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Ethereum is Doomed

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Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#101

Post by Tinyyy »

viraptor wrote: post #38
3pt14159 wrote: post #9

Ethereum isn't doomed. I don't think it will ever have as much backing as Bitcoin because of institutional buy-in; but the world needs programmable smart contracts. Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Bitcoin in terms of international payments and store…

I think you're thinking of use cases that would definitely be stopped outside of ethereum world: > Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. You can do things like this, but the law either already covers this, or will adjust. If you gain money, you're expected to pay the usual tax on that gain. First few may g…

The point of Ethereum is to provide something that is different from the real world. If not, it is simply fiat, except that it is 1000 times more inefficient and burns up loads of electricity.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#102

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #38
3pt14159 wrote: post #9

Ethereum isn't doomed. I don't think it will ever have as much backing as Bitcoin because of institutional buy-in; but the world needs programmable smart contracts. Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Bitcoin in terms of international payments and store…

I think you're thinking of use cases that would definitely be stopped outside of ethereum world: > Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. You can do things like this, but the law either already covers this, or will adjust. If you gain money, you're expected to pay the usual tax on that gain. First few may g…

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#103

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #38
3pt14159 wrote: post #9

Ethereum isn't doomed. I don't think it will ever have as much backing as Bitcoin because of institutional buy-in; but the world needs programmable smart contracts. Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Bitcoin in terms of international payments and store…

I think you're thinking of use cases that would definitely be stopped outside of ethereum world: > Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. You can do things like this, but the law either already covers this, or will adjust. If you gain money, you're expected to pay the usual tax on that gain. First few may g…

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#104

Post by saalweachter »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #66
aakilfernandes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We want to allow recursion and loops. We want to be able to run arbitrary code. We just need to be a little wiser about how we do it.

How did this madness start? I don't want law to be turing complete. Especially programatic law. Why are people so nonchalant about this? This is not sane design. You want totality and termination proofs. At least that's what I would look for in any programatic system of law.

Biggest rock is best rock.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#105

Post by goldenkey »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #30
amaks wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All computations on Ethereum have to be funded with "gas" (transaction fees) But that's what was wrong with the exploited DAO code - it didn't use gas. The point of the article is that it's very hard or impossible to verify the correctness of the smart contracts.

> it didn't use gas this is incorrect

It doesn't matter if it uses gas when you are getting free eth...

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#106

Post by conception »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #60
aakilfernandes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of Ethereum is turing completeness. Ethereum without Turing completeness already exists and its called Bitcoin. While this implementation of The Dao has failed, Ethereum is the only blockchain where implementing The Dao is possible.

This doesn't sound right to me. Contract law should not require turing completeness. First order logic should be more than sufficient. How does having a loop in contract law make any sense?

Would regular payments based on criteria be an example? A paycheck basically.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#107

Post by drdeca »

wtallis wrote: post #81
drdeca wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a thing that advertises itself as being like Ethereum but without the Turing completeness. It is meant to be able to do more computation based stuff than Bitcoin, but without being Turing complete. However, they seem to have confused the halting problem not being computable with Godel's second incompleteness theorem? (They might have corrected this since I saw when they published something with this.)

> However, they seem to have confused the halting problem not being computable with Godel's second incompleteness theorem? (They might have corrected this since I saw when they published something with this.) They seem to be related concepts. See http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2725 for discussion of some interesting examples: > [...] has explicitly constructed a one-tape, two-symbol Turing machine with 7,918 st…

I didn't mean that the two aren't related, just that they aren't as strongly related as the group seemed to be implying. They were saying that Ethereum being turing complete made it inconsistent in some way.

But yes, the two definitely are connected.

For example:

A program which could solve the halting problem would be able to determine whether a given system is consistent.

So, as a result, if a system could prove that a program solved the halting problem, and it could simulate programs running, then it could simulate the program that solves the halting problem being applied to a program that searches for inconsistencies in the system. This would allow it to prove whether it is itself consistent.

Therefore, by Godel's second incompleteness theorem, a system which can simulate programs for any number of steps, and which is consistent, and which can do arithmetic and such, cannot prove that any particular program solves the halting problem.

Admittedly, this is a lot weaker than "no program solves the halting problem", but I think it is a fairly clear connection.

So, yes, I agree that they are related.

But Ethereum's Turing completeness (or, Turing completeness except being limited by gas costs), does not mean that Ethereum is "inconsistent", because that is, uh, pretty much a nonsense claim. And that is the claim that I think the other group was making (Though they may have stopped making it since.)

Also, btw, wrt that blogpost, they got the number of states for a machine which ZFC cannot prove does not halt, but which does not halt, down to, iirc, like 2030 ? But you probably knew that already because it is the next blogpost on there.

But yeah that is a cool result!

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#109

Post by wyager »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #19

I didn't know the language was turing complete. Isn't this computing 101? If you want a secure thing then you must be able to reason about it statically. Making things turing complete means any non-trivial property of program correctness can not have a generic solution and so you've just opened yourself up to a world of hurt.

You can reason statically about turing-complete languages. They just have to be syntactically restricted to forms amenable to mathematical analysis. Ethereum's scripting language is poorly designed for this.

Many high-tech fintech digital contracts are written in languages like Haskell or Ocaml. Fintech people value strong types, declarative programs, immutability, etc.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#110

Post by wyager »

intrasight wrote: post #78
aakilfernandes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of Ethereum is turing completeness. Ethereum without Turing completeness already exists and its called Bitcoin. While this implementation of The Dao has failed, Ethereum is the only blockchain where implementing The Dao is possible.

I also don't see the relevance of it being TC. I've heard regex is TC. Wouldn't want to write a contract in regex.

> I've heard regex is TC.

You heard wrong. Regex is specifically not turing complete. It corresponds to the class of machines called DFAs. Above regexes are CFGs, which correspond to pushdown automata. Above CFGs are CSGs, which correspond to linear bounded automata. Above CSGs are unrestricted grammars, which correspond to turing machines.

You may be thinking of PCREs, which aren't actually regular expressions, but are sometimes erroneously referred to as such. I don't know if those are turing complete or not.

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