Midnight February 1st saw the commencement of the annual Ethereum Proof-of-Concept series. We invite your community to join in and experience the ongoing Proof-of-Concept launch. The current IX release has the testnet; Olympic, now available.
The intention of Olympic is to reward those who test the boundaries of the Ethereum Blockchain during the pre-launch period. We’ve been pushing the network with transactions and making the most of state to see how it holds up under heavy load. Application developers, data providers and exchanges are all encouraged to deploy and develop on the testnet. You can also run nodes and activate multiple virtual private servers.
The total prize fund is up to 25,000 ether. There will be four main prizes and a grand award for the first person who produces a notable fork in the testnet. The four categories are Transaction activity, Use of virtual machines, Mining prowess and General punishment. Each category will offer a prize of 2,500 Ethereums as well as one or two smaller prizes of 100-1,000 Ethers. Small rewards of 0.1-5 Ethers will also be given out for participation. Each category will be judged by Vitalik, Gavin?, and Jeff, with the help of automated blockchain analytics tools.
In addition, Ethereum Genesis block winners will receive a reward of their name being immortalized on the Ethereum website. If you want to be eligible for a prize, please send an email describing your claim to olympic@ethereum.org.
This is the final stage of the Ethereum Development process before the release of Frontier 1.0. The network is currently stable at its current size, 20-100 nodes. All major clients remain in consensus and we are close to a code lock. Testing and auditing is ongoing and it is expected to last around 14 days. However, there is the possibility to reduce or extend this depending on technical considerations. A 48-hour countdown will be provided when we are ready.
Here are the binaries and sources: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v0.9.18
Guide to the work-in-progress Frontier can be found here: http://ethereum.gitbooks.io/frontier-guide/
Transaction activity
This category includes transactions sent and received. Possible rewards include:
- The account that sends the most transactions
- The account that contributes the most total gas consumption
- The account with the most transactions
- The account that contributes most (measured by bytes) to blockchain in terms proof of transaction content
- The account with the lowest address (in terms lexicographic order/numerical representation; both orders are equivalent) which sends at most one transaction
- Two accounts that send at most one transaction to addresses close together
Use of virtual machines
This category includes activities related to the virtual machine. Possible rewards include:
- The account that receives the most calls from any opcode
- The account which makes the most calls to any opcode during a single transaction
- The account that sends the fastest transaction to a customer
- The account that submits the quickest transaction per