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Ethereum is Doomed

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Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#131

Post by icelancer »

cyphar wrote: post #54
IanCal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the hack legal? A system letting you in if you poke it just right doesn't mean you are legally allowed in. I fail to see how a bug in banking software would be any different to the bug in the DAO.

No, it was fraud. I asked a lawyer, and the stealing of $50 million would not be considered a clause of the contract (it doesn't pass the officious bystander test). As much as programmers might try to remove lawyers and courts from our lives, they are vital to actually doing things with other people where you might have a difference of opinion on what a particular agreement means.

The fact it has to go to the US courts is why it's a failure.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#132

Post by henrik_w »

munificent wrote: post #41

> Solidity is like programming in JavaScript, except with your bank account accessible through the Document Object Model. Such a beautiful, terrifying sentence.

I recently saw this on Twitter, and thought it was pretty funny:

"What's Ethereum?"

Imagine that your dollar bills were written in Javascript.

(from @random_eddie)

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#133

Post by im3w1l »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #77
Retra wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing completeness is not an implication of poor anything. All it does is remove certain kinds of generality from your proofs. You can still prove things, you just have to be careful stating what the assumptions are.

So you mean to tell me that taking away the ability to write generic programs to validate contracts is good design? See Rice's Theorem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem ). Once you have turing completeness verifying any non-trivial program property starts requiring grad school experience and real proficiency with writing and verifying proofs. Most people, including programmers, do not have the training…

So, just write your contract in a non-turing complete subset of it. Just because the power is there doesn't mean you have to use it if you don't want to.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#134

Post by rwallace »

The problem with Turing completeness is that if it's not there from the start, people inevitably end up needing features that aren't present in the restricted language, and then a Turing complete language is added to either the original system or a successor, and being an afterthought it usually ends up being a hack job.

Examples: SQL was supplemented with procedural languages for stored procedures, Excel was supplemented with VBA, HTML was supplemented with JavaScript and, well, Bitcoin was supplemented with Ethereum.

So providing a Turing complete language was the right decision as far as it goes, but it's not enough by itself. If you need reliability - which this does - it needs to be the case that typical code does not involves arbitrarily complex computation. Typical code needs to fit stereotyped patterns whose behavior is predictable.

If Ethereum is to continue, it's clear that exhorting people to try even harder not to make mistakes in the current version of Solidity, won't cut it. The language needs to be supplemented or replaced with something that makes it easy to write correct code for the kind of things people typically want to do.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#135

Post by edejong »

rwallace wrote: post #134

The problem with Turing completeness is that if it's not there from the start, people inevitably end up needing features that aren't present in the restricted language, and then a Turing complete language is added to either the original system or a successor, and being an afterthought it usually ends up being a hack job. Examples: SQL was supplemented with procedural languages for stored procedures, Excel was supplem…

There are languages which are both expressive and Turing incomplete, for example Coq. In the Coq language, Turing incompleteness is actually needed to be able to make complete proofs. Maybe Solidity would have been better implemented within Coq, but it's too late now.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#136

Post by Grue3 »

im3w1l wrote: post #133
dkarapetyan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean to tell me that taking away the ability to write generic programs to validate contracts is good design? See Rice's Theorem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem ). Once you have turing completeness verifying any non-trivial program property starts requiring grad school experience and real proficiency with writing and verifying proofs. Most people, including programmers, do not have the training…

So, just write your contract in a non-turing complete subset of it. Just because the power is there doesn't mean you have to use it if you don't want to.

According to the article, you need to write interfaces that accept a function and call it somewhere down the line. At this point you already cannot guarantee the lack of recursion, simply because the supplied function can call your function again. It is simply not possible to write a code that always halts, unless you never even call the supplied function.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#137

Post by pt1988 »

Its too bad, I really thought Vitalik was the Chosen One, but I think he reacted incorrectly here by panicking and showing concern.

If I had been him I would have let DAO fail without even discussing any fork. Be as emotionless about it as the code itself. Admit mistakes were made, somebody (DAO investors) will lose some money in the short term but stay true to the principles of Ethereum.

PLUS even after all this drama, $ETH has a market cap of ~$1B as well as independence (fingers crossed) from government intervention making it an alternative to Fiat currency, as well as a much better block rate than BTC lending itself to mining on consumer-grade GPU's for the moment at least. I'm looking at litecoin LTC as my next crypto-bubble investment as well.

There's still lots of good to be said about Ethereum. DAO is toast, long live DAO2! Ethereum will come out stronger long term.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#138

Post by amq »

baybal2 wrote: post #85

Fiy, i recently came upon this company http://m.imgur.com/Hv9n7fk,55JgdgK that wants to sell ETH to Chinese. I checked the company registry, and found out that the guy has registered a proprietorship back in 2013. Apparently a friend of Vitalik

It is just a job posting.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#139

Post by dkarapetyan »

im3w1l wrote: post #133
dkarapetyan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean to tell me that taking away the ability to write generic programs to validate contracts is good design? See Rice's Theorem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem ). Once you have turing completeness verifying any non-trivial program property starts requiring grad school experience and real proficiency with writing and verifying proofs. Most people, including programmers, do not have the training…

So, just write your contract in a non-turing complete subset of it. Just because the power is there doesn't mean you have to use it if you don't want to.

You just made my point. The Ethereum designers have offloaded all the hard work onto others. What value do I get out of this platform if I'm doing all the hard work?

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#140

Post by lsc »

jacques_chester wrote: post #74
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…

> 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. Billionaires still have nexuses with the physical world. The machines which execute their code, for example, can absolutely be affected by court orders. So too can their homes, their cars, their planes, their drones and of course their person. There's a brand of tech…

>the law's power is accepted at face value by billions of people and underlined by men with guns and dogs.

emphasis mine. I find that last bit, though, to be super interesting; "enforced by men with guns" has always been a big part of the rhetoric of any discussion of law, anarchist, or libertarian thought.

But... I'm not sure I've ever seen dogs mentioned in that context.

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