What initiated back on the stroke of midnight on February 1st, 2014, is now drawing to a conclusion: we are excited to declare the launch of the ninth and final installment in the Ethereum Proof-of-Concept series. We encourage the community to engage in the ongoing Proof-of-Concept IX testnet in our current release, Olympic, now available.
The objective of Olympic is to reward individuals who attempt to push the boundaries of the Ethereum blockchain during the pre-release phase, inundating the network with transactions and executing unconventional operations with the state, enabling us to observe how the network withstands high load levels. Simultaneously, application developers, data providers, exchanges, and users are invited to innovate and deploy on the testnet and operate nodes – and if you possess multiple virtual private servers, please launch as many nodes as possible.
Olympic will boast an overall prize pool of up to 25,000 ether. There will be four categories for prizes and a grand reward for the initial individual to establish a significant fork on the testnet.
The four prize categories will include Transaction Activity, Virtual Machine Usage, Mining Excellence and General Misconduct. Each category will offer a main prize of 2,500 ether, along with one or more minor prizes ranging from 100 to 1,000 ether and potentially small rewards between 0.1 to 5 ether simply for participation. Each of these categories will be evaluated by Vitalik, Gavin, and Jeff, likely with considerable assistance from automated blockchain analysis tools. In addition to the Ether, similar to the bounty program, all prize recipients will have the opportunity to have their names enshrined in the Ethereum Genesis block. Please ensure that to be considered for a prize, you send an email detailing your claim to olympic@ethereum.org.
This marks the final stage of the Ethereum development journey before the Frontier release, as the network is demonstrating robust stability at its current size of 20-100 nodes, all leading clients have been maintaining consensus, and we are nearing a code freeze pending testing and auditing contributions. It is anticipated to span about 14 days, although we reserve the right to adjust the duration based on technical factors. When we determine that we are prepared, we will initiate a 48-hour countdown for the Frontier 1.0 launch.
Binaries and source code are accessible here: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v0.9.18
A guide still under construction for Frontier is available here: http://ethereum.gitbooks.io/frontier-guide/
Transaction Activity
This encompasses activities related to sending and receiving transactions. Examples of actions we may reward include:
- The account that dispatches the highest cumulative number of transactions
- The account that contributes the highest total gas usage
- The account that receives the highest cumulative number of transactions
- The account that contributes the highest bloat (measured in bytes) to the blockchain concerning transaction trie contents
- The account with the lowest address (in terms of lexicographic order or numerical representation; both orders are synonymous) that transmits at least one transaction
- The pair of accounts that send at least one transaction with addresses that are nearest to each other
Virtual Machine Usage
This includes activities related to utilizing the virtual machine. Examples of actions we may reward include:
- The account that makes the highest number of calls of any opcode
- The account that makes the highest number of opcode calls within a single transaction
- The account that sends the single transaction that requires the most time for a specific client to execute
- The account that sends the single transaction with the highest ratio of time to execute per unit gas consumed
- The account that receives the highest cumulative number of messages
- The account that reverts the greatest total amount of gas usage
- The account that establishes the contract with the lowest address (in terms of lexicographic order or numerical representation; both orders are equivalent)
- The account that transfers the transaction with the largest encoded receipt RLP (measured in bytes)
- The account that generates the largest number of transactions whose bloom is a (distinct) prime number
- A contract creator that contains, for example, a sudoku solver, accepting an array of 81 values as input and yielding the array of 81 values corresponding to a solved sudoku
Mining Excellence
This includes actions related to mining; miners will be identified by coinbase address. Examples of actions we may reward include:
- The miner that generates the largest block in the main chain (measured in bytes)
- The miner who contributes the highest total number of bytes of block data to the main chain
- The miner that mines the greatest number of consecutive blocks
- The miner that includes the maximum number of transactions
- The miner that produces the block requiring the longest duration for a particular client to process
General Misconduct
This involves tampering with the State in peculiar manners, making contracts perform unusual actions. Examples of actions we may reward include:
- The sender/miner of the transaction/block that adds the highest number of items to contract storage
- The creator of the contract featuring the largest code (for externally-owned accounts only)
- The creator of the contract with the most filled storage items
- The creator of the contract that contains a key/value pair with the highest merkle tree depth (i.e., the largest number of hash lookups before reaching the value)
- The creator of the contract that self-destructs while containing the most filled storage items
- The creator of the contract that executes the largest number of consecutive storage updates such that the storage root at each step is a prime number.
Please keep in mind that the above categories do not represent a comprehensive list of eligible actions for prizes. If you engage in something beyond what is mentioned that you believe warrants consideration, kindly email us.
The Grand Prize
A grand award of a minimum of 5,000 ether will be distributed among the miner(s) who successfully create a significant fork between the Go and C++ clients. The fork must occur on the main chain; one client must recognize the block while the other client rejects it. Additional smaller prizes for forks between Go/C++ and Python may also be available.
Best of luck, and we eagerly anticipate seeing and hearing what all of you create!
– The Ethereum core development team
