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What Is Ethereum?

whatthefuckisethereum.com

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Re: What Is Ethereum?

#81

Post by turblety »

ksikka wrote: post #78

What is Ethereum _useful_ for? When would I need it? Why is AWS (et al) not sufficient?

Decentralization and auditing. If you put some code on AWS there are two potential issues.

Firstly you don't know if AWS has actually run your code. They could potentially replace your code with their own modified version which does something malicious (like add a bias). For example in a voting system, code could be modified to ignore X percentage of unfavourable votes, or change unfavourable votes to a more favourable candidate.

Secondly I don't know what your code on AWS does. This isn't great for financial and voting systems that should be audit able.

With Ethereum you can view the code for a contract to validate it does not "cheat". You can also trust the contract was executed correctly because the miners have validated it and added it to the block chain.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#82

Post by Retra »

jamisteven wrote: post #5

Can't trust ethereum or bitcoin for the same reason we can't trust the fed and their "quantitive easing": 1. It's way complicated 2. It's fiat 3. Nobody understand who really is in control of its value

If it weren't too complicated, then it would just as well be too simple. But really, you cannot measure the efficacy of a solution by measuring your own ignorance.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#83

Post by merrickread »

prodtorok wrote: post #3

How important is the adoption of Solidity for Ethereum's success?

Solidity is just the first try. I built a couple projects and ideas with it - found it to be a very uncomfortable language.

On the other hand you have Hyperledger, it's "contract" code is Go. Widely adopted language that was basically designed for networking efficiency.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#85

Post by jamisteven »

mac01021 wrote: post #10
jamisteven wrote: post #5

Can't trust ethereum or bitcoin for the same reason we can't trust the fed and their "quantitive easing": 1. It's way complicated 2. It's fiat 3. Nobody understand who really is in control of its value

What's wrong with fiat currency?

I think you meant to write intelligence and not ignorance.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#86

Post by jamisteven »

mac01021 wrote: post #10
jamisteven wrote: post #5

Can't trust ethereum or bitcoin for the same reason we can't trust the fed and their "quantitive easing": 1. It's way complicated 2. It's fiat 3. Nobody understand who really is in control of its value

What's wrong with fiat currency?

Is this a serious question

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#87

Post by eli »

oh_sigh wrote: post #74
rspeer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do insurance companies deal with this problem today? The legal system. It can put people in jail for fraud if necessary. Do you really want "smart" "contracts" to have the power to put people in jail? Really?

A smart contract wouldn't put someone in jail(how often does that directly result from a contract dispute anyway?)...a lawsuit would he how someone resolves the issue if that remedy is available and necessary

People go to jail for insurance fraud all the time.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#88

Post by bitesports »

joe_the_user wrote: post #40
cslewis wrote: post #2

Few 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…

We're working on a decentralized dispute resolution mechanism to address that. You could add it into your smart contract, which would call our contract that has voting pools that make decisions when a dispute arises.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#89

Post by mikenew »

bsmithers wrote: post #29
mikenew wrote: post #26

There'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…

Thanks. In your example, how could one hope to prove they had rendered the animation correctly? Presumably each node must be able to verify the correctness of this in order to process the contract?

I think that's still an open problem. You could render a few random tiles from a few frames to build some confidence in the result. You could also build a reputation system, also running on ethereum, to establish who is trustworthy.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#90

Post by whitelable »

Here is the problem with ethereum business model. All new token created by ethereum are whitelable tokens. Each ico token brings new investors to own ethereum boosting its price. These new whitelable tokens are the. Exchanged for ethereum to provide funding. Each new project raises funds and lists it's token on an exchange. This boosts the value of the white lable token at a multiple of the amount raises in ethereum. Now companies need to spend money on there projects have to sell ethereum to fund there projects. This selling of ether raised by ico is at a multiple of the original amount raises in ether from new investors introduced to ico investing. This means mass e inflation on value will collapse as up funded projects sell their ether for operating funds. Can anyone explain how this voodoo economics can work for investors as a whole?
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