I am interested in an update of where the ethereum team is:
1) Do they have a working P2P network?
2) Do they have a working consensus algorithm other than POW
3) What would it take to merge their Virtual Machine / Contract Language Efforts with our DPOS?
4) What is the status of their wallet interface?
5) How do light-weight clients interact with Ethereum?
Could some enterprising individual do some research and report back?
Thanks.
Currently they have a test net up (no main-net) but their crowd sale is continuously delayed. They have several scripting languages they are going with.
1. They have at best a partially functioning P2P network. It can do some stuff but is not yet a serious implementation (test net alpha level).
2. I'm uncertain what they will do here. It looks like they are going with Proof of Work but I'm not receiving a consistent message as to what direction they plan to go.
3. I think prospects for integration are quite high once they have a functioning code base. I think it will be possible to send assets back and forth, to have cross platform assets, and it might be a good idea to work with Ethereum for voting because their platform can do those sorts of processes particularly well (Project Douglas for example).
https://github.com/project-douglas/eris4. I haven't seen what I could call a unified interface. Right now it's at the level that Mastercoin was at in 2013 where you have to be a programmer to make use of it or deal with scripting languages which in my opinion are in strange implementations. There is the AlephZero which in my opinion looks like the most promising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXGH6q43i_k5. Honestly I'm not sure if there are light weight clients. I haven't seen one yet.
I will admit that Ethereum is particularly difficult to follow. This isn't for any bad reason but because innovation is happening over there so fast and in so many separate projects that it's hard to follow the pace of innovation. I do think they need to focus a lot more on making an easy to install developer workspace. Make a virtual machine image or something like a live CD so that we don't have to deal with the current process. They also need to come up with some sort of standard or core implementation because right now it's looking like how Mastercoin was where there are programmers everywhere doing their own projects but not easy to follow whats going on except for the blog posts.
Also the scripting language seems to be constantly changing so it's hard for me to say for sure what it can do but I have looked at how it can be used to do voting. It can do alt currencies, currency exchanges and so on, but I don't think it's currently out of the testing phase. It's currently pre-alpha on it's way toward alpha.
I'm sure if I got anything wrong someone from the Ethereum community who is more knowledgeable will correct me. This is just my own perspective from my observations.