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Monthly Token Balances

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 02:00:02 -0400

Read Creating Monthly Token Balances

Factories

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 02:00:02 -0400

Read About Contract Factories

Community Contributions

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:10:28 -0400

From one of our community members. Thanks Leo!

For the fellow newbies, I took notes when starting this journey. I wrote a couple of posts I hope are helpful if you are setting up your own node with TrueBlocks.

Please note I focus on doing analytics. Storing and accessing the data are the most important factors for me. Thanks to everybody for the patience and helping me with all the issues!!

Better Token Accounting

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:10:28 -0400

Eth accounting is identical Token accounting is improved in these ways:

Intra block token accounting
Account for every Transfer event
If a balance is incorrect, do one of three things:
1. If the transaction contains a “large” input, and the event says something transferred, but the balances don’t change, lable probably-spam and add a field called removal of phony transfer in
2. If the function is one of a very small number of common mint functions, assign to knownMint field
3. If the function is one of a very small number of common burn methods, assign to a knownBurn field
4. If the balance goes up - label the transation as implied-mint and add to a feild called impliedMint
5. If the balance goes down - label the reconciliation as impied-burn and add to a field called impliedBurn

Bugs fixed: In previous code, if a token transacted multple times in a single block the entire net transfer was assigned to the first transfer. In new code, each individual inter-block transfer is accounting for. Show a picture

User contribution: Simple Blockchain Indexing with TrueBlocks

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 18:10:28 -0400

An article about TrueBlocks and how our indexers work. Written by one of our community members.

FAQ

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:45:28 -0400

Go here for a list of FAQs.

forEveryChain

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 10:45:28 -0400

Have you ever had the desire to look at every trace of every transaction of every block on every blockchain? Yes? Well, pull up a chair and visit with us for a while.

It’s a Multi-Chain World

I’m sure many of you are aware of the coming “multi-chain” universe of blockchains. You know the one. The one where all sorts of little baby communities of people are going to be doing all sorts of little baby community-like things. Charities over here. Games down here. Ultra sophisticated blockchain finance applications up there.

Installing Erigon and TrueBlocks as Services on Ubuntu

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:10:28 -0400

One of our users (Magnus Hansson) has written an excellent article on how to install all three of Erigon, Erigon’s RPC, and TrueBlocks as serives on Ubuntu.

How to set up Erigon, Erigon’s RPC and TrueBlocks as services

Not only that – the blog post is visually wonderful as well.

Thanks Magnus. Looking for some amazing data science from this quarter. Cheers.

Has EIP-1559 Fulfilled Its Objectives?

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 18:10:28 -0400

Pintail (twitter) wrote an amazing article on EIP-1559 and its effect on the Ethereum gas market. He used TrueBlocks to extract a bunch of his data. We get a nice mention at the end.

Thanks for the kind words, Pintail!

User contribution: Trueblocks Plotter

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:10:28 -0400

Matt Solomon, over at ScopeLift, used TrueBlocks as a backend to build a cool tool. TrueBlocks plotter lets you visualize and plot Ethereum data in your browser.

Thanks for expanding the TrueBlocks universe!

User post: Local Data Extraction

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 17:55:05 -0400

Go read the post. Thanks for the support and shoutout!

Recipe: List Tokens I Own

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 08:00:02 -0400

A TrueBlocks recipe to show ERC 20 token balances for an address.

Note: The following assumes you have a copy of (either by having built it yourself or downloaded it) the TrueBlocks Appearance Index.

Preliminaries

We start by extracting from the chain all the transactions for the address in question. We will use a randomly selected address that we know owns a number of different tokens.

chifra list 0x03fdcadc09559262f40f5ea61c720278264eb1da

This produces a list of 2,129 appearances (at the time of this writing). Each appearances is a pair of integers detailing the blockNumber and transactionIndex of the transaction. Note that other methods of getting such a list (such as EtherScan APIs) return far fewer transactions. We will explain this in a later post.

Running Against Multiple Rpc Endpoints

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 17:13:04 -0400

One user asked if it was possible to run TrueBlocks against multiple RPC endpoints at the same time. This is short recipe to accomplish just that.

Preliminaries

The first thing to understand is that the TrueBlocks core runs against a local configuration file stored in your $HOME folder called $HOME/.local/share/TrueBlocks/trueBlocks.toml. It’s an almost ridiculously simple file.

The file gets created and populated with default values the first time you build TrueBlocks. When you do cmake ../src and then make in the build folder of the TrueBlocks repo, you can look inside the file $HOME/.local/share/trueblocks/trueBlocks.toml.

Showing ERC-20 Transfers

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 08:00:02 -0400

A TrueBlocks recipe to show every ERC20 Transfer event from a given smart contract.

Note: The following assumes you have a copy of (either by having built it yourself or downloaded it) the TrueBlocks Appearance Index. These instructions also assume that the address you’re querying is an ERC 20 smart contract.

Preliminaries

To get started, we want to extract (from the TrueBlocks index) a list of every transaction that our address has ever appeared in.

A Long Winded Explanation of TrueBlocks

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 19:21:58 -0300

Recently, I was engaged in a tweetstorm with Nick Johnson, for whom I have deep, deep respect. The storm was about the topic of indexing the Ethereum blockchain. As is usually the case with my tweetstorms, I don’t think I explained myself well during the thunder and lightning, so I thought I’d take a moment during the lull to better explain myself. So this is an explanation for Nick (and anyone else who’s listening) about how TrueBlocks indexes the Ethereum blockchain.

Dynamic Traversers for TrueBlocks

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 12:29:07 +0000

Dynamic Traversers in TrueBlocks

Ethereum nodes come to consensus on a world-wide global ledger of smart contract invocations every 14 seconds. Everyone know this. This is what we celebrate about the chain. Not only is this data world-wide and consented-to, but it is also permissionless. At least that’s what we’re supposed to believe.

But, is it really permissionless?

I think the answer to that question is a resounding “No.” Ask yourself how you personally get data from the Ethereum blockchain. There’s only two answers: (1) you visit a block explorer, or (2) you go to website built by the developers of the dApp you’re using.

How Safe are My Private Keys?

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 12:29:07 +0000

Every 15 Seconds…

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:43:00 +0000

…a piece of open source software called an Ethereum node collects together a random, unordered collection of transactions, and after throwing out the invalid ones, puts the rest in a well-defined order.

The system then seals this newly ordered list for the rest of human history (modulo re-orgs) by creating a 32-byte block hash that stands in a one-to-one correspondence to that ordered list.

The system then quickly moves on to a newly growing collection of unordered transactions, leaving behind it a trail of sealed blocks.

Ethereum’s Issuance: uncleReward

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 12:13:31 +0000

This the second in a series of two articles detailing Ethereum’s issuance. Read the first part, which discusses the blockReward calculation. Also, see the code base for the actual code. This article discusses the uncleReward.

Uncle Reward

Previously, we looked at the ungrammatical second sentence in Section 11.3 of Ethereum’s Yellow Paper. In the first article, we discussed the first half of that sentence concerning blockReward. In this article we discuss the remaining half of that sentence (shown below) which details the uncleReward.

Ethereum’s Issuance: minerReward

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 11:44:23 +0000

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.

While the work we present here doesn’t necessarily make the numbers easier to get (fix the node!), the numbers are accurate to 18-decimal places and verified to the on-chain account balances at every block. We used TrueBlocks to do that.

Building Your Own Ethereum Archive Node

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 18:21:08 +0000

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. This list is outdated. About eight months ago we were forced to add a second 4TB hard drive to each machine, as the Ethereum archive node we were running (Parity) was getting close to filling up our single 4TB drive.

How Accurate is EtherScan?

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 03:59:52 +0000

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. He’s busier than ever. He tells me, and here I quote, “Nothing ever balances.”

Links About CLR, Radical Markets & GitCoin

Wed, 13 May 2020 02:33:50 +0000

Eth Research

Round 2

Gitcoin Grants: $50K Open Source Fund

Round 3

Round 4

Review of GitCoin Quadratic Funding Round 4 [Buterin]

Round 5

News

Tweets

Other

Grants Round 3 CLR — Data Analysis Bounty

TrueBlocks: First Quarter 2020 Update

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 17:08:44 +0000

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. I’ll be happy to share our latest work.

Simple Undeniable Facts

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 04:23:30 +0000

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’.

A Method to Diffuse the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 14:05:33 +0000

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.

In a previous article, I mentioned two questions that arise each time we discuss the Ethereum difficulty bomb: “How soon will the block times become intolerable?” and “For how many blocks should we reset the bomb?” I presented in that article a simple method to decide the second of these two questions. In this article, I extend that argument and run through an example. I then try to show why, if we adopted the method I’m proposing, we could answer the first question more predictably, removing some the ‘angst’ or ‘emergency’. Later this week, I will write an article analyzing the current situation and making a prediction of when the block times will become intolerable.

It’s Not That Difficult

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 07:10:44 +0000

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?”

A Time Ordered Index of Time Ordered Immutable Data

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 18:13:05 +0000

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. (Check it out here.) At the core of our explorer (which runs on commercial-grade hardware) is an index of Ethrerum addresses. This article discusses how we built the index, the difficulties we ran into, and why it’s way more complicated than you may think to share it — especially if you want to avoid becoming an old-fashioned, outdated, web site destined to invade people’s privacy.

Indexing Addresses on the Ethereum Blockchain

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 02:30:51 +0000

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.

Mother May I?

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 19:40:19 +0000

A New Way to Think About Data APIs

When I was a kid, we used to play a game called “Mother May I”. In the game, the person who was it, called “Mother”, would stand on one end of the room and the players would stand on the other. The players would shout out things such as, “Mother, may I take one giant step forward?” or “Mother, may I take two scissors steps?” Mother would say either “Yes” or “No.” Players pleaded with Mother in random order. Mother had to say “Yes” more often than “No.” The first player to reach Mother became Mother, and a new game would start. Not exactly the most exciting game in the world, but we were kids so give us a break.

Counting Shit on Ethereum

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 01:50:36 +0000

I like to count shit. I’ll count anything I can find. Cracks in the sidewalk. Pennies in a cup.

I also like to make lists. In fact, at one point in my life, combining my two passions, I was maintaining a list of over 350 rules related to how to pick up pennies without incurring bad luck.

Yes. I suffer a bit from OCD (but happily).

Recently, Pedro Gomes made a tweet asking if anyone had a list of the most frequently called function signatures on the Ethereum blockchain.

TrueBlarks

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:18:40 +0000

I wanted to share with you (through a series of charts) what happens when one releases a world-class data scientist such as Ed Mazurek on fresh-baked Ethereum difficulty data.

You get TrueBlarks (that’s a portmanteau of “TrueBlocks” and “R” in case you were wondering). If you don’t know about “R” and R Studio, you should. It’s amazing.

With little to no explanation, I am going to copy and paste the “R” code right next to the chart used to create it. Ask Ed what the code means.

A Short Take on Decentralization

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 16:48:42 +0000

This is a very short take on something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. “Why do I give a shit about decentralization? Should I compromise?” Here’s why I come down emphatically on the side of “Yes, I give a shit, and no you should never compromise!”.

Blockchain-like technologies (that is, decentralizing, trustless technologies) bring to the world, for the first time in human history, a way to help us solve the prisoner’s dilemma.

Building an Ethereum Account Scraper with TrueBlocks

Fri, 06 Jul 2018 20:21:50 +0000

When I first heard of Ethereum, I thought to myself “Excellent! I no longer have to keep track of my spending. Everything will be automated.”

Can you say “misconception”?

Not only is keeping track of Ethereum spending way more difficult than it should be, it’s actually so difficult that I stopped spending ether all together about two years ago. (The price of ether had a lot to do with it as well.)

Mantras for Decentralized Open Data

Mon, 07 May 2018 19:21:58 +0000

I had a wonderful experience at EdCon in Toronto this week. Mostly because of all the great new people I met and the many people I reacquainted myself with. The Ethereum community is freakin’ cool.

Here’s an example. In between speakers, the person sitting in front of me stood up, turned around, looked down at his seat and, using his pointing finger, counted the number of seats between him and the left isle. He then counted the number of seats between himself and the right isle. Finding that the right-most path was shorter, he existed the auditorium in that direction. He didn’t care which way he went — he cared only about being efficient.

How Many ERC20 Tokens Do You Have?

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 23:11:49 +0000

I was recently included in a discussion about why it’s so difficult to get ERC20 token balances (and other data) from the Ethereum blockchain. I thought I’d take a crack at answering the question.

I think it comes down to four words: “Incoming”, “Internal”, “Transactions”…and “Decentralization.” I’ll focus on each word individually.

Transaction

I’ll start with the easiest word first: “Transaction.”

Go into a bagel store. Buy a dozen bagels and get a receipt. Everything you need to know about your transaction is on the receipt. Date, amount, sender (from) and recipient (to). This is the same information you’ll find on every Ethereum transaction.

The Trace Data Problem

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:31:37 +0000

I recently wrote a piece discussing how I defeated the Ethereum DDos attack using TrueBlocks. Doing this was important because it freed me from the pain of a slow RPC. Speed allows me to analyze the Ethereum data iteratively. I can find more interesting stuff.

The Ethereum dataset is big (and growing). I want to be able to scan through the entire thing. I want to be able to do this on a laptop. This last fact makes it impossible for me to create a separate, independent copy of the data. If I want to do data analysis, I have to do it against the node’s data directly.

Defeating the Ethereum DDos Attacks

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 21:21:42 +0000

I spend a lot of time looking at historical Ethereum transactional data. I do this by scanning the chain using TrueBlocks.

If you’ve ever done this, you will be familiar with a certain set of transactions that take a very long time to process. These transactions happened between blocks 2,286,910 and 2,717,576. They are a pain in my a$$. See here.

In a surprisingly effective attack, some evil genius took advantage of an underpriced opcode to create millions of dead Ethereum accounts. This had the effect of significantly bloating the state database, but more importantly for our purposes it created tons of transaction traces.

Playing with Blocks

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 22:29:22 +0000

I am so deep down the rabbit hole of Ethereum data that I sometimes forget there is such a thing as the real world. And I care exactly zero if I never come up. Don’t ask me why. I’m pretty sure there’s no good reason.

Maybe my obsession with this has to do with something that happened to me in high-school. My guidance counselor administered a test intended to identify which career I should pursue. She watched me take the test and then carefully scored my answers. When she was done, she looked across the table and said, “You should look for careers that have nothing to do with people.” The remaining options for me where making things (factory work) and information processing. I took the latter path.

Announcing TrueBlocks®

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 18:07:27 +0000

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.

Reading Byzantium’s Tea Leaves

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 01:43:50 +0000

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.

Short Thoughts on Difficulty Calc

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 17:29:45 +0000

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.

Ethereum Block Production Continues to Slide

Sat, 09 Sep 2017 18:46:20 +0000

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.

Is the Ice Age Affecting Block Production?

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 18:42:01 +0000

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.

Be Careful Little Brain What You Code

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 21:49:06 +0000

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

It’s Growing! It’s Growing!

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 12:17:14 +0000

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.

The Real Flippening

Tue, 30 May 2017 19:58:51 +0000

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.

Zero-Storage Data Publishing on Ethereum

Wed, 17 May 2017 20:45:02 +0000

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.

Accounting for the Revolution™

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 03:07:38 +0000

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.

DAO Token Holders’ Response (in Charts)

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 17:54:45 +0000

I am posting this previously unpublished post now because I’m clearing out my drafts folder, and I didn’t want to simply delete the post. I wrote it soon after the DAO hack, but before it became apparent that the White Hats rescue the remaining ether in The DAO (or as some have called it “safely steal the ether”). The post is probably only interesting for historical reasons. References to days of the week in this post are to be read as meaning the week of Friday, June 17th.

A Eulogy for The DAO — Part II

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 14:26:27 +0000

Introduction

In this second installment of a multi-part series of articles analyzing the nearly 170,000 interactions with “The DAO” smart contract, we discuss the contract’s “Creation Period.” Previously, we presented an overview of The DAO’s lifespan. In that overview, we identified four distinct timeframes: the Creation Period, the Operational Period, the Post-Hack Period, and the Recovery Period. In this installment, we focus our attention on the Creation Period. Future installments will analyze each of the remaining three periods separately.

A Eulogy for The DAO

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 03:10:48 +0000

…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. This first part of our series gives a broad overview of these periods and is followed in the coming weeks with two more installments presenting further details.

A Too-Often Neglected Aspect of Smart Contract Security Auditability

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 01:49:11 +0000

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. The gist of the article, if I may summarize, is that by using readable and easily understandable modifiers, one may increase readability and help to insure that the function will execute only under certain conditions. This is an excellent idea, obviously, and one that all of us should follow.

Knowing the Future and Proving You Know It

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 03:44:29 +0000

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. The input field is one of the nuggets of true genius behind what Vitalik Buterin did — Bitcoin also carries input data in each transaction, but only 80 bytes worth. With Ethereum, the input data can be as long as needed. Ethereum sends function calls to smart contracts in the input field. In fact, the byte code of the smart contract itself is sent in the input field of the transaction that deploys the contract.

A Clue About the DAO Attacker’s Location?

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 03:09:42 +0000

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. Here is that list along with names kumavis provided for each account:

Downloading the DAO

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 18:43:27 +0000

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. I’ve been hacking for weeks. I’ve diven (doven? dove?) into the depths of the core code. I’ve studied ‘geth,’ ‘eth,’ ‘mist,’ and ‘web3.’ I’ve learned how to use RESTful APIs and JSON. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew what I wanted — I wanted that data.

What the ‘F’ is a Finney?

Mon, 23 May 2016 01:35:43 +0000

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. Someone walking past accidentally kicked them, and I had to scramble to get them back.

Smart Contracts are Immutable — That’s Amazing…and It Sucks

Fri, 13 May 2016 18:46:17 +0000

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. Write-release-done.

The DAO’s First Big Decision

Fri, 06 May 2016 19:48:48 +0000

“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.daohub.org, which is the official-but-not-official home of “The DAO”, an organization-that-is-not-quite-an-organization.

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A Eulogy for The DAO

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