71–80 of 85 posts
>There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything. Interesting change of attitude! I was just watching a talk[1] from a couple of years ago where Vitalik says "there are a substantial number of applications where you can actually say yes 'I am 99.9 percent certain this is bug free'". Amazing how much a few years of industry practice can…
>There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything. Interesting change of attitude! I was just watching a talk[1] from a couple of years ago where Vitalik says "there are a substantial number of applications where you can actually say yes 'I am 99.9 percent certain this is bug free'". Amazing how much a few years of industry practice can…
100 != 99.9
>There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything. Interesting change of attitude! I was just watching a talk[1] from a couple of years ago where Vitalik says "there are a substantial number of applications where you can actually say yes 'I am 99.9 percent certain this is bug free'". Amazing how much a few years of industry practice can…
True at NASA and in many other places that spend 100x as much per line of code, albeit it's more like 95% surety.
> There have been many solutions proposed to smart contract safety, ranging from better development environments to better programming languages to formal verification and symbolic execution . . . Why is 'human arbitration as a last resort' not on this list?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your DNA doesn't change very much throughout the course of your life. One a program is on a blockchain, much less energy is expended to maintain it compared with the POW used to create the block..
But the definition of evolution is many many changes.
Help? I have no idea WTF is going on here. I've tried to search around for a clue but the more I read the more confusing it gets. At first it seemed that Ethereum was a kind of cryptocurrency like bitcoin (something that people could "mine" and exchange), then something about "contracts" that don't require trust, then something about it being effectively "a computer" that never stops, an investment system investing i…
He's still calling the DAO risk "theoretical" after all that's happened? A situation that rarely if ever happens to the legal instruments and methods Ethereum intends to replace. One that has them considering forks. One that has investors wondering if they'll loose it all. That... "theoretical"... risk. Specific vulnerabilities aside, I think any reader should stop trusting the judgment or effectiveness of Ethereum-b…
I'm rigorously trying to assess whether my complete inability to find any there there in blockchain-based applications (Bitcoin, Smart Contracts) is a bug on my part or feature.
I'm leaning strongly to feature.
> There have been many solutions proposed to smart contract safety, ranging from better development environments to better programming languages to formal verification and symbolic execution . . . Why is 'human arbitration as a last resort' not on this list?
I thought one of the goals was for the currency to be outside the influence of humans. Unless this arbitration is somehow built into the network and depends on the majority. Which still isn't a great solution.
It's a complete aberration that the Ethereum Foundation is even considering pushing a fork (hard or soft). There will be a fork, that is people leaving "Ethereum" for its new shiny successor. If you want the protection of a big brother, why not invest in the regular stock market? Lots of neophytes trying to get rich quick are now crying for help after realizing they made a mistake. It's really touching.
Any time there is a bug in a smart contract, do we get roll back in Ethereum? There will be more smart contract bugs or operations against intent. I think this is going to become a joke. Ethereum is not trustable if there is rollback when a contract didn't operate as intended. Can you imagine the stock market operating this way? BTW has bitcoin ever had a rollback in its existence?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree broadly - and the current DAO was a terrible idea on many fronts, but I'll discuss one quibble in case it starts a broader discussion. > You can't possibly create a smart contract to purchase a house, because at the end of the day the person that physically occupies the house is in the position of power. It's likely that if something like this ever succeeded, there'd be many parties that would provide bridges…
- The adherents are international, and may prefer a standardized form of law accessible cheaply and easily to all I think this is undervalued, and probably going to become even more important in the future. Largely because it's something that the current legal framework simply doesn't provide. We have tenuous legal agreements between nation-states (largely of the "we choose to obey now because it's in our best intere…
So, picking the best jurisdiction for something like this plus getting all parties to agree to settle disputes according to its laws would be a positive step for such organizations. Knocks out a whole category of risk. These decentralized schemes often pretend they won't need lawyers but they exist in real world for good reasons. Best to know what they can or can't do in at least all the common, criminal situations.