wiki

My understanding that a full sync in Bitcoin means something different than a full sync on Ethereum. Bitcoin's database is modeled on UTXO (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unspent_transaction_output) therefore all clients need to validate all transactions from genesis to calculate final balances. Meanwhile, Ethereum is account based and state is global, and to determine the balances you only need to check the merkle proof, no need to store or re-validate each and every transaction, just the final result. Source: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Design-Rationale#accou... quote "The benefits of accounts are:Large space savings" In Ethereum, the closet to a Bitcoin full node would be an 'full archive' node, those are keeping all the transactions, down to the stack traces and events, without pruning. These are usually run by block explor

Yes, there are (and some that already do), but doing it correctly is actually pretty complicated. Checkout Ethereum's sharding docs: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs

That's a blatant lie, running a full node is not required to "be decentralized", for the same reason you don't need to run a full node in Bitcoin. Light nodes have the same guarantees about the integrity and irreversibility that full nodes do. Perhaps you should try learning about them - see https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-protocol - before stating things you don't understand? The fact that the worst thing a "fudster" like you has to say against Ethereum is that it had a hard fork to revert a millionaire hack caused by a bug in early stages of the project; whereas something not too different also happened to Bitcoin - see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident - when it had the same age; says it all. I don't often comment here, but I simply can't understand why an human being would come to the internet and h

I don't know much in terms of blockchain _research_, but reading the whitepapers of established cryptocurrencies will give you a great overview & keywords to research further. - Bitcoin[0] (the classic!) - Ethereum[1] (contracts is a really innovative concept) - Iota[2] (uses a 'tangle', rather than a blockchain) - Nano[3] (similar to Iota, but faster? Everyone gets their own personal blockchain -> asynchronous updates! Gets faster with more users) [0]https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [1]https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper [2]http://iotatoken.com/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf [3]https://nano.org/en/whitepaper

Fewer full nodes can download and keep up. But light weight ethereum clients[1] shouldn’t have an issue. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-protocol

The idea behind sharding is to essentially parallelize the blockchain by splitting the one big chain into many smaller chains which can communicate with each other asynchronously. This is a really difficult problem for countless reasons but if they can get it working it offers a lot of very important benefits. It can process orders of magnitude more transactions than a conventional blockchain without the loss of decentralization seen in schemes using dPoS such as Steem, light clients get to be much lighter while still maintaining high security, and smart contracts which live on an individual shard and do not require cross shard communication are massively more efficient and can operate at a far lower cost than smart contracts currently can. The last issue is probably the most important for Ethereum specifically because currently most smar

DAPP Radar is not the authoritative source for all Ethereum applications. There are many like Augur, Golem, MakerDAI, etc that aren't even included on that list. Depends on when "early days of internet" is defined? The internet could be seen as an evolution of ARPAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET which was defined in the mid-1960s and took years to deploy and probably decades to evolve to the usefulness you describe. ETH network is moving to a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm which will reduce it's electricity impact: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs And meanwhile, there are other blockchains, like Qtum, that are already Proof-of-Stake and run Ethereum VM and create blocks on Raspberry Pis, for minimal energy consumption: https://github.com/qtumproject/qtum/wiki/Installing-Qtum-on-...

Here's a spec from 2015: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/c02254611f218f43cbb075... From the block validation section: "Is block.timestamp <= now + 900 and is block.timestamp >= parent.timestamp?" (In Solidity, block.timestamp is in seconds, and I think that's a direct translation from the underlying opcode, so I assume it's 900 seconds here.)

So far, we have a long way to go to build higher quality code. There's a few reasons: 1. Blockchain smart contracts are often unchangeable, so you can't fix bugs 2. The language is being built as people write code, with some bad design choices that encourage mistakes (slowly being fixed) 3. Libraries are still being developed 4. Tooling is still limited (even basic linting) 5. People are not taking the time to have a beta process. 6. People prematurely optimize gas, at the cost of readability (For non-Ethereum devs, here's a short tutorial for how the language works: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/solidity/ ) My own view is that you have to code expecting that things go wrong, and ensure that your logic survives inevitable mistakes ('resiliency'). There's a lot of great resources on security, for people interested in this space: Ethere

You fundamentally misunderstand PoS. There is no social trust involved. It will work entirely through economic incentivization, including 'group penalization' when enough validators are offline/byzantine at the same time in the case of Casper. Read more here and try to fully understand this document before you make blanket statements like 'PoS won't work': https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

1) Proof of Stake will end the argument about electricity[0] 2) To criticize Ethereum as "an extremely slow computer" is the laziest, no-effort, no-thought attack you can make [0] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

> The core of Ethereum includes the consensus engine, the networking code and any supporting libraries. For C++, this includes libethereum, libp2p, libdevcore, libdevcrypto, libethcore, libevm and libevmface. > The core of Ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licenses. This reflects our desire to have Ethereum used in as many diverse environments as possible, even those which, for various reasons can require modifications or augmentations to the software which cannot be released to the public. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Licensing

You don't need ETH to send messages on whisper. And Whisper doesn't store your messages on the blockchain. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whisper