Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

Crypto has come a long way since Ethereum was first conceived and what was impossible only a few months ago is now 100% practical. Today there are A LOT of new techniques that allow us to largely implement decentralized autonomous applications on any blockchain (no matter how limited) - a fact I feel often gets missed out in all of the Ethereum hype.

If you have a lot a techniques like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic computations, multi-party computation, indistinishability (sic) obfuscation (not quite practical yet), and various threshold schemes - you will quickly realize we could basically already do everything that Ethereum was designed for from the start. In fact - a lot of the new crypto techniques make it possible to scale DAC applications even better than what blockchains would allow since you can implement a lot of crypto-application protocols outside of the blockchain and keep only the hash-locked payments on the chain (which I honestly think is preferable.)

It just seems to me like Vitalik largely invented Ethereum because he didn't want to bother messing around with all the crypto-hacking that's required to implement self-enforcing, autonomous contracts (which is half the fun.) My biggest problem with this is people act like this isn't possible with Bitcoin when we had working smart contracts (and special coins for smart contracts) before Ethereum even existed. Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment which means if you structure your crypto-protocol right you can essentially implement any self-paying, and self-running corporation as a never-ending complex chain of future problems.

(I would speculate that it's even possible to build a universal turning machine on top of any bitcoin-style blockchain that can compute any problem off-chain and allow these computations to be proven and self-enforcing but that is a topic for future research.)

It is (currently) not well suited to resource-intensive apps.

Basically you pay a "gas price" for every opcode executed by the EVM. Clearing a memory address? You pay for it. Setting a value? You pay for it. etc. etc.

(In the above paragraph "you" refers to the "user" sending the transaction)

You really need to think about what you are doing, whether it is allocation, computation, etc. Minimize the number of opcodes and the number of expensive ones at that. To date the contracts are quite simple, although some really interesting things are in the works.

I very much agree with you. Its hard to believe that this will rise to the bitcoin trust level. If anything I believe in sidechain.

I agree in some respects, i.e. RootStock basically plugs onto Bitcoin what the Ethereum decentralized execution model does. You can actually run your Ethereum-developed apps on top of it, they mention it is fully compatible.

SatoshiDice is not quite the same as a Ethereum app, the former requires the central website to be online and operating whereas the latter would work even when the site is down since the execution is not centralised. Add Rootstock however and the same applies.

Source: Just finished building a couple of "games" on the Ethereum platform, http://the.looney.farm - one is SatoshiDice-like but not one of them needs the website to be up to operate.

Where you are 100% right - there are multiple ways to solve a problem, so to a user there should be no difference between gaming on something like SatoshiDice or something like mine. Central or de-central, the user probably won't care in the longer term. If you transfer value, you can do it on any crypto, however there may just be with a different way of implementing it or going about your business getting it up.

Is there a "Hello World" version of a DAC?

What is the simplest contract I can make? And do I need a 3rd party oracle to confirm anything?