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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#81

Post by kang »

crazydoggers wrote: post #72
kang wrote: post #52

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142 Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is it advantageous if a DSL is turing complete? It is not that bitcoin 'cannot have' a turing complete script but that it is unsafe & there is no need to do so. Turing completeness can be applied on an upper abstraction. There is nothing that ethereum can do that bitcoin cannot! Th…

> Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin That's like saying give me any HTTP use-case, and I'll tell you how to do it with Gopher. To me Rootstock is like putting the WWW on top of Gopher. You can do it, but why? "We don't need GUIs, command lines can do everything!" "We don't need Java/Python/Ruby, you can do it all in C!" "We don't need C, you can do it all Assembly!" Ease of develo…

You are right, ease of use matters but it is so because ether was sold and got a lot of money whereas no such body exists in bitcoin. With that money ethereum could fund coding.

That is a good thing unless the whole point of the system is decentralization. This is similar to Amazon selling AWScoin and launching a SETI-like software so anyone can run their system as an AWS server & earn AWScoins.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#82

Post by nzoschke »

jarsin wrote: post #58
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is this your opinion because you truly believe it or because you have a horse in the bitcoin race? I'm not saying that Ethereum is superior to bitcoin but at least from a brief look over it, it seems to make quite a bit of sense. Whereas my experience with bitcoin is that it's an incredibly hacky and questionable system that primarily survives…

Yep ethereum has been out for what 6 months and look at all of development on top of it already. BTC has tons of VC money and I see nothing interesting beyond a few regulated exchanges. But oh ya we are all suppose to believe BTC can do all of this but apparently nobody really knows how. It's really just a bunch of people that think BTC is special because it was first, but it lost it's first mover advantage. https://…

The list of dapps is remarkable... That was my first glimpse into the hackability of Etherium and I am very intrigued now.

As a total outsider to all this, I suspect you are right.

Bitcoin is very hacky, as almost all successful first systems are. Etherium is a second system.

First systems: By force of will you cobble together a viable prototype and if you are lucky it gets traction. Then it's an exercise in patching to keep the system running.

Second systems: longer dev cycles based on lofty goals for better architecture and features. Many second systems fail here. But if/when the second system gains traction, it's potentially a much better solution since it could learn from mistakes of the first system.

It's clear that the tools are better in Etherium for building block chain apps. It also looks like it's getting good adoption.

Like all things crypto currency it's interesting that there is money on the line. Bitcoin won't fall out of fashion as quickly as other systems for that reason.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#83

Post by chejazi »

woah wrote: post #75
Uptrenda wrote: post #51

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, homomorp…

I'm trying to figure out your angle here. Are you saying that ethereum isn't ambitious enough because it doesn't incorporate these fun crypto techs you mention? I would say that it's already an extremely ambitious project so it's good that they didn't bite off more than they can chew. Or maybe you are trying to say that this could have been done on Bitcoin? Maybe, but whatever you try to shoehorn into Bitcoin's cripp…

He's saying Ethereum does similar things to Bitcoin, but the techniques to do them w/ Bitcoin were not understood from the get-go.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#84

Post by drcode »

kang wrote: post #65
jarsin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep ethereum has been out for what 6 months and look at all of development on top of it already. BTC has tons of VC money and I see nothing interesting beyond a few regulated exchanges. But oh ya we are all suppose to believe BTC can do all of this but apparently nobody really knows how. It's really just a bunch of people that think BTC is special because it was first, but it lost it's first mover advantage. https://…

Please give me an ethereum use case & I'll try to tell you how you can do it with bitcoin. I have previously answered a few use cases here [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846788 ]

Sending money to someone and having 99.9% certainty after a minute that the transaction is mined and will be in the chain long term.

Even though ethereum's 15 sec blocks are nowhere near as secure as Bitcoins 10 minute blocks, the fact that you can 4 blocks after a minute already gives pretty decent doublespend security, from a statistical standpoint.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#85

Post by jarsin »

kefka wrote: post #62

Unfortunately, I'm trying to obtain a small amount of ethereum currency to experiment with this.. And I just killed my thread doing 1M hashes a sec, because I found out that 6MHash/sec = 5 Eth/month on average. I'll spend my time learning other things, mainly because this is inaccessible to me.

Just download the mist wallet and mine on the test network which is what you should be doing if you are playing with it anyway.

https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#86

Post by xavieryvez »

kefka wrote: post #80
cjm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy the Ether on an exchange.

I was hoping for a roughly low barrier of entry, rather than try to figure out who will trade USB for ETH, as I have no BTC. In all honesty, I'm looking at distributed applications as well, which from what I read Ethereum says it does and doesn't do. It's a bit fast and loose from what I read about, about Ethereum's capabilities. I'll go back to my experimenting with TOR and how it might be possible to make your own…

While developing, you would do it either on the dev (local, not connected) or testnet. Both these are easily mineable (I have 10k's on both), so there is nothing stopping you to actually playing around and putting together a dapp without having real ETH in your pocket.

No expenses and you can play around all you like. When you want to go live, there is typically only a very small deployment cost.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#87

Post by woah »

kang wrote: post #65
jarsin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep ethereum has been out for what 6 months and look at all of development on top of it already. BTC has tons of VC money and I see nothing interesting beyond a few regulated exchanges. But oh ya we are all suppose to believe BTC can do all of this but apparently nobody really knows how. It's really just a bunch of people that think BTC is special because it was first, but it lost it's first mover advantage. https://…

Please give me an ethereum use case & I'll try to tell you how you can do it with bitcoin. I have previously answered a few use cases here [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846788 ]

Easy scripting language. And don't tell me about rootstock, it's not on top of Bitcoin.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#88

Post by pipermerriam »

kang wrote: post #61
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is this your opinion because you truly believe it or because you have a horse in the bitcoin race? I'm not saying that Ethereum is superior to bitcoin but at least from a brief look over it, it seems to make quite a bit of sense. Whereas my experience with bitcoin is that it's an incredibly hacky and questionable system that primarily survives…

I have both bitcoin & ether apart from hundred other coins; earning profit is different from technical merit. I spent a long time studying ethereum as a promise for something incredible but in the end I realized its just the power of blockchains & can be done using bitcoin too. What I do not like in ethereum is the nature of origin of ether which makes it just an IPO coin.

> Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin.

I'm failing to see your point. Does the fact that things are possible with bitcoin make the technical merits of Ethereum less in some way?

> What I do not like in ethereum is the nature of origin of ether which makes it just an IPO coin.

The "makes it just an IPO coin" statement also seems to discount any of the technical merits of the platform due to your dislike of how the initial coin distribution occurred.

Disclaimer: I stand to benefit financially if the platform succeeds.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#90

Post by facepalm »

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.

It's not a compute engine, more a verification engine. The idea is to have transparent contracts that everybody can verify on their computer at home.
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