/yellowpaper

The "Yellow Paper": Ethereum's formal specification

Primary LanguageTeXCreative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 InternationalCC-BY-SA-4.0

Ethereum Yellow Paper

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Gitter

The Yellow Paper is a formal definition of the Ethereum protocol, originally by Gavin Wood, currently maintained by Nick Savers and with contributions from many people around the world.

It is a free culture work, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) version 4.0.

Usage

The paper comes as a single latex file Paper.tex. The latest version is generally available as a PDF at https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf. If you find that the borders for links block too much text when viewing the PDF in the browser, you can instead download it and open and view it with a PDF viewer application such as Adobe Acrobat or Evince, where the borders are less likely to display over text.

How to build

The paper also comes as a single latex file Paper.tex, which is built as a PDF as follows.

git clone https://github.com/ethereum/yellowpaper.git
cd yellowpaper
./build.sh

This will create a PDF version of the Yellow Paper. Following building, you can also use standard pdflatex tools like http://latex.informatik.uni-halle.de/latex-online/latex.php for compiling/preview.

Tips on editing

You can use TeX Stack Exchange; https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/ (e.g. Bibliography Management and Hyperlinks); and BibTeX editor.

Versions

The previous protocol versions are listed in BRANCHES.md.

Other language versions

  • Chinese translated by YuanGe and GaoTianlu.
  • French translated by Asseth (checkout to branch 'french' ).