Articles about 'ethereum'

…or How I Learned to Love the Input Data Field… Introduction In this three-part series, we analyze the nearly 170,000 transactions made against the ill-fated smart contract “The DOA” since its inception nearly five months ago. The DAO is dead. This series may serve as part of its eulogy. The DAO lived through four distinct time periods, each characterized by different user behavior, being (1) the Creation Period, (2) the Operational Period, (3) the Post-Hack Period, and (4) the Recovery Period.

In the wake of The Great DAO Debacle of 2016™, there have been many articles and blog posts concerning the need for the community to write more secure Solidity smart contracts. One such article is Writing More Robust Smart Contracts by Elena Dimitrova of Colony.io. Here, Dimitrova discusses the use of function modifiers to verify — prior to a function’s execution — both the initiator of the transaction and the input to the transaction.

I’m building a piece of software called EthSlurp. It’s a blockchain data scraper. It runs from the command line and takes various parameters such as an Ethereum contract address, an output format, a date and/or block range, and various other options. The most salient feature of EthSlurp is its ability to convert a transaction’s input data (which is usually seen as unreadable hex) back into human readable text. Every ethereum transaction carries with it an arbitrary amount of data in a field called input.

I used EthSlurp to scrape every transaction from The DAO since its inception. This first chart shows those transactions distributed by hour. There are more than 121,000 transactions: As you can see, the transactions are relatively evenly distributed throughout the day. This is to be expected because the DAO token holders are presumably distributed evenly across the globe. This makes perfect sense. So What? Recently, a user called kumavis on TheDAO slack published a list of accounts that he thought may have been related to the attack on the DAO.

I am obsessed with the DAO. I spend a ridiculously large amount of time thinking about it, reading about it, and trying to figure it out. The most interesting thing to me is the data. The fact that the smallest transactions —both into and out of the DAO — are recorded forever is very interesting to me. Ever since I got into Ethereum, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get at all that data.

When I was nine, my Dad took me to a Phillies baseball game for my birthday. I don’t remember the game, but I do remember that he yelled at me for not being careful with my money. We were in the hot-dog line, and he asked me if I still had the money he gave me earlier, so I pulled four crumpled one-dollar bills out of my pocket. Two of the bills fell to the ground.

Apparently there are two types of software engineers in the world. One type writes code, pushes it out into the world to see how it works, keeps track of the bugs, and then goes back to drawing board, re-writes the code, fixes the bugs, and re-releases. Write-release-fix, write-release-fix. A never-ending circle. The other type of software engineer seems to be able to write code once, and because it was carefully planned and carefully implemented, it runs correctly forever.

“The DAO” has been in existence for about a week, and besides the obvious pending decision concerning slock.it’s proposal for the USN, another major decision looms over the group. This decision will test the ability of, perhaps, as many as 10,000 people to come together, anonymously, and make a long-lasting decision. Let’s just say I’m a bit skeptical. The locus of discussion on all issues related to “The DAO” (which is not its official name) is http://forum.