Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

svds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 243 posts

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#141

Post by brighton36 »

Anonobread wrote: post #120
simondlr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What block size for Ethereum's blockchain would be required to hit 56,000 tps? I'm really getting some deja vu in having to write this out for the millionth time in a 18 month period. None of your talking points magically address the extreme costs of prerequisite physical infrastructure needed to hit 56,000 tps. Bottom line, it's impossible to match the throughput capacity of just a single credit card company on any…

Thank-you for writing this for the umpteenth time. I write these same points myself, constantly, as well.

Most of the people in the ethereum project are delusional teenagers looking to get rich quick.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#142

Post by darawk »

Anonobread wrote: post #120
simondlr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What block size for Ethereum's blockchain would be required to hit 56,000 tps? I'm really getting some deja vu in having to write this out for the millionth time in a 18 month period. None of your talking points magically address the extreme costs of prerequisite physical infrastructure needed to hit 56,000 tps. Bottom line, it's impossible to match the throughput capacity of just a single credit card company on any…

Make block time 1s. Allow blocks to hold 1M transactions. Problem solved?

Granted, this doesn't deliver the physical infrastructure to process that many transactions - but that will happen over time. Visa didn't process 56k tps on day one, either.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#143

Post by ApplaudPumice »

whypeoplepeople wrote: post #97
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…

There were tons of techniques to preserve home-made foods - canning, vacuum drying, salt curing, fermentation, etc. - and then someone invented the fridge. What is widely adopted? As an average developer, I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code in Ethereum. I have no idea in earth how to even start writing those things on classic blockchains, let alone prove they work as I expect.

> I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code in Ethereum.

Have you done this before? I tried to learn Ethereum (as an average developer) but it was over my head.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#144

Post by Animats »

This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the typical football fan.

Possible YC startup.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#145

Post by knightofmars »

whypeoplepeople wrote: post #97
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…

There were tons of techniques to preserve home-made foods - canning, vacuum drying, salt curing, fermentation, etc. - and then someone invented the fridge. What is widely adopted? As an average developer, I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code in Ethereum. I have no idea in earth how to even start writing those things on classic blockchains, let alone prove they work as I expect.

I think a better comparison would be "commercial mass production of preserved foods vs making them at home". For example, it is easier to buy a can of beans for cooking than it is to grow your own beans, can them, and then use them for cooking. The purchasing being analogous to using Ethereum and the growing and home-canning being analogous to classic blockchains.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#146

Post by DennisP »

splintercell wrote: post #107
kang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ]

Last week I built an dapp called 'GameOfTrolls', it is an attempt recreate the /r/GameOfTrolls subreddit which was banned by reddit. The idea was to make a game out of trolling people(as in just lying and making up stories). I did it in one week, it uses Oraclize.it (which I believe is also available for bitcoin, so that's nice), and I am sure it can be built on bitcoin too, but the biggest problem remains this: * Wh…

Generally agree, app development is great. Regarding your last point, apps in Ethereum run on Ethereum's specialized VM. Every opcode has its own transaction fee. There's no way to write an Ethereum app in C++.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#147

Post by repomies69 »

Animats wrote: post #144

This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the typical football fan. Possible YC startup.

If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? I would bet my ass off that the end-users (gamblers) don't give a crap whether it is on blockchain or not, they just want it to be easy, quick and possibly cheap. And of course trustable. And by latter I don't mean "mathematical proof" trustable, they want brand that they know to trust.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#148

Post by gervase »

Animats wrote: post #144

This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the typical football fan. Possible YC startup.

They actually discuss this in the article, including the concept of oracles, 'reputation', etc. See more at the referenced site[0] or the Youtube video[1].

[0] http://www.augur.net/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yegyih591Jo

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#149

Post by repomies69 »

whypeoplepeople wrote: post #97
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…

There were tons of techniques to preserve home-made foods - canning, vacuum drying, salt curing, fermentation, etc. - and then someone invented the fridge. What is widely adopted? As an average developer, I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code in Ethereum. I have no idea in earth how to even start writing those things on classic blockchains, let alone prove they work as I expect.

> I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code in Ethereum.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting for the first smart contract that is actually useful for something.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#150

Post by crazydoggers »

Anonobread wrote: post #125
crazydoggers wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, nothin…

> I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable

But I did answer what it does different. I cited a few of the many things it does different, one of which is an account based model. Another is faster and unlimited sized blocks. And if you care to read more of the development threads, you'd find lots of other solutions. Ignoring facts and continuing to say "The answer is, of course, nothing" is just FUD.

Here's a quote from Vitalik in October:

"Scalability: using a combination of sharding schemes, random sampling, heavy use of Merkle proofs and asynchronous calling in order to increase the potential transaction throughput from ~10-20 transactions per second to over 100000 (or, if super-quadratic versions are used, a theoretically unlimited number). The basic concepts behind scaling have been set in stone for over six months, and our research team is highly confident that the general approach is valid;"

> But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud"

Who said anything of the sort? I'm saying it's a hard problem, but it's tractable and takes resources and time. What's that got to do with the cloud??

Ultimately I don't understand the whole negative attitude on scaling. Obstacles are not a reason to not attempt something, and certainly not potential scaling issues. Making the Internet was hard. In 1993 people could have said "computers are expensive.. and think of all the cables you'd have to lay! It's going to be millions of miles of cables! It'll never happen! This whole WWW thing is just a toy fad!"

Post reply on HN