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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#121

Post by empath75 »

Anonobread wrote: post #100
crazydoggers wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One key difference with Bitcoin is that, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has an account based architecture. In other words, you have an account that is credited or debited, and you then have a current balance for that account. If you need to get your balance or send ether, you just look up a single number. Bitcoin on the other hand uses an "Unspent Transaction Output" architecture. Basically your balance is made up of all o…

But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain". VISA does 56,000 tps. So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer? And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethere…

Blockchains don't need to take over a substantial percentage of economic activity to be useful. I don't understand why people bring up transaction limits as if they permanently cripple the technology.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#122

Post by empath75 »

maxander wrote: post #102
vonklaus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this true? I believe there is a tradeoff but want a more in depth explsnation if possible

As I recall (and this may not be the whole of it), the "tradeoff" was that a larger block size would risk getting attention from China's great firewall, effectively splitting the network and rendering Chinese users' funds effectively worthless. And it turns out a set of Chinese users have a controlling interest in the network currently... so yes, its a political problem par excellence . It occurs to me as I write tha…

Also, the miners get more fees when the transaction limit gets reached.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#123

Post by choicewords »

eco wrote: post #119
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…

That all sounds very exciting. Are there some implementations of this stuff we can look at?

Would like to see some of these techniques as well. Or just I just hangout in BTC irc more?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#124

Post by david-given »

simondlr wrote: post #105
Anonobread wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain". VISA does 56,000 tps. So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer? And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethere…

There are several things Ethereum does currently that's better for scaling. 1) It produces blocks every 17 seconds. It can do this without neglecting security, because orphan blocks count as uncles and are included in the security of the whole network. 2) It has a scalable/dynamic blocksize. The miners can scale the gas limit up or down by a certain amount. If the current gas limit (pi million) gets hit, miners can s…

Is that 17 seconds per block globally, or per client? If it's global, how long would the average client take to generate a block?

If it's going to take hours to generate a block, I'm worried that it's going to take forever for an app to generate enough ether to get anything done; buying the stuff using real money is a nonstarter for most applications, so generating it on demand is the only real option.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#125

Post by Anonobread »

crazydoggers wrote: post #110
Anonobread wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain". VISA does 56,000 tps. So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer? And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethere…

Well, as I understand it, there's no technical reason Ethereum can't do the 56,000 tps. Ethereum has no fixed block size. Realistically, obviously, you'd need more and more compute power. The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small no…

> The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)

Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction.

> It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!".

But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#126

Post by jude- »

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.

I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log (where inimitability is provided by PoW in these two cases). Once you have that, nodes in a decentralized application use it it to record their externally-visible state transitions, thereby giving each node a global, total ordering of all of the application's prior states. Then, the usefulness of one blockchain versus another is simply a function of how secure it is (i.e. how inimitable it is), how much bandwidth it offers (i.e. how much state can be recorded in a block), and how fast it can add new blocks.

This is the approach Blockstack DNS uses, for example (full disclosure: I'm its lead engineer). It's designed to be portable across blockchains, so we can migrate it to a more secure one if the one it's currently using proves insufficient.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#128

Post by eco »

repomies69 wrote: post #111

"The Ethereum network is a distributed economy like Bitcoin, except it is much, much more powerful. The essential difference is that Ethereum is programmable. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to program a whole new currency like Bitcoin." AFAIK it takes 5 minutes to fork Bitcoin and create a new altcoin. Why would I use ethereum for my altcoin instead of doing a new altcoin?

They don't mean fork ethereum and create a new currency. They mean create a new currency running on the ethereum platform. A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it. Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has.

Here is the tutorial about creating your own coin on ethereum. It's pretty short and interesting: https://www.ethereum.org/token

People like to think of ether as another cryptocurrency like bitcoin but the ethereum currency is intended to be more like a commodity that is used to fuel the platform that runs all sorts of stuff (including currencies).

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#129

Post by Anonobread »

empath75 wrote: post #121
Anonobread wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain". VISA does 56,000 tps. So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer? And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethere…

Blockchains don't need to take over a substantial percentage of economic activity to be useful. I don't understand why people bring up transaction limits as if they permanently cripple the technology.

The throughput capacity of Bitcoin, being programmable money, isn't a user limit. We can just as soon put billions of users with BTC-denominated accounts at higher layers of abstraction, and in fact this is exactly what Bitcoin's core developers aim to achieve. It doesn't make any sense to globally broadcast every last Starbucks coffee and permanently etch it into an immutable database at enormous cost.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#130

Post by Taek »

semiel wrote: post #47
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.

Currently, yes. However, the Ethereum foundation is actively working on addressing that limitation, and there are some very clever proposals for how to get around the problem. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum development is very active and the community welcomes major changes if they are worthwhile. I agree that Ethereum needs to solve the scaling problem to be successful, but I think Vitalik and the foundation have a good s…

"Unlike Bitcoin"??

Bitcoin has a multiple-factor greater mindshare. More developers, more researchers, more conferences, and more overall maturity.

There are a lot of incorrect things in this thread.

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