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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#191

Post by brathouz »

Anonobread wrote: post #179
brathouz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I want BTC to fulfill our need for global electronic cash and Ethereum to fulfill our need for a developer-friendly Dapp environment.

The bigger Bitcoin becomes, the more we all benefit from a stable universal currency. The bigger Ethereum becomes, the more we all benefit from a rich set of shared resources for developing apps that use BTC in ways that we've been dreaming of for years.

Bitcoin's killer apps might be Ethereum Dapps. That wouldn't mean that Ether "failed" as a currency or that Bitcoin "failed" because Ethereum was used to build the killer apps. It'd mean both are succeeding!

Life is more colorful when it's not just black and white.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#192

Post by TD-Linux »

eco wrote: post #119
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…

That all sounds very exciting. Are there some implementations of this stuff we can look at?

Hot off the presses: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#193

Post by dudeonthenet »

I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question:

When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the network (or other blockchain technologies) can perform. If we think of regular computers, then no matter in which language an application ( i dislike the word 'app' :) is written in, eventually we end up talking about the x86 instruction set, the microcode that makes up each instruction, and, finally, the actual transistors logic that run them.

I somehow feel this is important to ask because we have to take into account the energy efficiency of computation. For example, if we think about the x86 ADD instruction, there is an approximately fixed amount of energy it dissipates when it is performed. ( This is a pretty interesting subject in intself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle )

What would be an equivalent ADD instruction or other basic unit of computation on the Ethereum computer and how expensive would it be? If it involves one or several distributed blockchain operations, then it seems to me that this model would be neither energy efficient, nor performant, especially if we take into account the distributed factor, which means that such an operation would be very costly since getting one bit of information from one end to the other requires an arbitrary number of routers along its path, and those consume energy to operate.

So I guess what I'm trying to ask is if this is practical in any useful way.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#194

Post by 7373737373 »

jcfrei wrote: post #73

I've dabbled with the dev tools ethereum provided for a while and I can't imagine that the computations ethereum does will ever be fast enough for a general purpose, distributed computation platform. If I had to wager on yet another cryptocurrency™ I'd bet on Zcash ( https://github.com/zcash/zcash ). They promise a real differentiator for cryptocurrencies with their zero-knowledge proofs.

There is http://golemproject.net/, which builds on top of Ethereum and uses it for administrative purposes (e.g. payments).

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#195

Post by jarsin »

dudeonthenet wrote: post #193

I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question: When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the netw…

opcodes cost gas.

More in depth [1] and in the yellow paper linked in the stack exchange question.

[1] http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-were-gas-...

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#196

Post by alexfisher »

dudeonthenet wrote: post #193

I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question: When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the netw…

Check-out the Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction set by reviewing Gavin's Yellow Paper. It start on page 22:

http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#197

Post by Anonobread »

ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #190
Anonobread wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But since we're talking about "decentralized systems", the question is who owns the blockchain infrastructure. Is the blockchain going…

"To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion." "Big boys" do though. And that is my point exactly - if there's enough tx volume (driven by consumer adoption first and foremost) to warrant this expense - someone will do it. Also, in reality bitcoin isn'…

You'll have to excuse me for this, but what you've just written has been said so many times in the past 18 months it's basically a cliche.

If you're willing to put the entire system into the cloud and hand over the backbone of Bitcoin to big banks and megacorps, you end up with a system no different from fiat currency over time. It ends up being a State controlled fiat money, because all of the infrastructure providers are Corporations - creatures of the State.

Inflation? No problem, we'll just have the usual suspects update the code. Freezing accounts? Narcoturrerism? No problem, we'll update the code. Etc. Having a P2P electronic cash system means accepting that the system is going to be different than government scrip.

The blockchain was never meant to be PayPal. It was meant to bootstrap a cryptoeconomic system outside the bounds of politics and the law. It's completely irresponsible to give that vision up for the ability globally broadcast low value, meaningless consumer payments - especially since you can achieve that by building higher layers of abstraction.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#198

Post by linagee »

xavieryvez wrote: post #57
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 agree in some respects, i.e. RootStock basically plugs onto Bitcoin what the Ethereum decentralized execution model does. You can actually run your Ethereum-developed apps on top of it, they mention it is fully compatible. SatoshiDice is not quite the same as a Ethereum app, the former requires the central website to be online and operating whereas the latter would work even when the site is down since the executio…

> they mention it is fully compatible.

As far as I know, Rootstock is still just a whitepaper. So this is just a promise to be compatible. Nothing exists yet, it's vaporware at this point.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#199

Post by ChemicalWarfare »

Anonobread wrote: post #197
ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion." "Big boys" do though. And that is my point exactly - if there's enough tx volume (driven by consumer adoption first and foremost) to warrant this expense - someone will do it. Also, in reality bitcoin isn'…

You'll have to excuse me for this, but what you've just written has been said so many times in the past 18 months it's basically a cliche. If you're willing to put the entire system into the cloud and hand over the backbone of Bitcoin to big banks and megacorps, you end up with a system no different from fiat currency over time. It ends up being a State controlled fiat money, because all of the infrastructure provide…

Well sure, there's a "libertarian" angle and there's a "pragmatic" angle here. I don't want to be beating a dead horse but with the way things are shaping up for bitcoin things are getting pretty centralized and as a result easy to control.

As for being "outside the bounds of politics and the law" when it really comes down to it you can only go so far especially if there's something as sensitive and highly visible as "money" is involved. Even in the reasonably "soft" western countries there are subpoenas, cease and desist orders etc. All of that can be set in motion by the government who has the final say. In China - they just disconnect the whole country from the internet :)

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#200

Post by norswap »

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.

In this metaphor, I expected Bitcoin to be canning and Ethereum to be vacuum drying.
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