Ethereum has had a good start being the first mover in smart contracts, but EOS is coming and the value proposition is much more solid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUZWZj1pu94
Blockchain tech is evolving...
What Is Ethereum?
51–60 of 272 posts
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#52Few weeks ago I decided to spend a weekend to try to understand Ethereum. I found the whitepaper to be pretty instructive (it even helped me cement my understanding of bitcoin). Here is an annotated version of the whitepaper by vitalik: http://fermatslibrary.com/s/ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...
Interesting; The document mentions creating a crop-insurance application that would depend on a weather feed. The problem is if the weather feed isn't something that's uniformly secureable the result could be bad given that the insurance application would take action automatically and no appeal to any higher authority concerning the fraud would be possible - without a "fork" as happened earlier. Hack an insecure feed…
This to me is one of the fundamental problems (or challenges) of smart contracts - they remove humans and human judgment from the core, but they just push it to the edges.
You still end up trusting a human - an "oracle". You trust the weather feed, or you trust some exchange to give you the accurate price of some other asset. If that oracle is mistaken (bug, intentional misinformation), the smart contract can be manipulated.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit silly to dismiss the whole thing because the cofounder is trying a little too hard to sell the technology.. it certainly doesn't mean the technological aspect of the paper is "drivel"
This is Sokal level writing. If this was a random person trying his hand at a writing class, whatever, but this is the guy writing the code behind your crypto coin.
Literally everything I read about Ethereum that's written by Vitalik stinks of something I haven't been able to put my finger on. "Sokal-ish" nails it exactly. The writing is never straight-forward, and always appeals to mainstream idealogical preconceptions. It's liberally salted with economical-jibberish-nonsense that sounds good as well.
I believe blockchain technology is important and I think Ethereum is a strong contribution in its own right. But the more I read of Vitalik's Sokal-style writing the more I wish he would stop and let others handle it because he is making it sound like he's going to scam the shit out of everybody.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#54Are we at the "mania" stage of cryptocurrency interest yet?
I read about it in the newspaper for the small town my parents live in, and I have a completely non-technical friend duped into a weird Bitcoin ponzi scheme. It's getting there.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#55A framework for creating ponzis
I'm sure you're only partly joking, but sadly it does seem to be one of the biggest first uses. Oh and lotteries - those are popular.
On the other hand, people will continue to run ponzi schemes as long as there are greedy/ignorant people to attract, so it might as well be done all visibly. At least then the guy running the ponzi can't just tell everyone "sorry, feds raided the bank, all the money is gone" when he actually just moved it offshore.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#56Few weeks ago I decided to spend a weekend to try to understand Ethereum. I found the whitepaper to be pretty instructive (it even helped me cement my understanding of bitcoin). Here is an annotated version of the whitepaper by vitalik: http://fermatslibrary.com/s/ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...
This is drivel. Protocols and decentralized applications around decentralized file storage, decentralized computation and decentralized prediction markets, among dozens of other such concepts, have the potential to substantially increase the efficiency of the computational industry, and provide a massive boost to other peer-to-peer protocols by adding for the first time an economic layer
File storage: Swarm, and several other file storage protocols getting integrated with Ethereum.
Computation: pretty much the whole point of the Ethereum VM, plus there are a couple projects that put proofs on the blockchain of larger computations than the blockchain can handle.
Prediction markets: Gnosis and Augur
Efficiency: at least developer efficiency, in my experience
Economic layer: because you have reliable currencies on the network, both ETH and roll-your-own.
It might sound like buzzwords but at this point it's all real code.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#57There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…
If you want to do more intense computation, https://truebit.io/ has a cool solution. It's exactly what you said, it allows you to pay someone to do the computation for you and publish the result to the contract. After the result was published, anyone can verify that it's correct by re-running the computation. If the published result is not correct, you can interactively prove this to the smart contract because the sm…
I only looked at it briefly. Very cool idea: Is it practical for heavy compute jobs though? Suppose a rendering takes 10 hours. If I don't know where the bug/difference is and just binary-search it, then they have to run at least 5 hours of computation to verify (out of the 2^^48 instructions, I'll start by asking for the 2^47th step).
I guess that's solvable by requiring payment for verification runs and just splitting up your work into much smaller pieces.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#58This doesn't seem to do it for me. The multiple explanations it offers are all either: 1) Extremely vague and handwavy, or 2) Links to extremely long documents. Neither one is an explanation, something that hits the key points and gives you enough to know what to ask to get greater detail. Edit: toned down criticism.
Unfortunately it's simply not something that can be explained easily and clearly. Imagine trying to explain the Internet to someone who has never seen a computer. This is actually a sign that something innovative is happening, because it can't be explained in terms of something that already exists.
I hear that on every topic and have never found it justified. A high level explanation can illustrate the general structure of what you're explaining and then you can paint in details as necessary. It's always possible to find an "in between".
When I wrote understandingbitcoin.us, I explained it as a global ledger with mutiple versions floating around where everyone agrees to trust the version (out of the valid ones) with the most proven work invested in it. That provides the overall structure and allows me to dive into:
- How you sign transactions (public key crypto basics)
- How you know how much work has been invested in something (the guessing game and the crypto version with hashes and nonces)
- Why people invest work in it all (mining and transaction fees).
- Why people agree to follow these rules at all (dynamics that encourage people to follow vs reject a protocol and what effects that has for the network)
(I would like to see something similar for ethereum.)
If I were explaining the internet to someone in your example, I would explain what functions computers can perform, then introduce the concept of them communicating with each other and what that allows, and the flesh out the details of how the communication happens in a distributed way.
(The linked page also doesn't provide that kind of explanation.)
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#59How important is the adoption of Solidity for Ethereum's success?
I've been reading a lot about Ethereum, and I am really interested in blockchain tech -- but I also wonder about this. I am really curious as to whether it would be possible to develop new languages for the handling of smart contracts, or if it is possible to develop smart contracts (using a library or other resource) with existing, popular languages like c++, python, or javascript. I know web3 is already quite acces…
There are several languages that compile to the EVM. Also there's a somewhat speculative project to transition to a restricted version of WASM, which would let languages like C and Rust be compiled into smart contracts on Ethereum.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#60Wow, I actually own some ETH on coinbase and had no idea it was more than just a competing crypto currency.