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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#21

Post by roymurdock »

replies_to_all wrote: post #8
roymurdock wrote: post #5

What are the costs like for building resource intensive apps on ethereum? Would be interested in comparing with centralized compute providers.

A lot more expensive. There will be no comparison in cost, or at least that is the wrong comparison to be making.

I'm not sure if I'm reading ethereum right, but it sounds a lot like mesh computing, where a user can bid for unused cycles on a bunch of networked computers, or one "world computer" if you agree with the author's characterization.

If that is correct, then ethereum and Amazon spot instances could be interchangeable - low availability, but potentially lower cost due to the bidding process if there is a lot of excess compute power on the network.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#23

Post by crazydoggers »

[deleted] wrote: post #7
aakilfernandes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its technically in the "frontier" stage, which means that its in "beta" of sorts. There are lots of developers working on Ethereum dapps and it is more than useable, however consumers should be aware there may be loss-causing bugs around.

[deleted]

Why does there have to be large scale production use while it's in beta? Bitcoin's genesis block was mined in 2009, but it took years for it to come out of "beta" and see production adoption.

Ethereum adoption actually is already outpacing Bitcoin's adoption. Ethereum has only been live since July of this year, and already has seen adoption by numerous corporations (even if it's largely development projects at this point).

For example Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service runs Ethereum. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-blockchain-a...

And here's a large test run conducted with 11 Banks across the globe:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banks-distributed-le...

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#26

Post by jnpn »

teraflop wrote: post #13

The article is pretty light on technical details. Does Ethereum suffer from the same design limitation as Bitcoin, where every operation must be verified by every node? If so, I have a really hard time believing it will scale. Look how much difficulty the Bitcoin network is having with just a couple of transactions per second.

The Ethereum foundation has been putting a lot of resources into scaling research. Theres some promising proposals involving sharding the validation process, in addition to the off-chain scaling protocols that Bitcoin is pursuing like the lightning network.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#27

Post by pjc50 »

teraflop wrote: post #13

The article is pretty light on technical details. Does Ethereum suffer from the same design limitation as Bitcoin, where every operation must be verified by every node? If so, I have a really hard time believing it will scale. Look how much difficulty the Bitcoin network is having with just a couple of transactions per second.

Isn't that inherent to blockchains (every node must have a copy of all transactions)?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#28

Post by thewelder »

[deleted] wrote: post #7
aakilfernandes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its technically in the "frontier" stage, which means that its in "beta" of sorts. There are lots of developers working on Ethereum dapps and it is more than useable, however consumers should be aware there may be loss-causing bugs around.

[deleted]

Here's a provably fair ponzi scheme [1] https://ethereumpyramid.com/

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#29

Post by aakilfernandes »

roymurdock wrote: post #21
replies_to_all wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot more expensive. There will be no comparison in cost, or at least that is the wrong comparison to be making.

I'm not sure if I'm reading ethereum right, but it sounds a lot like mesh computing, where a user can bid for unused cycles on a bunch of networked computers, or one "world computer" if you agree with the author's characterization. If that is correct, then ethereum and Amazon spot instances could be interchangeable - low availability, but potentially lower cost due to the bidding process if there is a lot of excess c…

Sorry, thats not correct. The only person who gets compensated for performing computations are the miners. Everyone else performs computation so they can have an up-to-date blockchain, but are not compensated.

Ethereum is the most expensive computational environment you can imagine. However, it is also the highest trust. Its not for computationally-limited (gaming/data analysis) its for trust-limited (financial applications/privacy)

There is an effort to build a computation market on top of Ethereum, but the computation happens off the chain.

https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#30

Post by SolarNet »

powera wrote: post #24

I still don't understand how anyone can believe that paying ten to a hundred times as much for algorithmically provable trust or whatever will get any market traction ever.

Because it's something that doesn't otherwise exist. It's actual innovation, where else in the world can you run trustless global peer-to-peer applications? It will be a while before it's commercially viable, sure, but it's something unique.
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