Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with fiat currency?
Is this a serious question
Yes. Can you answer it? Assume I'm neither a libertarian nor an anarchist.
What Is Ethereum?
111–120 of 272 posts
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#112Earlier 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 -…
Hmm, not sure about cycles too. It sounds more like CPU clock cycles, may be confusing to those who see it that way?
Note that there is also one more limit, the max gas per block limit..
Personally, I quite like gas, not too hard for a casual dev like me to understand. However, perhaps in the future it could be something that is totally abstracted, since asking everyone to understand how gas works is too much.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Basically the way people are thinking about blockchain business models right now, require everyone to migrate to the new platform for it to really work.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#114There'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…
The difficulty is "prove you did it right". I'd guess that only works for cheap-to-verify (trapdoor"?) functions. However, Intel SGX does enable this. You would need an SGX-attested renderer, but the output would include a signature on the inputs in addition to the actual output image. You could verify this signature was made by the SGX-secured renderer code, then you'd know it executed as designed (i.e. the person d…
The costs to subvert SGX are unfortunately far below millions. Probably hundreds or thousands after you have some one time research.
It is a viable additional client protection, especially against remote malware, software-only tampering (unless there are implementation bugs or backdoors), but not a viable server trust substitute.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#115A 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 ac…
Instead they can just go "sorry, my site / wallet was hacked, all the money is gone"
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#116Can'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
It's NOT fiat currency, it's a product that can be used to exchange funds, evade taxes, go around a country's poor economy, make a buck via day or long-term trading / investing, etc. It's an investment product; nobody uses it as fiat outside of dodgy darknet websites, and whatever webshop does accept it only does so to hold onto it for a while and hope the value increases.
There's too much inflation and uncertainty for it to be a fiat currency. I mean the value of BTC fluctuated 1000% in the span of just a couple of years.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#117Nice 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.
A good litmus test is the level of technical depth of discussion, it's very easy to discuss hypothetical achievements at a high-level of any cryptoasset, but to be able to get into the details demonstrates knowledge beyond any regular trader as well as provides possibly objective reasons to be argued with.
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#118Nice 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.
A good litmus test is the level of technical depth of discussion, it's very easy to discuss hypothetical achievements at a high-level of any cryptoasset, but to be able to get into the details demonstrates knowledge beyond any regular trader as well as provides possibly objective reasons to be argued with.
Good point. There is one guy in he thread who doubts that ETH will scale. He stays quite meta but sounds credible because he gives one or two good reasons. Still it's hard to judge if it's just a claim or is it substantial, is it crucial for the success anyway?
This whole cryptothing feels like gambling, 'put all your money on red, red will win..'
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#119How important is the adoption of Solidity for Ethereum's success?
I'm quite surprised by the answers. The truth is that Ethereum's success comes from the seemingly ease of the Solidity. It made it possible to have a crazy amount of developer jump in.
As a Node.js developer, it was effortless to start coding with Solidity. But that's part of the problem; it seems so easy, but there are no safeguards and a lot of traps. That's why we get so many flawed contracts that were taken advantage of/hacked and ICOs delaying their distribution or processes because a bug was found.
90s cypherpunks that gave birth and worked on these ideas of smart-contract etc. saw the things a bit more responsibly, instead of development velocity on something that proves unsustainable even from a security perspective not to mention scalability-wise. Here is are some thoughts from one of the originals - Christopher Allen co-author of TLS standard.
I'm disappointed in the corruption of the term Smart Contracts. Bitcoin's Script, and in particular P2SH is a good start to them, but massive multiple execution of arbitrary code is not (aka IBM's Chain Code), and I would even argue that Ethereum's languages are not smart contracts either—just another chain code. I do agree that business logic is hard to do with Bitcoin's Script, but for all of us talking about Smart Contracts in the late '90's (Szaboian Smart Contracts?) we desired cryptographic composabilty, that the code could be analyzed at multiple levels to be secure (from language proofs to high level business logic atomic validation), limitable (i.e. expression complexity & evaluation cost can be determined) and could often just be validated by consensus of parties not every node in the world (which only at most need to see proof of execution, not the full contract). These would be true cryptographic Smart Contracts!
Re: What Is Ethereum?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mani…
This is a significant challenge for sure, at least with Ethereum there's no way around needing an external account (centralization) to feed data into the blockchain.
However, I know of at least 1 promising project on Ethereum (Augur) that provides decentralized oracles, and you can trust these oracles due to some clever game theorish mechanics.
The gist is randomized Reporters submit real-world information to the blockchain and earn a fee for their service. Reporters purchased a cryptoasset to have this priviledge, and if a certain Reporter submits information in conflict with a majority of other reporters (e.g. they lied) then they lose a portion of their cryptoasset giving them incentive to play by the rules and get paid for it.
And even further, if majority of Reporters report dishonestly then people will not use the Oracle service, the Reporters will not be able to earn fees, and the cryptoassets they purchased to allow to be reporters become worthless.