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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#171

Post by andrewla »

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…

I'm of the minority opinion that the Turing-complete nature of Ethereum is an anti-feature. [1]

The features that matter in my mind are things that make Ethereum superior to Bitcoin:

1. Shorter block times without compromising security -- GHOST was proposed for Bitcoin, but it's a long way from happening.

2. Every block contains the Merkle root of the balance tree, so proving account balance becomes a one-node + proof problem instead of an "entire blockchain" problem -- the only way that I can verify that a UTXO is valid is to have the entire blockchain forward from the UTXO block. In ethereum, I just need the root plus a proof at the top of the chain.

3. No reward halving. The fee schedule is constant, which means that the marginal rate of growth is diminishing, but the logic across the board for utility calculations is incredibly simple.

4. Easy offline transaction creation -- the properties in #2 means that all you need to generate a transaction is the nonce(s).

5. (possibly) ASIC-resistant proof-of-work. I'm not completely sold on this one; all it really means in my mind is that the cost of such ASICs is higher on a per unit basis, which means that the power is more likely to be consolidated than the double-SHA256.

[1] Why do I think the whole Turing-complete thing and smart contracts are useless? Because fully-funded contracts are economically uninteresting. Basically, only zero-sum contracts can be encoded. If I borrow money from you at a given interest rate, I can do economically productive activity to make more money, and both pay you back and come out ahead. If I am instead forced to keep the total payback amount in escrow, then I have no capital to use, and the transaction is meaningless. Things like cryptographic ownership tokens (colored coins, etc.) have some limited utility, but as you say, those are easily done on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#172

Post by drcode »

nikkwong wrote: post #162

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.

> That doesn't seem very practical to me.

Ethereum has the highest uptime of any computing platform ever developed. It's probably something like 99.99999% uptime (assuming a 0.00001% yearly chance that the earth is destroyed in a given year from a giant asteroid impact)

What would be a "practical" way of getting the same results with your node server?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#173

Post by nickik »

ufo wrote: post #39
empath75 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a political problem with the miners and developers. There's no technical reason they couldn't raise the block size.

You shouldn't ignore political problems when it comes to distributed systems... Additionally, raising the block size cap is only a stopgap measure. Eventually you will reach hard bandwidth or disk storage limits and the only way will be to throw some transactions outside the blockchain.

Bishares is a blockchain that can do as many and more transaction as Visa. Their does not seem to be a fundamental problem as long as you accept that Worker(miners) are fast servers with good networks.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#174

Post by vamur »

drcode wrote: post #169
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 eth…

Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps. This would mean that for most applications trustlessness is not very useful. And for those apps where it would be generally useful, such as exchanges, betting. etc, the expensive nature of gas would mean that operating on Ethereum would be cost prohibitive and they would lose to their centralized competitors. And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#175

Post by drcode »

vamur wrote: post #174
drcode wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eth…

Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps. This would mean that for most applications trustlessness is not very useful. And for those apps where it would be generally useful, such as exchanges, betting. etc, the expensive nature of gas would mean that operating on Ethereum would be cost prohibitive and they would lose to their centralized competitors. And how is…

> Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps.

I think that's a valid criticism- I, too, am a bit disappointed that there are few contracts yet with obvious utility.

However, as someone deep in the community and talking to lots of people, it seems there's going to be tons of interesting dapps deployed in the next 6 months. Hopefully there will be a "killer dapp" among them.

> And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS?

If I store money on your VPS-based app, how can I be assured you can't steal it from me? If I use a feature on your VPS, how can I be sure you won't disable it tomorrow? Ethereum can provide these sorts of guarantees.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#176

Post by droffel »

crazydoggers wrote: post #157
Anonobread wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He is not a Core contributor anymore. He's been effectively frozen out.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#177

Post by ChemicalWarfare »

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…

56k TPS is a supposed peak at burst volumes, in reality the number is closer to 3K TPS but that's beside the point.

Until there's a real need for bitcoin to support this sort of volume (if ever) I don't think comparing bitcoin to visa tps wise proves anything.

If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#178

Post by DennisP »

splintercell wrote: post #152
DennisP wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah makes sense, sorry for my confusion.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#179

Post by Anonobread »

brathouz wrote: post #163
Anonobread wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Global electronic cash is a zero sum game. Money is pure network effect and only one unit of account can have 90% global market share at a time. I want that to be BTC. You want that to be ETH. Let's just agree to disagree?

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#180

Post by jarsin »

ApplaudPumice wrote: post #143
whypeoplepeople wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

here is the a basic example. https://ethereum.org/greeter

more in depth tutorials exist on ethereum.org

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