This is the first of a two part series describing my shock at how much it cost me to swap my own money for my own money using MetaMask. This article describes how we used TrueBlocks to figure out what happened. Click here for Part II.

Yes, Dear…

My wife spent her entire career as an investment consultant for institutional investors. She spent a lot of time investigating the all-in costs, including “hidden” costs associated with moving her client’s money from one investment vehicle to another. Her clients spent a lot of money moving money — typically more than they knew.

She’s…

Custom Ethereum extraction for permissionless access to your data

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. …

…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.

This trail of sealed blocks is the best data the world has ever seen.

…

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.

It would be more accurate for the Yellow Paper to say that the “beneficiary of each ommer gets rewarded…”…

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…

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. …

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.”

How is this possible? Isn’t Ethereum supposed to be an 18-decimal-place accurate…