Reaching the Frontier | Ethereum Foundation Blog

First, some background information. We’ve already covered a little bit about what you can expect from Frontier. Ethereum launch process Blog post and Gav gave us Comprehensive overview of the status of development efforts. You can also read about our ongoing security work. Includes bug bounty system. The bug bounty program has found my favorite bugs so far. Jonas NickThe discovery of You can transfer value from their account to yours by sending someone a negative payment!

As the bug bounty found, it’s an absolute gem. Well done!

Gav has a new blog post that explains a bit more about the difficult end of the development process. It synchronizes three different implementations to produce an accurate specification for Ethereum., instead of having a standard implementation that implicitly defines a protocol specification and makes different versions compatible across bugs. This is a pretty rigorous and thorough approach to putting together a system, and it’s worth a read to see how the engineering work is going.

You should now have a pretty good understanding of what the development process looks like and the different threads of work that are woven together in a release. So let’s talk about what actually needs to be done between now and Frontier.

there is Four specific challenges We decided to meet at Frontier.

• security
• network stability
• mining
• exchange

Two of them, mining and exchange, are partnership efforts. People must bring and run software, in some cases along with their own tools, to provide services as part of the ecosystem. Remember. We are launching an ecosystem, not just a product. Everything is part of that ecosystem. Each of these aspects of the release process must work on their own and in conjunction with the other aspects to ensure that the ecosystem is truly properly tested under load.

furthermore:

• All software should be reasonably easy to install and include mining.
• We need to support partners, especially exchanges, to provide services.
• We need to build checkpoint and blockchain integrity testing services.
• This is done in the context of a Frontier environment that provides strong guarantees of network integrity (more on this later) while accepting the risk of network rollbacks if unexpected network behavior or other issues are discovered.

Reasonably good progress is being made on all fronts. Instead of giving us a release date and risking gaps in other work days due to the pressure of having to meet that date, we’ll check things off during the release process. This basically lets you know how far away a release is on a certain date without having to guess how long everything will take, post your guess, and then hope it becomes a reality on your calendar. : As I said before, this is a security-driven process, not a schedule-driven process. We can make that process fairly transparent to you and give you a summary so you don’t have to look at the repository. But rather than just giving you an explanation, it’s better to involve them in the process so you can understand what’s happening and how things are going. Tally up the days and keep guessing about the actual status of the task. We believe this approach is more transparent, better suited to the crowdfunding development process, and overall more realistic.

If you want to see the current state of play, Jeffrey Wilcke (Go Client Leads Amsterdam hub) Go client issue tracker for Frontier.

this Issue list The best reference for Frontier releases. Currently, 10 issues are closed and 26 issues are open. New issues will arise, and of course issue count is only a very loose proxy for “delivery time”, but work done is the best indicator, so if you want to predict, look there.

NOTE: This is what we call “valve time” (Although Valve Time produces awesome products!) We have an open development process, so you can see the code being written, download the latest branches, and participate in testing. Not everything is hidden behind a company promotional wall. However, we are going through a time of “launching innovative software with huge security processes involved” and predicting a schedule for something that has never been done before is not going to help anyone. Some of the advantages of how Ethereum raises funds over traditional funding models include: It’s about being able to do the right thing in the medium to long term rather than being subject to constant market pressure about next quarter’s performance.

We will say this: there will be at least two weeks notice before anything goes live. You’ll get a lot of news through your blog posts, you’ll see the number of issues go down, and you’ll start saying positive things about security audit feedback and more. We will keep you posted!

What about the feature list? We covered this primarily in our Launch Processes post, but Frontier reiterates the following:

• Use only as a command line client
• You mine at 10% of the normal rate, but this ends up being real Ether.
• When Homestead launches, it will include the full set of blockchain features, including smart contracts and logs, even if everything except account balances is cleared.

• We are working with exchanges to enable ETH conversion during the Frontier period.
• For security purposes, the blockchain is manually inspected every 24 hours and any reported anomalies are investigated.
• Official exchanges will use this checkpoint service to protect traded assets from potential blockchain rollbacks.

• In the event of a particularly severe failure, the Foundation may discontinue Frontiers checks entirely and release a client upgrade.

In short, while we are doing everything possible to make Frontier a safe place to test Ethereum with real value, we strongly discourage people from using their Ether on the Frontier network where they cannot afford to lose it.

Frontier is primarily intended for people writing and testing tools for mining and exchanges, and perhaps more robust dApp developers. You can download the client and even mine some Ether since you can, but it’s not a typical release that regular users would expect to interact with at all. The show actually begins in Homestead, and we’ll have more news about Homestead’s features later.

Keep watching the skies for more news!