Software Engineering Daily

Ethereum is a system for running decentralized smart contracts. In the current implementation of Ethereum, every smart contract gets deployed to every full node. Whenever a user wants to call a smart contract, that smart contract gets executed on each full node–across the entire network. The current model for smart contract execution needs to be made more scalable. In today’s episode, Christian Reitwiessner joins the show to describe Plasma–a systemContinue reading...

Soumya Basu is a PhD student at Cornell, where he studies distributed systems problems associated with cryptocurrencies. Soumya is advised by Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell professor who previously appeared on the show to discuss smart contract security. Soumya joins the show today to talk about a variety of issues in the cryptocurrency space. We first explored the degree to which Bitcoin and Ethereum are actually decentralized–which might be lessContinue reading...

Consensus protocols are used to allow computers to work together. A consensus protocol lets different servers agree on the state of a system. For decades, these protocols have been used to establish consensus among database nodes, application servers, and other infrastructure that runs within an enterprise. More recently, new consensus protocols have been invented to allow cryptoeconomic systems to agree on the state of a financial system. The first cryptoeconomicContinue reading...

The DAO was a system of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that investors put millions of dollars into. Back in May 2016, it was the largest crowdfunding event in history, and we discussed it in detail in a previous episode with Matt Leising. The DAO was hacked due to a security vulnerability, and this event led to a hard fork of Ethereum. The DAO was organized by a companyContinue reading...

Data streams about the weather can be used to predict how soybean futures are going to change in price. Satellite data streams can take pictures of the number of cars on the road, and judge how traffic patterns are changing. Search engines can aggregate data from different queries and determine what people are most interested in. Data streams define how the world is changing over time. Technology companies process theseContinue reading...

Anthony Diiorio was involved with Ethereum since the earliest days. He was one of the first people to see the Ethereum ideas presented by Vitalik Buterin, and he invested deeply in Ethereum–both financially and by helping to establish the early Ethereum community. Anthony started Decentral in 2014, which is a hub for his projects in the cryptocurrency space, the most impactful project being Jaxx. Jaxx is a blockchain wallet thatContinue reading...

A financial exchange is an operationally intensive business. You have customers making a high volume of transactions, your service has to be low latency and highly available, and you are dealing with a lot of money. A cryptocurrency exchange has all of the complexity of a typical financial exchange–and then some additional complexity. ShapeShift is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to buy and sell digital assets–Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, andContinue reading...

Cryptocurrency speculation has pulled in a large population of people who do not know what they are investing in. If you hear about an investment of $1000 turning into $1M, it’s tempting to get sucked in yourself. For most of these everyday people, the game is completely rigged. A large percentage of market activity is driven by “pump and dumps.” A pump and dump is a conspiracy to trick investorsContinue reading...

In the finance industry, many people have a computer on their desk called a Bloomberg terminal. A Bloomberg terminal contains news, stock prices, communication tools, and other features that make it worth a high subscription price. And people in finance can afford to pay that high subscription because their decisions can cause a gain or loss of thousands of dollars. Cryptocurrency investors have a similar set of informational problems asContinue reading...

Decentralized applications can be built on the Ethereum blockchain. Just as the Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed, append-only ledger of financial transaction history, Ethereum is a distributed, append-only ledger of computational transaction history. New kinds of applications can be built on the Ethereum blockchain—and just like every new technology, we need an interface to bridge that new technology and our existing technology.  We can use a pure Ethereum browser likeContinue reading...