51–60 of 112 posts
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Ultimately a cryptocurrency, like many things, is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If people decide to stop using Old Etherium and switch to New Etherium that works the same and where everyone except the hacker get New Eth for their Old Eth, there is no way to stop them.
Exactly. Code is indeed law, but we should take into account both the code living on the blockchain and the code the nodes are running.
If there was a hard fork, shouldn't they report numbers for both versions? Or which version went up by 50%?
Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and too expensive. Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand. Declarative smart contracts, over at https://byteball.org/
Ethereum brought a lot of geeky fun to my life, it's a great hobby for those interested in cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, compilers and so on. But, it was just that, a hobby. 90% of the people I met in Ethereum meetups and hackathons didn't really understand what Ethereum is, most big companies that invest in Ethereum just do it because they don't want to miss "the next big thing", not because Ethereum solves…
I especially dislike the "let's make spotify, but on blockchain" approach the community has. They simply don't get that people won't switch over to their solution just because it's running ethereum blockchain.
P.S. as I write this, poloniex went down.
On the other hand, the skepticism in this forum (albeit from people who are far more knowledgeable about crypto currencies and markets than me) makes me feel like I should 1) sell it all, or 2) sell only enough to recoup my initial investment.
Either way, the money I put into it was just fun money and wouldn't hurt if I lost it. It's a bit of a thrill to watch an asset appreciate in value that much within such a small period of time. The ultimate question is when to realize the gain or the loss.
Humans have a distinct disposition wherein we tend to sell gaining assets earlier than we sell losing ones (the disposition effect), even in circumstances where it's detrimental to us. Is this playing out in my mind right now?
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> The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin Opinion > ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution Fact -- but double edged sword (my opinion, of course). I have personally been skeptical of ETH for years as their team have been promising the moon for a variety of use cases. For me, the biggest blow to ETH is t…
I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code. There's no reason that smart contracts require Turing completeness (no real world program requires it, for that matter), and software theorem proving will be required for me to take smart contracts seriously. We need to be able to prove things about the contract execution for it to be safe to trust "code as contract". Im not as upse…
This is a very valid concern, in my opinion. Although some people seem to be working on that, it looks like still in its infancy: https://medium.com/@pirapira/1-000-ether-bounty-on-a-proven-...
I'm also afraid that 'smart contract' is sort of a misnomer. Where regular "social" contracts between people and entities define all sorts of relationships, the contracts that are put on a blockchain-serialized VM can only express relationships in terms of value transfers.
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I especially dislike the "let's make spotify, but on blockchain" approach the community has. They simply don't get that people won't switch over to their solution just because it's running ethereum blockchain.
Are you kidding? Who doesn't want an Uber for the Blockchain, where they can enter into a smart contract with their driver before getting into the vehicle?!
Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and too expensive. Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand. Declarative smart contracts, over at https://byteball.org/
Using bytes as the unit of currency is awful. That's like releasing a car whose dashboard displays speed in liters.
If there was a hard fork, shouldn't they report numbers for both versions? Or which version went up by 50%?