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Ethereum is Doomed

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Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#191

Post by peterbonney »

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…

"without worrying about a judge taking that away from them"

Unfortunately the ultimate arbiter of the courts' authority is not a piece of code or a piece of paper, but the courts themselves. If someone disputes the authority of a contract (smart or otherwise) that dispute will ultimately be settled in court. Even if the contract contains language claiming that it is not open to interpretation by a certain court or set of courts, the validity of THAT language will ultimately be interpreted by... a court.

There is no degree of technical cleverness that can supersede the authority of a sovereign entity. You can hide things from a sovereign, move things out of the reach of a sovereign, but you can never overrule a sovereign's authority within its own borders.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#192

Post by codygman »

thelollies wrote: post #166

I wonder if a language like Haskell with a strong type system and strict typing could help. If you were able to express exchange of currency with the type system.

I'm pretty sure you can do that. See units in F# for example.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#193

Post by 3pt14159 »

peterbonney wrote: post #191
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…

"without worrying about a judge taking that away from them" Unfortunately the ultimate arbiter of the courts' authority is not a piece of code or a piece of paper, but the courts themselves. If someone disputes the authority of a contract (smart or otherwise) that dispute will ultimately be settled in court. Even if the contract contains language claiming that it is not open to interpretation by a certain court or se…

In which border does the Etherium contract reside and who should the court order name?

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#194

Post by 3pt14159 »

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…

You cannot rely on the law to treat your wishes long after you are dead. The largest park in Toronto (High Park), for example, should technically not be owned by the city because the person that bequeathed it to the city said that it would revert to some other organization if a catholic was ever elected mayor, but that never happened.

As for XKCD - where something happens is no longer clear cut. If someone creates a etherium contract during a year in Argentina while SSH'd into a computer in Hong Kong it starts to become very difficult to enforce the law.

I'm not even talking strictly about tax evasion I'm talking about subversion of the states restriction on individual action - and I agree that this isn't a good thing across the board. I don't like the idea of billionaires hiding their influence and wealth, I just think it is inevitable.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#195

Post by naasking »

dvdkhlng wrote: post #147
maxander wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing-completeness was the entire conceit of Ethereum, as I understand it- without that you would have Bitcoin with a few bells and whistles, and no one would bother. And once you're committed to that, a new language and environment are essential- something this entire fiasco shows is that a language for contract programming has very different requirements than what software engineers are currently used to, in order…

I think we have a lot of theory about turing-complete computation. I really wonder why somebody would be willing to sign a turing-complete contract? The problem of understanding properties of the contract may be NP-hard [1] i.e. practicallly uncomputable. It may even be undecidable by involving instances of the halting problem [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hardness [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haltin…

> The problem of understanding properties of the contract may be NP-hard [1] i.e. practicallly uncomputable.

The difficulty makes good contract design a valuable service (like hiring lawyers). Otherwise everyone would just write their own contracts. A more declarative, less powerful language would have opened this up at the expense of contract succinctness.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#196

Post by naasking »

mbrock wrote: post #189
dvdkhlng wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn't Ethereum be a lot safer to use if its contract system would only have so many degrees of freedom, that all side effects and properties of contracts were computable for all contracts in a practical amount of time? With the current system I imagine one could even utilize homomorphic encryption to implement another Ethereum inside Ethereum that is cryptographically protected not only against modification bu…

I'd love to see an example of such a restricted contract language. My speculation is that we'll see a few different languages pop up with different approaches to safety, along with coding methodologies and tools for static analysis. Maybe we'll also discover a handful of primitive contract building blocks, to be implemented with care and stringency, with methods for combining them.

> I'd love to see an example of such a restricted contract language.

A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts, http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html

Composing contracts: an adventure in nancial engineering, https://lexifi.com/files/resources/MLFiPaper.pdf

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#197

Post by naasking »

3pt14159 wrote: post #193
peterbonney wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"without worrying about a judge taking that away from them" Unfortunately the ultimate arbiter of the courts' authority is not a piece of code or a piece of paper, but the courts themselves. If someone disputes the authority of a contract (smart or otherwise) that dispute will ultimately be settled in court. Even if the contract contains language claiming that it is not open to interpretation by a certain court or se…

In which border does the Etherium contract reside and who should the court order name?

Which ever border the "victim" files, and if the judge rules against you, your assets in that region can be seized.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#198

Post by naasking »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #126
plaguuuuuu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing completeness isn't so bad when you have a relatively low gas limit on a transaction that ensures you can halt at some point. Maybe I spent too much time in functional languages and I've been doing too much React stuff lately but the way I see it, we have Contract_method(state, parameters) => {new state, return value} You could always run the program on a fake, mock state then test postconditions for sanity. So…

Yes, I'd assumed since Ethereum was so highly touted and hyped that the foundations of the entire thing were sane. Well I mean sane in the sense that the actual contract language was as restrictive as possible and custom made for expressing contract law but it turns out you can do arbitrary computation and although in theory you're limited by this gas thing because the language is not formally specified and verified…

> What you described is basically abstract interpretation and if it was designed properly then the type system would have taken care of the simulation piece.

Actually, termination checkers often compare the size of the term being reduced before and after an evaluation step, and if it can prove that it's always smaller, then termination is assured. With the notion of finite amounts of gas, termination seems assured, so this termination analysis can (and should) be added to EVM.

Based on this termination property, all sorts of static analyses now become possible.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#199

Post by rwallace »

mbrock wrote: post #169
rwallace wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen of the discussion on this, you're right about uncontrolled reentrancy being a big source of problems. One thing that occurs to me: would the command-query distinction be a useful notion here? I have no truck with it in the general context in which it was coined, but in this context maybe it would be useful to draw a hard line distinction between 'I call you to ask for information' and 'I call you…

Solidity contracts can define "const" functions which aren't allowed to change state. For some uses you can also look at the events that a contract emits, which are indexed and searchable off-chain... so client apps can read them, but not contracts themselves.

Okay, so const was available as a feature - but not used because it wasn't the default? Some of the discussion on this seems to be saying Solidity supports exceptions and transactions, which should provide a lot of safety here (on error, an exception should be thrown and everything the script just did should be rewound) but the documentation was still exhorting programmers to check return values all over the place. Is this at least in part a matter of bad defaults? I'd be quite prepared to believe so; bad defaults are a much bigger problem than they are sometimes thought to be.

Re: Ethereum is Doomed

#200

Post by naasking »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #26
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.

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.

> Ethereum without Turing completeness already exists and its called Bitcoin.

There are an infinite number of non-Turing complete languages. Not-Turing complete != Bitcoin.

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