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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#131

Post by semiel »

Taek wrote: post #130
semiel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin can barely agree to a minimal blocksize increase. The Ethereum proposals for stuff like sharding would be complete non-starters in the Bitcoin world.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#132

Post by Anonobread »

jude- wrote: post #126
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…

> I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log

You're coming at this backwards. Once you have the most valuable cryptocurrency unit of account, you have the most security and the highest availability log in the world. On that basis, you can do just about anything, e.g. sidechains or payment channels.

A "highly replicated log" is a prerequisite of that, and Bitcoin is currently winning that battle due to first mover advantage. Hence, anything can be built on top of that basis.

If you have small competitor to Bitcoin that aims to do more, it's more valuable for the majority to snipe the features from the small competitor and make those features available denominated in the majority owned asset.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#133

Post by Anonobread »

crazydoggers wrote: post #98
kang wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what you're arguing? Ethereum is fully decentralized and open source. There happens to be a well funded non-profit that the community funded in order to speed up development (EthDEV). Ethereum and EthDEV are not one in the same thing. If EthDEV disappeared, ethereum would continue. That's a little different than some Amazon owned and operated "AWScoin". Bitcoin also has the "Bitcoin Foundation" which emp…

Gavin is no longer lead developer and hasn't been for years now.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#135

Post by repomies69 »

eco wrote: post #128
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:…

I know what they mean.

> A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it.

Of course, you need miners. However the mining is the easy part, otherwise you need marketing, use cases, etc, for the currency to get any traction. I think an altcoin working on top of the ethereum blockchain would not be as convincing as invidual altcoin.

However of course if we are speaking about some other kind of asset, it might make sense to do it on ethereum.

> Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has.

No. Maybe mining security or something, but trust? Why would anyone use these crappy in-ethereum tokens, when you can just use ether itself. Or bitcoin.

You can make tokens as well inside bitcoin via colored coins and similar methods. They haven't gained much traction, I doubt that they will inside ethereum.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#136

Post by Anonobread »

cdetrio wrote: post #69
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…

> Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment Sure, bitcoin script can in theory compute any computable problem (as can any turing machine). But it doesn't have native access to the data it needs, so pretty much any input you'd want to use needs to be put there by a trusted "oracle" (through a clever encoding into UTXO logic). For example,…

But you can port any and all features to sidechains or Enigma [1], and in doing so make them accessible to a much bigger market, denominated in BTC which is a more stable and proven unit of account.

Or at least that's how the story is supposed to go. In theory, porting nice-to-have features to a larger audience results in more revenue and more overall societal benefit than starting a new scarcity race, which Ethereum has done, pitting investors against each other.

[1]: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#137

Post by tommorris »

vertex-four wrote: post #17
Hermel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bitcoin network is not having much difficulty with a couple of transactions per second. It is the community that struggles with adjusting to an appropriate throughput.

How do I continue using Bitcoin as a transactional currency if I can't perform transactions with it?

I believe the current answer to that is to make vague promises about how the vapourware known as the Lightning Network will solve all the problems.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#138

Post by kanzure »

choicewords wrote: post #123
eco wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, bitcoin IRC or bitcoin slack- http://slack.bitcoincore.org/ which has an IRC bridge to freenode (read-only), plus read-write slack channels.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#139

Post by micwawa »

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…

Are people still developing Counterparty? Is this what you're referring to?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#140

Post by brighton36 »

micwawa wrote: post #139
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…

Are people still developing Counterparty? Is this what you're referring to?

They are. And, I'm not sure if that's what he's refferring to. his claim is fairly dubious, because blockchains require energy, and you don't just snap your fingers and acquire that
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