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We are pleased to announce the release today of the first of three white papers describing TrueBlocks: Faster, Richer, Fully Customizable Data from Programmable Blockchains. Additionally, we are announcing the release of an updated and improved website (http://trueblocks.io) as well as fourteen open-source command line tools.

What is TrueBlocks

TrueBlocks is a collection of software libraries, open source command-line tools, and applications intended to improve the ease and speed with which one may access data from the Ethereum blockchain. Given fast, easily accessible data, new use cases and applications such as smart contract monitoring, per-block accounting, and integration with business intelligence tools such as Tableau become possible.

I used to watch a television show called “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.” The host would frequently laugh at the way Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, would testify in front of Congress. Rukeyser found it comical that we all had to “read the tea leaves” after Greenspan spoke.

“I should warn you, if I turn out to be clear, you’ve probably misunderstood me.” ~Alan Greenspan

Why did Mr. Greenspan speak in such obscure and difficult to understand language? Why did he force people to “read the tea leaves”? Because he knew that a single wrong word had the power to send shockwaves through the markets. “We’re going to do exactly this…” Crash goes the market.

I found this text in EIP 2 of the Ethereum github repo. It’s from the justification section of the EIP. It explains some of the choices in the difficulty calculation code found here:

The difficulty adjustment change conclusively solves a problem that the Ethereum protocol saw two months ago where an excessive number of miners were mining blocks that contain a timestamp equal to parent_timestamp + 1; this skewed the block time distribution, and so the current block time algorithm, which targets a median of 13 seconds, continued to target the same median but the mean started increasing. If 51% of miners had started mining blocks in this way, the mean would have increased to infinity. The proposed new formula is roughly based on targeting the mean; one can prove that with the formula in use an average block time longer than 24 seconds is mathematically impossible in the long term.

Two weeks ago, we wrote this Medium post in which we describe the slowdown in per-week block production due to the Ice Age or Ethereum Difficulty Bomb. We thought it would be interesting to continue to watch the process as it unfolds. We wondered “Is the difficulty bomb having its desired effect”?

The following chart is the one we presented two weeks ago. It shows the number of blocks produced each week since the inception of the Ethereum chain (August, 2015). The slowdown in block production is readily apparent.

This is just one of 100’s of questions we have about what is happening on the Ethereum blockchain. We’re developing TrueBlocks to help us answer these questions and more.

TrueBlocks is a set of software libraries, applications, and command line tools that provide fast, easy, fully-decentralized access to the Ethereum blockchain data. As part of preparing for our next release, we’ve written a a number of simple command line tools to test our code. One of these is called whenBlock which helped us answer the question above.

When I was a kid, my mother used to send my brothers and me to vacation Bible school. Having children of my own, I’m pretty certain she did that to get rid of us for the summer. The experience had no lasting effect on me (thank God), but I remember a song we used to sing:

Be careful little eyes what you see
Be careful little eyes what you see
Because Jesus up above
Is looking down in love
So be careful little eyes what you see

I spend much of my free time on the Ethereum Stack Exchange answering questions about Solidity and asking questions about the Ethereum data, so I’m well aware which questions are most frequently asked.

By far, the most repeated question on that forum is how long it takes to sync the Ethereum blockchain using geth or Parity. The short answer to that question is It takes forever. But this is only a perception. In real life, the sync actually does come to an end. It just takes a very long time.

My wife constantly tells me we should sell our Ethereum holdings, and I constantly resist. She wants to buy a new sewing machine. I want to wait until “The Flippening.”

What is “The Flippening”?

Well, there’s an old biblical word “quickening” which refers to the moment an unborn infant first moves in its mother’s belly. I love that word, and when I first heard the word “flippening”, I thought of it.

What’s the cheapest way to publish data while maintaining an unchangeable, permanent record of having done so?

Blockchain?

What’s the most expensive way to do computing today?

Blockchain?

Actually this second point may or may not be true, but one thing is true, if the blockchain is expensive, storing data is the reason why. Any data.

In this article we will recount our experience trying to create a simple one-way publisher-to-consumer data delivery smart contract. At the same time, we’ll explain an idea we have called off-chain monitoring and how our project, TrueBlocks™, helps us use this idea to lessen the cost of running a smart contract.

In recent weeks, the price of ether has risen from around $10.00 US dollars per ether to hovering around $20.00 US in recent days. Needless to say, this has caused a lot of discussion.

We wondered if this increase in price meant that the Ethereum community was all of a sudden spending thousands of dollars more per day on gas. Or was it hundreds of dollars more per day? Or was it one dollar per day? Or even one penny? We had no basis to answer that question, so we set out to find the answer for ourselves.