Firstly, here is some background information. We’ve previously discussed the things to anticipate with the Ethereum Launch Process in the Ethereum Launch Process blog post by Gav. We are extremely thankful for that. You can also find out about the ongoing security work, which includes a bug bounty system. The bug bounty programme discovered one of my favourite bugs to date: jonas nick’s detection that you could send a negative check to someone who is transferring money from their bank to yours.
The bug bounty system is really amazing. Well done!
In this blog post, Gav will provide more detail about the end of the development process. It is important to make a precise specification as it allows three different implementations to be used together. Instead of having a single implementation that implicitly defines and is compatible with all versions, we should have a version that can be used to implement the protocol specification. This is a very thorough and in-depth approach to constructing a system, and it is worth reading to get an idea of how the engineering work is progressing.
By now, you should have a good understanding of what the development process looks like and the different threads of work that are being woven into the release. So, let’s consider what is necessary between now and the end, Frontier.
In particular, there are four particular challenges for us to meet at Frontier.
- Security
- Network stability
- Mining
- Exchange
These are all present. Mining and Sharing Partnership work is work where people take our software and use their own tools in certain cases to provide services as part of the ecosystem. Remember, we are launching an ecosystem, not just a product. Everything is part of this ecology. Each of these components must work together for the ecosystem to be able to function under load.
Also:
- All software must be easy to install, even mining.
- We need to support exchanges to offer services.
- We need to develop our blockchain and checkpoint security testing services
- At Frontier, we will provide strong guarantees for network integrity (more information later), at the cost of network rollbacks in the event of unforeseen network behavior.
There are positive developments on all fronts. We will not give a release date and then risk something being lost under the pressure of meeting it. Instead, we will check them off in the process as we move forward. This will allow you to get an idea of how far away we are from the launch on any given day, without us basically having to guess how long it will take, post our guess and then hope that we can make the timetable come true. As we have said, this is not a scheduling process but a safety-driven process. We can make the whole process transparent and provide you with summary information, so you don’t have to go to the repositories. However, we would prefer that you take part in the process so that you can understand the work and the current status. This method is transparent, more suitable for crowdfunding development and, in general, more realistic.
If you want to know the current status, Jeffrey Wilcke (Lead in Go Client and the Amsterdam hub) is the Go To customer issue tracker Frontier.
This issue list is the best reference for the launch of Frontier: currently, there are 10 closed issues and 26 open. New problems will arise and the issue count is only a rough indicator. “Ship time” However, the work done is the best indicator.
