Cryptocurrency

There has been a lot of debate around what makes someone an Ethereum core developer or what the term even means. I’m intimately involved in day-to-day operations involving Ethereum 1.0 protocol development as a developer liaison for the community and have been operating the Ethereum Core Developer call (a.k.a AllCoreDevs call) every other Friday since late 2016. The following is not definitive and only represents my opinion. Nothing in this blog represents the opinion of any of my employers or the Ethereum Foundation. ...

Intro Ethereum 2.0 is the upcoming overhaul to the Ethereum blockchain protocol that will bring with it proof-of-stake (to provide more security) and sharding (to provide more scaling). It is being released in at least 3 “phases”, labeled Phase 0 through Phase 2. It is anticipated that during Q3-Q4 of 2020 it will be launching Phase 0 of the upgrade that will deploy the “beacon chain”. The beacon chain, among other things, is meant to act as a coordinator between the different actors participating to secure the Eth 2.0 network. I wanted to join an Eth 2.0 Phase 0 testnet to help and get experience running a node. This article is going to detail the hardware and software set-up I went through to become an Eth 2.0 validator on the Topaz testnet. ...

This post will discuss how protocol level development decisions are made as well as how Ethereum network upgrades (a.k.a hard forks) are organized. There is a rich history in how Ethereum’s decision making processes have developed over time. This article will focus on Eth 1.0 governance and not touch on Ethereum 2.0 governance. This article does not represent the viewpoint of the Ethereum Foundation or any other entity that I am associated with. ...

Programmatic Proof-of-Work (ProgPoW) has been a topic of contention in the Ethereum community for a long time. This post explains the history of ProgPoW, the various arguments for and against it, and my personal opinion on the topic. I am speaking on behalf of myself, Hudson Jameson, and not on behalf of the Ethereum Foundation or any other entity. History ProgPoW is “a new Proof-of-Work algorithm to replace Ethash that utilizes almost all parts of commodity GPUs”. ProgPoW aims to decrease the economic incentive to build an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC); a highly specialized device designed for a specific purpose, in this case, mining Ethereum much more efficiently than traditional GPU mining. ProgPoW is not designed to completely prevent a ProgPoW ASIC from being created, but rather make it expensive to build and not worth it to produce. It was submitted as a core EIP on May 2, 2018, by a semi-anonymous group calling itself IfDefElse. ...

I spent the last two days going over every dev fund proposal and writing my thoughts. I have turned this into a post on the Zcash forums. I’m proud to be a part of the Zcash Foundation Advisory Board and I take this decision very seriously. I hope the community comes together on this. Zcash Forum Post Tweet Skip to the bottom for my pick Who am I? My name is Hudson Jameson and I am a cryptocurrency enthusiast who is involved in both the Ethereum and, to a lesser extent, Zcash community. I work for the Ethereum Foundation in a role for devops and community management. I hold a number of roles in the wider Ethereum ecosystem including EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) Editor, Reddit moderator, Ethereum Cat Herders group co-founder, and core developer liaison responsible for organizing the bi-weekly Ethereum core developer calls. I am on the Zcash Community Advisory Panel that will be polled (for sentiment collection) by the Zcash Foundation regarding NU4 proposals (dev fund proposals). I care about Zcash and it’s community. I consider Ethereum and Zcash besties <3 ...