Quote from: MasterOfCoin on July 12, 2014, 03:30:12 PM

i believe the success of dogecoin was in part due to the inclusiveness of the community surrounding the coin. it's not intimidating. not full of savvy people who attitude is along the lines of - i learned cyrpto on my own, why can't you do the same?... or the answer is out there, you're just not looking hard enough. looking at the ethereum forum you can tell that the community is not inclusive to the general public, at least not right now it isn't. and i understand.

the willingness of the community to answer "stupid questions" and to help guide / make clear to those who are a little lost is one indication of the attitude of ethereum and the attitude of the early adopters/inverters. how this will effect this crypto is anyone's guess.

to answer my own question... as far as i have seen, the mining algo works on the test client... i've mined some ether. but like vitalik have mentioned, ether, in theory, can be mined with cpu, gpu, memory and bandwidth. i would like to have something more concrete, more finalized in therms of the mining algo since we are no more than 6months away from launch. pref to have something before the sale. unless i am wrong, and the algo is already something finalized, please enlighten me. thank you.

Thanks for the feedback MasterOfCoin!

In terms of user friendliness, well, I can only use my own story: I was blown away by Mike Hearn's presentation at the turing festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4PAMFPo5Y back mid last year, and immediately wanted to build these autonomous, self-owned agents he was talking about. I tried my hand at hacking the core client but quickly found it way too complex for my liking, and while there are some good APIs and alternatives (https://libbitcoin.org/libbitcoin-manifesto.pdf), it was still too much for me to get into with a full time day job that required very long extra hours to boot.

While the underlying technologies that power ethereum can be also very advanced, our main goal has always been to make the power of ethereum trivial to leverage by developers. HTML skills, some javascript is all that's needed to build most of a decentralized application: the underlying 'crypto' layer is neatly abstracted behind user-friendly APIs. As for end users, well, if they are comfortable with using a web browser, they certainly will be comfortable using the EtherBrowser.

Of course, at the moment, halfway in the development process, things are far from user friendly. The four reference clients have rather obtuse interfaces (we haven't started on the GUI/browser work yet), the documentation is sparse, out of date, or non-existent, and you are confronted with messages about 'canonical blocks' when booting up the CLI for the first time. Not exactly friendly, in fact, more like the opposite of it!!!

There's a saying, "Those on the 'bleeding edge' bleed a lot". That's true. I get a kick out of using alpha software that could crash at anytime, and has no documentation. But it's certainly not for everyone, and certainly not our end goal. It's however the consequence of having a totally transparent and open source development process: anyone can try the develop branch of the github. (and developers, please do! the repos need all the pull requests they can get).

So anyway, answering your question: the mining algo is not finalized yet, however we have a vision to make it CPU-friendly, and ASIC resistant, if not completely ASIC-proof (that would be nice). We intend to develop this algorithm, and perhaps with the addition of hybrid proof of stake, as the consensus algorithm for Ethereum 1.0.

Cheers!