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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#161

Post by pmarreck »

crazydoggers wrote: post #37
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.

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…

> 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

How is that different from a Bitcoin wallet address aka public/private key combo?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#162

Post by nikkwong »

I'm still not getting this. Let's say I have a node server that can serve up some sort of front end application. How would something like that run on etherium? Are a number of computers in the network going to get a copy of my source code copied onto them so they can 'distribute' it effectively? That doesn't seem very practical to me.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#163

Post by brathouz »

Anonobread wrote: post #132
jude- wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 replicate…

Ethereum and Bitcoin can, and should, coexist. Both have something to offer to one another.

For example, check out btcrelay.org. While you're waiting for Bitcoin to "snipe the features from the small competitor", that small competitor can lend a helping hand to Bitcoin.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#164

Post by nickik »

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…

The bitcoin debate is mostly political, not technical, even if their are lots of techlogical aspects to it. Butshares allready has an architecure that can deal with 200000 transactions a second. I dont know if etherium could do the same.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#165

Post by vamur »

One issue with Ethereum is that smart contracts are expensive and must run on every node. These days a VPS with 2GB RAM costs $4 so Ethereum would not be competitive even in short term.

Another issue is the blockchain size which is already 8GB and growing faster than the Bitcoin blockchain.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#166

Post by aianus »

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…

> 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?

Because it's not legal (in the US), obviously. But the feds won't be able to shut it down if it's on the blockchain. Look at bittorrent, still perfectly alive and well after so many years.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#167

Post by spaceman77 »

crazydoggers wrote: post #37
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.

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…

Some people downvote what they don't understand or agree with.

I only downvote abusive comments and spam.

As for Ethereum I have a lot of work understanding how the whole thing works. I sense there is a lot of promise and potential there.

However like the internet when it was emerging, I suspect the Ethereum project will probably be attacked without thoughtful discussion.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#168

Post by repomies69 »

jarsin wrote: post #158
repomies69 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You have to take in account that for every failed banks there is something like 20 banks that have worked good enough. For full tilt, there has been many gambling services that haven't failed yet.

When using banking services, you have a risk of a bank run. How big that risk is? How much work are you willing to do, or how much money are you willing to spend to migitate that risk?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#169

Post by drcode »

vamur wrote: post #165

One issue with Ethereum is that smart contracts are expensive and must run on every node. These days a VPS with 2GB RAM costs $4 so Ethereum would not be competitive even in short term. Another issue is the blockchain size which is already 8GB and growing faster than the Bitcoin blockchain.

Ethereum smart contracts have abilities far beyond a VPS, particularly around security, reliability, and trustlessness guarantees- Whether you think those abilities have value and justify a new platform is a separate question, but the argument that "this is like a VPS" is a misunderstanding of what ethereum is offering with its technology.

The large blockchain size, on the other hand, is a legitimate problem with ethereum (as with all blockchain systems.) Hopefully the devs will be able to solve this problem- They are hard at work on a potential solution as we speak.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#170

Post by aaren »

kang wrote: post #76
jarsin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the bitshares, nxt, insert any blockchain project all say the same thing yet none of them comes even close to the amount of dev taking place on ethereum. hmm why is that....

Vitalik became famous cause of his journalism. Then the sale gave ether founders loads of money. Now it is being used to market cleverly. One example around me here in India is BlockchainU. Blockchain university has taught in almost all prime Indian IT companies pumping ethereum & thus atleast most, if not all, corporate devs are working on ethereum here, whereas there is no central advertising foundation for bitcoin…

Are you suggesting that Consensys, Microsoft, R3CEV and Red Hat are only developing on Ethereum because of clever marketing? There isn't some technical merit to the platform that means they are doing this?

Why didn't these companies develop their products on Bitcoin? Are they incapable of due diligence in this space?

https://consensys.net/

http://www.blockapps.net/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/ethereum-blockchain-a...

https://consensys.net/static/blockappsRedhat.pdf

http://r3cev.com/

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