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What Is Ethereum?

whatthefuckisethereum.com

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Re: What Is Ethereum?

#231

Post by devrandomguy »

bpicolo wrote: post #197
tech_man7 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For heavy compute, it's the Golem Network (golem.network)

What's the benefit over throwing it at a cloud provider? There's an active downside of random people being able to see your data, not to mention randomly sized boxes and shoddy network connections (which is a big deal for the microservices which they are touting as a use case, and also for big data. Data transfer is one of the slowest bits of data science). Running a web service on random devices where keys, sessions…

Technically, these problems also exist with cloud providers, but we more or less trust them because of their reputation.

Perhaps a digitally signed NDA could be verified by a smart contract? Then, to prove the NDA was breached, a quick court case (standardized NDA) leads to a published ruling that the digital contract can check.

Combine the clear guidelines of a standard NDA with a proper court adjudicating the more complex disputes, and you have the foundation for a strong reputation system for Eth-cloud services. Is reputation already a thing in the Ethereum network?

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#232

Post by dingo_bat »

acdha wrote: post #221
dingo_bat wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what do you do when someone creates a fake profile, uploads revenge/child porn, nazi propaganda, etc.? Ignore it and move on. Block the user from your personal feed if you want. > In many parts of the world that has a legal requirement to be blocked which would seem to either require a way to rewrite history or the entire system being blocked in that jurisdiction. How has that worked out against BitTorrent?

> Ignore it and move on. Block the user from your personal feed if you want. That doesn't address the questions: 1. How can you ignore something which is causing you or someone you care about harm? Will you operate a node which keeps that content available against the wishes of the target? (For that matter, how many people will use a network which prevents you from removing mistakes?) 2. You can't just ignore things…

> How can you ignore something which is causing you or someone you care about harm?

If it is really causing you harm, you can always sue for libel. If it is just something you dont like, deal with it. The internet is not a "safe space".

> Will you operate a node which keeps that content available against the wishes of the target?

If it is anything like DHT, yes. I don't give a shit. Whoever has a problem can take it up with the originator of the offending content. If they can trace them and prove it is illegal in a court.

> For that matter, how many people will use a network which prevents you from removing mistakes?

Everyone. Do you use git? Do you correct mistakes using a new commit? Congrats, you now know how to correct a mistake on the internet.

> if someone uploads legally restricted content, everyone participating in the network has to expect legal consequences even if they personally aren't troubled by it

In such cases the law is wrong and must change.

> If you're in Germany and someone else can get Nazi content from your system, do you really think “I didn't upload it and there's no way to block it” is going to lead to a court reaction other than an order to turn it off until the underlying technology is fixed?

The way German law treats Nazi sentiments is highly anti-free-speech. Cannot continue for much longer (~50 years). The correct way is to allow free speech but prosecute criminal acts (free-speech is not a criminal act). IMO, irrational laws in countries that are against free-speech should not impact adoption of technology, just as bittorrent is still widely used even though US law is against it.

> Ignoring that many places do block BitTorrent

I am curious how that is done. Are you talking about China? I do not know any way to block the bittorent protocol itself apart from DPI.

> That doesn't seem to fit with a blockchain model and it seems like a major problem growing a social network beyond the immediate founders if everyone has to find a private cluster to join.

I agree. Maybe someone can come up with a solution. Maybe we can encrypt everything so that nodes can not possibly know what the content is. I don't know.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#233

Post by rdl »

baybal2 wrote: post #121
rdl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probing a live chip for 30k - https://zeptobars.com/en/

Probably cheaper side channel attacks, too. To some extent this depends on the software running under SGX.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#234

Post by rdl »

baybal2 wrote: post #121
rdl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probing a live chip for 30k - https://zeptobars.com/en/

Probably cheaper side channel attacks, too. To some extent this depends on the software running under SGX.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#235

Post by tsukaisute »

mrb wrote: post #195
tsukaisute wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I know what gas is. It would be more accurate to call it a unitless number describing the relative resource cost factor of each opcode. If you define the term gas as a unit then it refers to both a value, and the unit of that value, which is where most of the confusion comes from. The language "1000 gas" could mean either "1000 wei/szabo/whatever of gas" or "1000 gasCost" which are 2 completely different things!

"This book is five dollars" vs.

"The price of this book is five dollars" vs.

"This is five dollars" (meaning "this book's price is") vs.

"This is five dollars" (meaning "five dollars are sitting here on the table.")

I know what you're saying, there is ambiguity, but these make sense to people based on context.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#236

Post by Jabanga »

joeyspn wrote: post #228
Jabanga wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum had no "solid" value proposition in 2014, and EOS doesn't have one now. You're overstating its proven value. We can share our opinions on the respective projects, but that's different from a demonstrable value proposition.

You should check the definition of value proposition. [0] Ethereum had one: "a cryptocurrency with a programming language beyond opcodes" EOS value proposition is: "a platform for building DApps beyond PoW (using DPoS) and industry-ready TPS (with Graphene[1])". Both DPoS and Graphene are inventions of Larimer. For many this is enough, and that reflects why it's already a top 15 crypto. [0] http://www.investopedia.co…

You're saying a vaporware blockchain with unproven claims has a more solid value proposition than Ethereum because its founder created two cryptocurrencies that combined have a market capitalization that equals 4% of Ethereum's.

>Ethereum had one: "a cryptocurrency with a programming language beyond opcodes"

It didn't have one until it had working code.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#237

Post by ojr »

I don't believe all ICOs are illegal

ICO tokens are digital commodities/assets that are more similar to app credits or in-app mobile purchases than securities.

Unlike with Ethereum apps/dapps, you can't trade traditional app credits/in-app purchases on an exchange but imagine if there were farmville ERC-20 tokens a few years backs, people will buy thousands off speculation alone, it'll be interesting to see how the SEC will regulate this

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#238

Post by runeks »

Taek wrote: post #202
runeks wrote: post #148

Ethereum is very simple in essence: it's a Turing-complete version of Bitcoin. The way you transfer a bitcoin from one person to another is by creating a Bitcoin transaction that contains an input script that fulfills an in-blockchain output script with which a number of bitcoins are associated. The output script may say " provide a public key that hashes to and a signature, over a transaction (which sends the bitcoi…

Worth adding perhaps that Bitcoin is intentionally not Turing complete, as the complexity opens up a very big space for vulnerabilities. And indeed, we see a lot of those in ethereum contacts.

The DAO failed because of a lack of strong typing in the contract language, not because of Turing completeness.

The main problem with a Turing-complete contract language is that it becomes impossible to statically verify runtime properties, so a node can't know how long it will take to verify a transaction it receives. This opens up for denial-of-service attacks, e.g. embedding a transaction with an infinite loop in a block in the blockchain.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#239

Post by joosters »

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…

Yes, the value of blockchains is in their 'trustlessness', however the moment you need to retrieve data from outside of the blockchain, you have to trust it. In which case, there's no point in using the blockchain at all.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#240

Post by pauhana »

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 -…

Clearly, it should be called "flooz" not "gas"
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