Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Is Ethereum?

whatthefuckisethereum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 272 posts

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#101

Post by hanklazard »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #96
ksikka wrote: post #78

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

well, not specifically ethereum but stuff like siacoin provide cheaper options than AWS and while I personally cannot attest to the performance, they seem to be interesting alternatives.[1] In the case of siacoin, at face value it seems to be significantly cheaper than AWS or Google Cloud for providing bulk cloud storage. [1] http://sia.tech/

Even more exciting for me is IPFS and Filecoin. Seems like this pairing could allow for a truly decentralized Internet. Ycombinator had one of the founders / lead programmers on the podcast in the last few weeks and I highly recommend it!

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#102

Post by mrb »

flashmob wrote: post #76
mrb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" using something called gas " gas is ETH. It is simply a term they chose to refer to the ETH fee paid to execute the code. I don't like their terminology. Calling it "gas" make it sound like it's a different currency. They should have just call it the "ETH fee".

No, gas is a synonym for fee. However, gas is its own unit, separate from ETH. Each op code in the EVM has a gas price, depending on the complexity of the instruction. Eg. A store op costs more gas than a comparison op. When you do a transaction, you specify how much ETH you will pay for one unit of gas. Typical transactions use 21k gas, but contracts need much more. More info about why it's like that: https://www.cr…

A much simpler terminology Ethereum should have picked instead of "gas" is the "cycle". Each operation takes a predefined number of cycles to execute. For example SLOAD takes 20 cycles, SSTORE 100 cycles, etc. Then a transaction defines the maximum number of cycles it will need, as well as the ETH per cycle it will pay as a fee. That's it. Basically:

gasCost -> cycles

gasLimit -> max cycles per transaction

gasPrice -> ETH per cycle

The fact you need so much text to explain gasCost, gasPrice, etc, perfectly illustrates my point that their "gas" metaphor is the wrong one. Also as xur17 said, "cost" and "price" are too confusable.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#104

Post by thinbeige »

Nice thread but the issue I always have with all discussions around cryptocurrencies is:

I never know if the person who just worshipped or criticized a specific currency has a vested interest.

Somebody who sits on billions of ETH will write totally different tham someboy who is shorting/margin trading ETH.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#105

Post by xur17 »

mrb wrote: post #102
flashmob wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, gas is a synonym for fee. However, gas is its own unit, separate from ETH. Each op code in the EVM has a gas price, depending on the complexity of the instruction. Eg. A store op costs more gas than a comparison op. When you do a transaction, you specify how much ETH you will pay for one unit of gas. Typical transactions use 21k gas, but contracts need much more. More info about why it's like that: https://www.cr…

A much simpler terminology Ethereum should have picked instead of "gas" is the "cycle". Each operation takes a predefined number of cycles to execute. For example SLOAD takes 20 cycles, SSTORE 100 cycles, etc. Then a transaction defines the maximum number of cycles it will need, as well as the ETH per cycle it will pay as a fee. That's it. Basically: gasCost -> cycles gasLimit -> max cycles per transaction gasPrice -…

That is much easier to understand. I spent way too much time reading and converting units when trying to send my first transaction. GasCost and gasPrice sound too similar.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#106

Post by chrido »

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…

An alternativ would be that the weather "oracle" has something on stake, e.g. if it lies or is hacked, it looses a deposit. But then it goes further, maybe you need a voting mechanism, or other weather "oracles" participating in the vote ... in the end you need to get it game theorically right to incentivise honest "oracles" and punish dishonest.

In general I see two really hard challenges with smart contracts. Getting them bug free (i think formal verification which is worked on will help a lot) and getting the incentives right to punish dishonest behavior. (So far I haven't seen a lot work being done here, I also don't know how you could automise that, maybe some kind of simulation with AI based actors)

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#107

Post by reinhardt1053 »

craigc wrote: post #31
booleandilemma wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not until we have cryptocurrency bootcamps and people pursuing degrees in cryptofinance.

Or job postings asking for a minimum of 5 or 10 years of experience working with Solidity and Ethereum

https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Visa/743999653819682-blockc...

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#108

Post by uncle_d »

herval wrote: post #97
nullc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yep. Unfortunately the creators of Ethereum marketed it heavily as a "world computer" on promotional roadshows, claiming it would replace Facebook and whatnot. Perhaps more interesting is that, in my view, Ethereum has it wrong: re-executing computati…

How would Ethereum “replace Facebook”?

Well, it can't in its present form, but there is a market (me, at least) for a distributed app framework that would be the basis for uncensored (and uncensorable) serverless p2p versions of all your favorite social media.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#109

Post by TD-Linux »

herval wrote: post #97
nullc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yep. Unfortunately the creators of Ethereum marketed it heavily as a "world computer" on promotional roadshows, claiming it would replace Facebook and whatnot. Perhaps more interesting is that, in my view, Ethereum has it wrong: re-executing computati…

How would Ethereum “replace Facebook”?

It wouldn't, though a lot of the initial "Web 3.0" hype seemed to imply that, such as this post by a cofounder [1]. Even their website used to mention Facebook [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140723210829/http://insightsin...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140801161657/https://www.ether...

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#110

Post by rspeer »

gfody wrote: post #42
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…

Ethereum isn't trying to be some sort of generic distributed computing platform. The notion of writing a dApp to do distributed 3D rendering is outrageously stupid. The idea is to program your money. Here's a dollar that can only be spent on healthy food. Give these to your kids for doing their chores or whatever.

How do you cryptographically, trustlessly verify that food is healthy?
Post reply on HN