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Recently, there was a dustup on Crypto Twitter (started here, carries on here) about Ethereum’s money supply. The claim was made that Ethereum’s money supply was not easily available, nor was it widely agreed upon. News flash: Both of these claims are right. At one point, our project, TrueBlocks, was mentioned, so I thought I’d write an article (which has grown into two articles and a code base) exploring the issue.

This article is incomplete in the extreme. [Jan 20, 2021: Since writing this article, we’ve come upon a project called TurboGeth. It reduces the size of the hard drive needed for an archive node from 6TB to around 1.5TB. Significant difference. Same data. Less costs.] In the first part, we simply present pictures and prices for the components we used to build the two Ethereum archive nodes we run in house.

Why build an 18-decimal place accurate ledger if it doesn’t balance? [Accompanying Video] I had a call this morning with a cryptocurrency accountant. He’s a wonderful fellow. One of those people who can happily wade through thousands of rows of a spreadsheet trying to get the digits to behave themselves. He’s a man after my own heart. This accountant — call him Mr. Green — makes a good living helping people do their crypto-taxes.

The Liberal Radicalism Mechanism for Producing Public Goods [Tabarrok] Experiments With Liberal Radicalism [Singh] Liberal Radicalism: Breaking down Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl Some Gentle Criticisms on Vitalik/Gitcoin CLR [van Ness] A Simple Way to Fund Public Goods [van Ness] Radical Market, ZK, Privacy and More [Buterin] Wikipedia: Quadratic Voting Eth Research A Proposal to Improve Pairwise Coordination Subsidies Pairwise Coordination Subsidies: A New Quadratic Funding Design [Buterin] A Strange Kind of Pairwise-Bounded Quadratic Funding Negative Votes in Quadratic Funding [Buterin] On Collusion [Buterin] Round 2 Gitcoin Grants: $50K Open Source Fund Round 3 Gitcoin’s Q3 Match: $100K+ to OSS projects CitCoin’s $4.

This is short update on what we’ve been doing since receiving so many wonderful grants during the GitCoin CLR matching fandango. This money goes a long way. It allows one of us (Rush) to make a trip to EthDenver, where he will be judging some hacks. It has also paid for some much needed help developing the React frontend. If you donated (or even if you didn’t), and you’re in Denver this week, seek me out.

One of the reasons I fell in love with blockchain tech way back in 2013 was because I felt that for the first time in history, engineers had created a system that could produced undeniable data. Undeniable access — yes, but more importantly, undeniably high-quality data. That was a paradigm shift. While, technically, the data on a blockchain may be untrue, what is mathematically undeniable is that at least 51% of the participants have agreed that the data is consistent — maybe that’s as close as we can get to data being ‘true’.

There is no more angst-ridden profession than being a member of a bomb squad. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever seen the movie The Hurt Locker. In a recent Gitter post in the All Core Devs channel, Alexey Akhunov says of the difficulty bomb that it, “…forces people to make rushed decisions and be reckless, without real emergency…” This is true currently, but we can do better.

All about the Ethereum Difficulty Calculation Special thanks to a first-rate Tuftian and data scientist, Ed Mazurek, for early versions of the R code used in this article. Each time the Ethereum time bomb goes off, two related questions arise. The first question (and arguably the more important) is, “When will blocks get so slow, they will be intolerable”. The second question is, “How long should we delay the bomb this time?

Did you ever notice that the only way to get the history of an Ethereum account is to visit a fully-centralized, database-driven, old-fashioned web-2.0 website? Every time I use one of those sites (and I use them all the time), I think to myself: They’re watching me. They’ve attached my IP address to my address and in the future, they will wildly invading my privacy…but I need them… Recently we demoed a fully decentralized blockchain explorer built on TrueBlocks.

Given a blockchain, our goal was to create a list of every appearance of every address in any block on that chain. We define an “appearance” as either the use of the address in one of the common ‘address’ fields of a transaction (such as to, from, or contractAddress) or its use as data in one of the data fields in a transaction. We do not check numeric fields such as value or gasUsed.