What Is Ethereum? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#241

Post by joosters » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

Drdrdrq wrote: post #222

eyezick wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 blo…

> 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. To be precise: it gives them incentive to submit the same information as majority of other Reporters. This is a huge difference.

This seems to be a massive flaw in the gambling markets that they propose. For example, let's say Augur (or any number of competitors) host a market on a football match, where team A are supremely better than team B. The odds on A will be extremely short, and there will be far far more people backing team A than team B.

Now, imagine that team B somehow win the match. How can the system prevent the overwhelming majority of team A backers from submitting a fake result claiming that their team won? They will vastly outnumber the people backing team B, and also outnumber any of the casual observers who might also contribute to the results. So the market will get settled as if team A won, thanks to the 'wisdom of the crowd'. The minority backers will be robbed.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#242

Post by bpicolo » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 8:06 PM UTC

devrandomguy wrote: post #231

bpicolo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, they exist in much less of a form. It's trusting 1 entity vs literally everybody, including people intent on being bad actors. You also have to have less trust because you're operating in a more or less known environment.

The network bandwidth will be a real problem regardless. Latency too. Single digit millisecond scale database roundtrips are awesome. 50-100ms would be just terrible. If that's a fundamental limitation then applications can only get worse, not really better.

Overall, what fundamental problem are these solving? If they aren't solving a real pain point with a worthwhile cost, uptake is going to be nonexistent.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#243

Post by dewyatt » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 9:08 PM UTC

I know I'll get hate for not commenting on the actual content of this article, but...why is this only taking up 1/3rd of my horizontal screen space? Perhaps all that space could be used to show the images alongside the text?

> here’s what we’ll talk about: (with links if you want to jump to a specific section).

Holy smokes, it's got links! Good thing he pointed it out to me since I never could have figured that out by the visual indicators that every web browser adds to links.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#244

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 9:33 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #239

joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier 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…

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.

Oh nonsense, it's not all or nothing. There could be value in:

* Making the trust-liability explicit

* Building a trust-less core system that can swap out 'trustful' sources of data as needed

* Streamlining the processing and accounting of something that depends on a 'trustful' source of data

Not to mention that trust-less data is potentially achievable with prediction markets. This is obviously not a trivial innovation, and they may not be practical, but writing off the whole system is unfounded at this point.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#245

Post by dogma1138 » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:41 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #218

joosters wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name some. And then explain why a private blockchain, controlled by a single entity, or a group of companies that trust each other, is better than a database.

There's no reason to use a blockchain within a single entity. Use a database for that. Private blockchains do appear to be useful among a consortium of companies who don't completely trust each other, and don't want to pay a single company to maintain a central database.

It's not about "trust" it's that keeping the accounts and books consolidated even within a single bank is problematic and between banks even more so.

Banks lose billions each year and i mean lose as they have no idea where the money went. Account consolidation within a bank is a huge enterprise.

Even within a single entity like a bank a blockchain that governs all accounts and transactions is hugely beneficial because of the consistency and the trail any action within it leaves.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#246

Post by joeyspn » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:50 PM UTC

Jabanga wrote: post #236

joeyspn wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I'm saying that I trusted Ethereum would be built when it was a project idea although Vitalik was only a blogger, and that I'm trusting Daniel because hi has even better chances of delivering.

And that is the reason why I bought in both crowsdsales. Your call...

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#247

Post by rspeer » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:01 PM UTC

bitesports wrote: post #88

joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier 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…

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.

What incentive will people have to vote for the fairer outcome in a dispute?

If people even know of the existence of a dispute, it's almost certainly because they have some personal stake in the outcome, and they will vote for the outcome that benefits them.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#248

Post by omarchowdhury » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

pazimzadeh wrote: post #229

rspeer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you cryptographically, trustlessly verify that food is healthy?

A program could compare the output of a gene sequencing reaction against a known database to verify that such and such fish matches what's on the label. But then you have to trust whoever is loading your fish samples into the gene sequencer.

And the fish samples that are loaded into the sequencer are not the same as the ones in circulating supply.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#249

Post by pyskell » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:45 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #238

Taek wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's true theoretically and your argument still stands for a lot of cases.

However for practical purposes nodes only compute up to a certain amount of instructions. This is known as the "gas limit". Additionally it costs Ether to get them to run code so any DOS approached in this way is prohibitively expensive.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#250

Post by acdha » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 12:15 AM UTC

dingo_bat wrote: post #232

acdha wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

If you have a computer serving that to other people (i.e. a real durable P2P system), you're going to be pulled in as a collaborator. Even if you're willing to risk the police and are willing to go to jail rather than compromise an absolute free speech position, which I highly doubt, almost nobody else is and that's kind of the death-knell for a P2P network.

If you want to build things people will actually use, following the law is more important than naive techno-utopian fantasies about being able to force your desires on nation-states.