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

151–160 of 243 posts

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#151

Post by repomies69 »

pipermerriam wrote: post #96
joshuakarjala wrote: post #48

Have built a demo app with Ethereum in November. The tooling was ok, but not amazing. IMO one of the main problems is that you need trusted inputs for most "interesting" or "valuable" computations.

Developing on the platform right now is akin to writing software to run on a VM that has no operating system. The services that are being written right now can be thought of as the operating system (foundation) that everything that will come next is built on. To do the really interesting stuff you have to first build all of the really low level tooling to support it. There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/…

> There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a few years away.

At least a few years? LOL. I would give it 20 years.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#152

Post by splintercell »

DennisP wrote: post #146
splintercell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++.

"by Ethereum app in c++" I mean writing that logic in C++, of course it won't run on Ethereum network anymore after that point.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#154

Post by iamthepieman »

i see a browser plugin/app like "Cloud to Butt"[0]

that detects phrases like "I would bet my ass off" or "I bet you that" or "I wager" and converts them to a prediction market link - creating the market if it doesn't exist or just linking to it if it does.

[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#155

Post by fragsworth »

powera wrote: post #24

I still don't understand how anyone can believe that paying ten to a hundred times as much for algorithmically provable trust or whatever will get any market traction ever.

One tangible example is how there is significant legal and accounting overhead for banking contracts, particularly credit default swaps and other risk-mitigating things. Some of these can be automated in Ethereum.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#156

Post by fragsworth »

powera wrote: post #24

I still don't understand how anyone can believe that paying ten to a hundred times as much for algorithmically provable trust or whatever will get any market traction ever.

One tangible example is how there is significant legal and accounting overhead for banking contracts, particularly credit default swaps and other risk-mitigating things. Some of these can be automated in Ethereum.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#157

Post by crazydoggers »

Anonobread wrote: post #133
crazydoggers wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, he is no longer "the lead" developer, but he's still a core contributor, and is Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, so the point stands.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#158

Post by jarsin »

repomies69 wrote: post #147
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…

> they want brand that they know to trust.

like fulltilt or leehman brothers!

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#159

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#160

Post by pmarreck »

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

Where's the github gist for this?

Post reply on HN