Frontier
FRONTIER IS COMING
- Frontier launch final steps
- Etherchain API look out for block #1028201
- Olympic network stats
Frontier is the first in a series of releases that punctuate the roadmap for the development of Ethereum. Frontier will be followed by ‘Homestead’, ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Serenity’ throughout the coming year, each adding new features and improving the user friendliness and security of the platform.
Ethereum is special and different from other software projects in that its release also involves launching a live network. After a year and a half of development the Proof of Concept series completed 9 cycles. The 10th iteration resulted in the Olympic testnet, which gradually led to the Release Candidate client for Frontier.
The Ethereum network goes live when the clients consent on the genesis block and start mining transactions on it. The genesis block will reference an initial system state where all the accounts set up by the presale exist with the correct amount of pre-issued ether allocated. Initially, the network will be in a "thawing" state allowing only blocks to be mined, but not transactions to be processed. This allows for users to have a break-in period to connect to the network while also building up its security.
In conjunction with the Frontier launch several exchanges will likely start enabling trade of Ether, which will provide necessary liquidity to the marketplace, allowing users and miners to transfer their holdings to other users requiring more or less Ether. As opposed to an earlier strategy, there is no plan to remove any contracts from the blockchain or otherwise alter the network to carry balances over to Homestead. In other words, the state in Homestead will be a direct and unmodified continuation of the state in Frontier.
Mining reward is the full amount of 5 ether per block (as opposed to our earlier proposal of a reduced amount). Mining rewards are discussed in detail here
- You are responsible for your own computer security. If your machine is compromised you will lose your ether, access to any contracts and maybe more.
- You are responsible for your own actions. If you mess something up or break any laws while using this software, it's your fault, and your fault only.
- You are responsible for your own karma. Don't be a jerk and respect others.
WARNING: Before you interact with the ethereum Frontier network, make sure you read the documentation and understand the caveats and risks. Please read the legal disclaimer
The focus of Frontier is the Go implementation of an ethereum full node, with a command line interface codenamed "Geth".
By installing and running geth, you can take part in the ethereum live network, mine ether on the blockchain, transfer funds between addresses, create contracts and send transactions.
WARNING: before you use geth or interact with the ethereum Frontier live network, make sure you read the documentation and fully understand the caveats and risks.
Apart from geth, the Go CLI, the Frontier release contains the following components:
-
web3.jslibrary implementing the JavaScript API for Dapps to conveniently interact with an ethereum node -
solca standalone solidity compiler. You only need this if you want to use your Dapp or console to compile solidity code. -
ethminera standalone miner for openCL GPU mining -
netstata network monitoring GUI allows you to add your node to the http://stats.ethdev.com page
Ethereum is not something that’s centrally ‘launched’, but instead emerges from consensus. Users will have to voluntarily download and run a specific version of the software, then manually generate and load the Genesis block to join the official project’s network.
Once Frontier has been installed on their machines, users will need to generate the Genesis block themselves, then load it into their Frontier clients. A script and instructions on how to do this will be provided as part of the new Ethereum website, as well as our various wikis.
We’re often asked how existing users will switch from the test network to the live network: it will be done through a switch at the Geth console (--networkId). By default the new build will aim to connect to the live network, to switch back to the test network you’ll simply indicate a network id of ‘0’.
The work on the Frontier software is far from over. Expect weekly updates which will give you access to better, more stable clients. Many of the planned Frontier gotchas (which included a chain reset at Homestead, limiting mining rewards to 10%, and centralized checkpointing) were deemed unnecessary. However, there are still big differences between Frontier and Homestead. In Frontier, we’re going to have issues, we’re going to have updates, and there will be bugs – users are taking their chances when using the software. There will be big (BIG) warning messages before developers are able to even install it. In Frontier, documentation is limited, and the tools provided require advanced technical skills.
The Canary contracts are simple switches holding a value equal to 0 or 1. Each contract is controlled by a different member of the Eth/Dev team and will be updated to ‘1’ if the internal Frontier Disaster Recovery Team flags up a consensus issue, such as a fork.
Within each Frontier client, a check is made after each block against 4 contracts. If two out of four of these contracts have a value switched from 0 to 1, mining stops and a message urging the user to update their client is displayed. This is to prevent “fire and forget” miners from preventing a chain upgrade.
This process is centralized and will only run for the duration of Frontier. It helps preventing the risk of a prolonged period (24h+) of outage.
You probably are already familiar with our network stats monitor, https://stats.ethdev.com/. It gives a quick overview of the health of the network, block resolution time and Gas statistics. Remember that participation in the stats page is voluntary, and nodes have to add themselves before they appear on the panel. See details on network monitoring
In addition to the stats page, we will have a status page at https://status.ethereum.org/ (no link as the site is not live yet) which will gives a concise overview of any issue that might be affecting Frontier. Use it as your first port of call if you think something might not be right.
Finally, if any of the clients receive an invalid block, they will refuse to process it send it to the bad block website (AKA ‘Sentinel’). This could mean a bug, or something more serious, such as a fork. Either way, this process will alert our developers to potential issues on the network. The website itself is public and available at https://badblocks.ethdev.com (currently operating on the testnet).
During the last couple of months, the Ethereum test network was pushed to its limits in order to test scalability and block propagation times. As part of this test we encouraged users to spam the network with transactions, contract creation code and call to contracts, at times reaching over 25 transactions per second. This has led the test network chain to grow to a rather unwieldy size, making it difficult for new users to catch up. For this reason, and shortly after the Frontier release, there will be a new test network following the same rules as Frontier.
During the Olympic phase there were a number of rewards for various achievements including mining prowess. These rewards will not be part of the Frontier Genesis block, but instead will be handed out by a Foundation bot during the weeks following the release.
Resources:
- Frontier launch final steps
- Frontier is coming blogpost by Stephan Tual announcing the launch.
- The frontier website
- Original announcement of the release scheme by Vinay Gupta
- Follow-up blogpost
- Least Authority audit blogpost with links to the audit report,
- Deja Vu audit blogpost
- Olympic. Frontier prerelease, Vitalik's blogpost detailing olympic rewards.