The Ethereum cryptocurrency is one of the largest cryptocurrencies. As of this writing (Q1 2018) it has a market cap in the billions.
#Conclusion The Ethereum project doesn’t currently justify a thorough security review because the security design flaws are so glaring and fundamental that even a brief overview of the major issues is sufficient to demonstrate the projects general insecurity and inability to achieve the expectation of users.
A more thorough analysis will be justified if these issues are significantly resolved.
However, it should be noted that design level security flaws often require a completely new design and it is unlikely that that the Ethereum project can be salvaged more cheaply than starting from scratch.
#Findings Summary
- Although Ethereum claims to be a “world supercomputer” the features envisioned here need to be build on top of the digital asset that functions as money.
- As a result Ethereum must be the most secure digital asset to be viable. This is beacuse only the most secure digital will be selected by the market as money (often callend "sound money" by economists).
- Ethereum has no cap on the total number of assets it will produce.
- Ethereum is not sufficiently secure to prevent unpopular transactions from being reversed. This has happened on more than one occasion.
- The code used to create even the most basic contracts is so complex that it has proven to be impractical to create trustworthy code.
- Ethereum is at a disadvantage to bitcoin because it has a shorter price history and market cap.
- The developers working on Ethereum are inferior in quality and quantity to those working on bitcoin.
- The Ethereum difficulty adjustment, that affects both the security of transactions and the emission rate of new tokens, is manually adjusted by one person.