Questions related to Ethereum's "spec" aka yellow paper. Good questions will be highly-technical and/or protocol-level questions, rather than the "how do I..." style. Great for inspiring discussions and getting clarification about specific passage you haven't quite grasped or understanding how a subject fits into the larger protocol.
Abstract. The blockchain paradigm when coupled with cryptographically-secured transactions has demonstrated its utility through a number of projects, not least Bitcoin. Each such project can be seen as a simple application on a decentralised, but singleton, compute resource. We can call this paradigm a transactional singleton machine with shared-state. Ethereum implements this paradigm in a generalised manner. Furthermore it provides a plurality of such resources, each with a distinct state and operating code but able to interact through a message-passing framework with others. We discuss its design, implementation issues, the opportunities it provides and the future hurdles we envisage.
