
Ethereum Homestead release - ConsenSys
https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/02/29/homestead-release/
======
kasbah
If I wanted to create some kind of kudos/points economy for my local hackspace
would Ethereum be a good choice or should I rather look into creating an
altcoin?

I am not interested in hooking it up to the global networks just providing a
way for people to earn points for running workshops, cleaning and doing
maintenance that they can spend as time on the laser cutter or 3D printer or
similar (which we currently charge for).

~~~
kang
Create an altcoin simply by forking many available coins, with ethereum you'd
have to pay to be bounded to the system, which is a special use-case.

Here are a couple of tutorials to make your own altcoin in a few minutes:

[https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~baisang/LearnCoin.pdf](https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~baisang/LearnCoin.pdf)
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2ylzCBr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2ylzCBrZhigJ:themerkle.com/news/altcoins-
dying-make-one-hour/)

~~~
aakilfernandes
If he creates his own blockchain, he has to pay to mine that blockchain.

~~~
na85
If all he wants is for users to be able to send kudos back and forth, he could
make the difficulty trivial, mine a few million/billion coins on a network of
1, and then distribute as he sees fit.

~~~
aakilfernandes
If the difficulty is trivial, there's no point in a blockchain since you can
double spend cheaply

~~~
na85
Then simply hike the difficulty way up afterwards.

~~~
zaroth
Hike the difficulty, how? Hard fork? And even if you could hike difficulty
with consensus, then you'd be locking yourself out of mining any new blocks,
and your blockchain would stall! An altcoin is not a good solution for the
proposed use case.

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kibwen
The release announcement mentions that the Go and C++ clients are compatible,
but the Rust client (Parity) has also just added support for the new version
of the protocol:
[https://twitter.com/gavofyork/status/703624799944310784](https://twitter.com/gavofyork/status/703624799944310784)

I'm happy to see that Ethereum encourages multiple implementations, I'm
curious how they managed to achieve this given that Bitcoin seems to have had
so much trouble doing the same.

~~~
orblivion
I'm not speaking as someone familiar, so someone who is should superecede me.
But, I understand that it was a goal from day one not to fall into the same
trap Bitcoin is in with their reference implementation. They did it by
developing a spec, and having three official clients developed at the same
time in three different languages.

~~~
mike_hearn
Bitcoin's problem is not that it has a single reference implementation. It can
be forked, at least in a technical sense.

Bitcoin's problem is that a tiny number of people managed to convince key
players that they are irreplaceable "experts", despite having repeatedly
proven that they aren't experts at all (go check out the Bitcoin forums today
to see the wailing of users due to the giant tx backlog).

This isn't something Ethereum has any solution for. If Vitalik stepped back
and after a few years some random developers had managed to manipulate the
Ethereum community into doing something stupid, having 3 implementations
instead of 1 wouldn't save them.

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david-given
Does anyone have any information about Ethereum costing?

That is, on an average machine, how long does it take to mine a block, and how
much processing/storage do we get with that block? Do we need to mine a
_complete_ block before we can get any work done?

My concern is that if I want to build an app with a simple message bus and a
small amount of transactional state, each client might need to mine for a
prohibitive amount of time before it can actually start participating in the
network.

~~~
barnabee
I am not sure regarding the block times, but for connecting clients for the
purpose of running a simple app, you may be interested in the light client
protocol, which according to the link below only requires processing of ~1kb
of network data every 2 mins.

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-
protocol](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-protocol)

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empath75
Just out of curiosity, how profitable is mining ethereum, and can you do it
with a GPU or is it mostly ASICs? I have a brand new gtx980 ti on the way for
the oculus, and was curious if I could run it to help pay for it.

~~~
polymetric
It's GPU memory intensive, so no ASICS yet, and an ETH ASIC would just be a
general purpose computer. It's fairly profitable to mine, assuming your
electricity cost is reasonable.

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detaro
link should be: [https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/02/29/homestead-
release/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/02/29/homestead-release/)

~~~
dang
Thanks. Changed from [https://blog.ethereum.org](https://blog.ethereum.org).

