Live data from Hacker News

What Is Ethereum?

whatthefuckisethereum.com

131–140 of 272 posts

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#131
The best way to think of ethereum is bitcoin with more flexibility, and its immutability define by owners* tolerance for loss. When vladmir and slock.it lose money they just roll it back. * owners being the slack group with 90% of the mining power. There exists shitcoins with more credibility than ethereum

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#132
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact the #1 comment on this HN submission refers to "something called gas" (as if it was an advanced concept) instead of "fee" is another data point showing the gas metaphor is confusing :) Also gas is not its own unit. gasPrice is the unit. Or... actually it's not even a unit. A "unit" implies a constant. But it's not constant since each tx can set its own gasPrice. The more I think about the cycles metaphor the…

Gas is its own unit, decoupled from ETH. Opcodes cost a certain amount of gas to execute [1]. When creating a transaction, a sender sets the maximum amount of gas that they are willing to pay. This is the "gas limit."

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m89CVujrQe5LAFJ8-YAU...

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#133

The best way to think of ethereum is bitcoin with more flexibility, and its immutability define by owners* tolerance for loss. When vladmir and slock.it lose money they just roll it back. * owners being the slack group with 90% of the mining power. There exists shitcoins with more credibility than ethereum

Can we please stop bringing up slock.it and the DAO fork. It was more than a year ago and it's time to move on.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#134

The best way to think of ethereum is bitcoin with more flexibility, and its immutability define by owners* tolerance for loss. When vladmir and slock.it lose money they just roll it back. * owners being the slack group with 90% of the mining power. There exists shitcoins with more credibility than ethereum

Can we please stop bringing up slock.it and the DAO fork. It was more than a year ago and it's time to move on.

Why? It is quite defining. I would judge a bank on how it behaved 12 months ago, or 24 months, or 10 years ago. if(lapsed > months(12)) { forget; } errr no..

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#135
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It sounds more like CPU clock cycles, may be confusing to those who see it that way?

Having non-CPU cycles is extremely common in emulators and VMs, you can just say it's a "virtual cycle of the eth VM", something along those lines.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#136
The protocol is not distributed, the application state is, as a shared memory system. It's fundamentally incompatible with hosting the web, for instance, since hypermedia is supposed to be the engine of application state as the web is fundamentally a distributed hypermedia application.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#137
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Visa? Hedging their bets, it seems. Or one of those projects to put undesirables on.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#138
What is the best place to have discussions about Ethereum? I tried to follow the Reddit group, but I don't really need all the hype. I just need information and opinions on writing contracts and developing applications that use Ethereum network. I'm also very interested in the psychological side of trading and different trading strategies. No fuzz, just reasonable discussion.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#139
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I understand ethereum, I will!

Shoot! Explainer site missed the target. I wrote the "average person" page to be quite high level. Unfortunately the "nerdy" page became a little too nerdy. I should work on an "I'm a software developer who wants an intermediate technical understanding" or something like this.

This is the exact option I was looking for. I've dabbled a tiny bit in bitcoin but that's about it. An explanation about Ethereum that assumes I know some basic computer science stuff would be perfect :)

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#140
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…

So instead of hiring professional animator with good reputation and fair pricing, you write a sophisticated program to check correctness of animations (what would that do?), try to come up with fair price in somewhat cryptic market, and hope someone somewhere will take up a challenge of both, figuring required specs from your contract source code and actually have an expertise to do a job in question.

Revolutionary indeed.

Post reply on HN