credits for hosting, this goes further then using Bitcoins to rent bare metal servers. It's integrated in the architecture. Reading on in that whitepaper. "The machine does not follow the standard von Neumann architecture. Rather than storing program code in generally-accessible memory or storage, it is stored separately in a virtual ROM interactable only through a specialised instruction." Quite exotic and no re-usage of existing code. What does that mean for IO and networking? Are you allowed to create TPC/IP listen sockets? This is undefined. Moreover, "For the release series, we use a more complex proof-of-work. This has yet to be formally defined, but involves two components; firstly that it concerns the evaluation of programs on the EVM." The developers aims for an ASIC-proof proof-of-work system and link it to their arbitrary code execution ability (EVM). However, they are still working on this. Conclusion, it is an…

Completely agree. Judging from the technical description [1] and the most recent version of the draft white paper [2] alone, I think the project would benefit greatly from more substantial input and expertise from the academic cryptography community. I'm afraid they are spending a lot of effort cargo-culting on the wrong things, while missing where the real challenge lies: How to deal with the inevitable orders-of-magnitude increase in transaction size/complexity while preserving consensus-based distributed verification. To be more precise: The metered computation mechanism is a very clever solution for dealing with unrestricted computation and unbounded data storage, but their proposed solution does not convincingly address the inevitable increase in space required. Hand-waving about greedy subtree verification without actual numbers/scenarios that shows this could work at all (which would be very surprising to say the least) is not convincing. In all a great idea, though. It would be great if it works out. [1] http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf [2] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whitepaper-2-Draft

The spec [http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf] has been to revert on errors since day 1: > Just as with contract creation, if the execution halts in an exceptional fashion (i.e. due to an exhausted gas supply, stack underflow, invalid jump destination or invalid instruction), then no gas is refunded to the caller and the state is reverted to the point immediately prior to balance transfer (i.e. σ). The Oct 4 commit just optimizes the way that reverts are implemented in go-ethereum (use a journal rather than deep copies).

I really feel frustrated by your lack of search/manual-crawling/link-clicking/understanding capabilities. He was the official security reviewer of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then some extra references so you can continue your own search: - "MPF (Mental Poker Framework): A new family of practical and secure Mental Poker protocols" http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner - MAVEPAY: a new lightweight payment scheme for peer to peer currency networks: https://bitslog.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/mavepay1.pdf - Strict Memory Hard Hashing Functions: http://www.hashcash.org/papers/memohash.pdf referenced in the Ethereum original paper: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf

There are actually 10+ independent implementations of Ethereum (including one in Haskell): https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3pdskt/how_many_ethereum_im… This was part of the development philosophy, to implement the client (based on the yellow paper http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf that specifies the protocol) in multiple languages in order to find bugs: if 2 clients don't agree on something, then we found a bug.

Check-out the Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction set by reviewing Gavin's Yellow Paper. It start on page 22: http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

There are definitely some major implementation level differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin. The hashing mechanism (Ethash) is quite different from Bitcoin, as well as how references to previous transactions are stored. You can read more about it here [1] and here [2] [1]: https://ethereum.gitbooks.io/frontier-guide/content/ [2]: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf

Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850 Generating Text with Recurrent Neural Networks http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2011/LANG-RNN.pdf Bitcoin whitepaper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Ethereum paper http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

This version contains some mistakes and approximations. For a more up-to-date paper you should take a look at the White paper v2 draft [1]. A more formal and technical description is presented in the Yellow paper (also draft) [2]. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whitepaper-2-Draft [2] http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

The Ethereum team just released a more technical paper: http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

>NFTs and crypto currencies are a part of what people think the Web 3.0 will be, but they are definitely not synonyms. The author, however, seem to have did that. Regardless of the original or intended definitions of "Web3", it will end up being whatever the masses think it is. To recap some history: - "web3" circa ~2014 when coined by Gavin Wood covered 3 concepts without mentioning NFTs : (1) hash-ids of static content instead of urls (2) p2p encrypted messaging (3) consensus engine. (One of the earlier essays from 2014: https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html) - "web3" circa ~2021 emphasizing the "token economy" (e.g. NFTs) popularized by Chris Dixon (a16z VC): this is the current news mania with celebrities selling jpgs, etc Therefore "web3==NFTs" narrative has overtaken the original Gavin Wood narrative. Analogous situation of evolution of terms was the "internet". In the 1980s, "internet" included Gopher, telnet, USENET, ftp. (E.g. I used to be able to telnet into public computers before all firewalls and Linux configs shut off telnet access.) But Gopher/USENET/etc faded and HTTP became the dominant idea of what "internet" is. NFTs now have constant press coverage of eye-popping sale amounts from celebrities and OpenSea founders are now paper billionaires. Therefore, NFTs dominate the meaning of "web3" because getting rich is more sexy to talk about than encrypted-p2p-communications-based-on-hash-identities.