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Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

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Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#201

Post by brighton36 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #183
Anonobread wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"VISA does 56,000 tps." That's what I keep telling them. The whole of credit processing and banking... even the Fed... runs on centralized, transactional architectures with redundant datacenters and optionally redundant checks from mutually-distrusting parties. What people want to do can be built on a highly-efficient, log-based system with distributed checking run by a foundation (or international collaboration) in…

The reason to use a blockchain is because you're locked out of service in the incumbent models. That means : gambling, drugs, sometimes porn, and capital flight. That's why you use a blockchain. (And IMO, that's what makes them so cool)

Otherwise - Blockchains totally suck at everything, and these private-blockchains/blockchains without energy are completely inane and stupid

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#202

Post by brighton36 »

Anonobread wrote: post #186
nickpsecurity wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"VISA does 56,000 tps." That's what I keep telling them. The whole of credit processing and banking... even the Fed... runs on centralized, transactional architectures with redundant datacenters and optionally redundant checks from mutually-distrusting parties. What people want to do can be built on a highly-efficient, log-based system with distributed checking run by a foundation (or international collaboration) in…

Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills. Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contract…

Very good answer.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#203

Post by ilaksh »

We need something like Ethereum or Bitcoin but built on a common platform such as web assembly which is an AST supporting multiple programming languages, with semantic versioning and an npm-like registry. This way it can evolve easily.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#204

Post by nullc »

chejazi wrote: post #83
woah wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to figure out your angle here. Are you saying that ethereum isn't ambitious enough because it doesn't incorporate these fun crypto techs you mention? I would say that it's already an extremely ambitious project so it's good that they didn't bite off more than they can chew. Or maybe you are trying to say that this could have been done on Bitcoin? Maybe, but whatever you try to shoehorn into Bitcoin's cripp…

He's saying Ethereum does similar things to Bitcoin, but the techniques to do them w/ Bitcoin were not understood from the get-go.

They've even been understood for years too...

For example, today I participated in a demonstration of trustlessly, privately, and securely selling information (a 16x16 sudoku solution) via Bitcoin:

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

(But you probably won't read about it on HN; no profit in promoting it. )

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#205

Post by crazydoggers »

droffel wrote: post #176
crazydoggers wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant lowercase core, not uppercase Core. His most recent contribution is to the "Bitcoin Classic" fork rather than the "Core" fork. He's still a key developer in the Bitcoin community. I wasn't trying to wade into the Bitcoin political issues. It's all "Bitcoin"

Whats relevant to first post is that Bitcoin Foundation is a non profit aimed at bettering the Bitcoin ecosystem, similar to EthDEV, not some corporate owner of Ethereum IP, and they help move forward development of "Bitcoin"

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#206

Post by dudeonthenet »

alexfisher wrote: post #196
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

Thanks for the link, I'll take a look

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#207

Post by bshanks »

The way i think about Ethereum is that it's a cloud computing platform upon which the whole world can see which program the server is running. The usefulness of this is that if you want to run a computing service that administers something of great value to others (such as a vote-counting service or a property registry), other people might be suspicious that you will use your administrative access to the server to corrupt the system. With Ethereum, the service provider doesn't have any admin access (and neither do the people upon whose hardware the program is ultimately running on); the cloud computer just runs the program you upload, and everyone can see what program that is.

In addition, it runs your service robustly, and preserves the entire history of the computation forever. The downside is that these transparency and robustness features make the service a lot more expensive than ordinary cloud computing, as well as more difficult to program on.

It doesn't really have much to do with Bitcoin or currency (except that (a) like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses blockchain technology to achieve these things; but that's an implementation detail (b) a Bitcoin clone is one of the many things you could build as an Ethereum application (c) for technical reasons you buy Ethereum server time via purchasing server-time-credits called "Ether").

As a project, Ethereum is very technically ambitious (they are not just working on a cloud computing platform, but also trying to advance blockchain technology in general, eg developing a new proof-of-stake algorithm, and eg developing a way to not have to replicate computations on every node on the network). They are trying to do a lot of new things at once, which is risky (but awesome).

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#208

Post by CephalopodMD »

pre wrote: post #68
LAMike wrote: post #59

Is there a "Hello World" version of a DAC? What is the simplest contract I can make? And do I need a 3rd party oracle to confirm anything?

Yep. Running it is about as far as I got with my investigations. https://www.ethereum.org/greeter

What is wrong with this website? It is glitchy looking as hell.

Re: Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

#209

Post by httpagent »

woah wrote: post #87
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 ]

Easy scripting language. And don't tell me about rootstock, it's not on top of Bitcoin.

Can you elaborate on rootstock not being on top of bitcoin? That was my understanding...
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