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

Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

ethereumdev.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 244 posts

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#181

Post by empath75 »

mbrock wrote: post #119
kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

The belief that Turing machines aren't amenable to formal verification is a hobgoblin that shows up in every thread like this, but it's not real. Of course there are limited formalisms that make certain types of verification easier, but proving programs has been possible since, like, the 1960s. A multisig, for example, has a finite number of states when considered under symbolic execution. A model checker can rip thr…

> Should Ethereum not have been launched until it had solid methods for auditing and proving? Maybe, but that's not how the world works, typically. Worse is better and all that.

As a platform for experimentation that's fine. As a platform for doing real things with meaningful amounts of money, it's madness.

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#182

Post by grogenaut »

ekidd wrote: post #151
kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

> 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked The last time this was discussed on Hacker News, I found this comment particularly instructive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 It points out a great many fundamental issues with the Solidity contract language. Basically, the language design sounds extremely amateurish and it appears to have ignored everything we've learned about security in the last…

I hate immutable variables because I'm lazy but I would definitely use them as a feature in a system like this. Maybe I should reconsider using erlang or my position on immutble variables... Nope that's enough self discovery for today... Carry on.

Edit: And again erlang people can't take a joke. I'm literally making fun of myself for having an invalid bias and erlang folks take it as an attachment on the language.

It's also a commentary on how long it takes for devs to mind shift and incorporate new ideas.

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#183

Post by [deleted] »

ekidd wrote: post #151
kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

> 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked The last time this was discussed on Hacker News, I found this comment particularly instructive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 It points out a great many fundamental issues with the Solidity contract language. Basically, the language design sounds extremely amateurish and it appears to have ignored everything we've learned about security in the last…

[deleted]

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#184

Post by [deleted] »

ekidd wrote: post #151
kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

> 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked The last time this was discussed on Hacker News, I found this comment particularly instructive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 It points out a great many fundamental issues with the Solidity contract language. Basically, the language design sounds extremely amateurish and it appears to have ignored everything we've learned about security in the last…

[deleted]

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#185

Post by amouat »

DennisP wrote: post #166
KirinDave wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other sad thing is that Solidity, the language of Etherium, is a trainwreck. It has tons of bugs, properties that maximize the memory cost of the program, and until ~6 days ago had crazy double init bugs in constructors using "this".

Looking at Solidity's release log, the last update was 18 days ago. It fixed some minor bugs from the previous release three days prior, and none of the bugfixes mentioned in the previous release seem to fit your description. Do you have a link? https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/releases

A look at the recent commits would suggest they are correct: https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/commit/e506129aee5745e2...

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#186

Post by macmee »

kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

> Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked

The exploits so far were NOT security holes in ethereum, they were poorly written smart contracts by third parties.....

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#187

Post by grogenaut »

seanwilson wrote: post #175
mbrock wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real answer is probably that total languages are obscure and the Ethereum inventors didn't know about them so they chose a simple and ordinary stack machine. But those total systems are, of course, subsets of Ethereum, which means that if you write your program in an obviously finite way, you can use the same inductive proofs you would use for a total language. Turing completeness makes it hard to prove propertie…

> The real answer is probably that total languages are obscure and the Ethereum inventors didn't know about them so they chose a simple and ordinary stack machine. I'm not an expert on Ethereum, but even if they did pick a total language, how would you deal with bounding the CPU cost of complex contracts? Even if you could formally verify a loop would eventually terminate, wouldn't long running loops or those with ex…

I'm not sure static typing is tied to formal verification. In fact if you think about it most proofs are basically typeless I a lot of cases.

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#189

Post by pkulak »

ekidd wrote: post #151
kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

> 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked The last time this was discussed on Hacker News, I found this comment particularly instructive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 It points out a great many fundamental issues with the Solidity contract language. Basically, the language design sounds extremely amateurish and it appears to have ignored everything we've learned about security in the last…

Does Solidity really matter, though? "How's the VM" is the real question. I haven't spent more then 10 minutes looking into it, but it seemed reasonable to me. No heap and 256(?)-bit addressing seem like good ideas to keep execution complexity down.

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#190

Post by theptip »

kbody wrote: post #109

The sad reality of Ethereum: 1. Bitcoin is slow and expensive, Ethereum is the future 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked 3. Ethereum fans say it's an experiment there are lots of things that will transform Ethereum (Casper/PoS, Raiden, zkSNARKs, Enterprise Alliance) 4. Low price getting pumped by Ethereum Foundation & big-holder affiliates 5. Back to #1 We've seen it happen again (DAO) and again (Par…

Worth mentioning that there is at least one other language being built on top of the EVM:

https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo

This one takes a strict state machine approach, and aims to solve some of the tricky reentry and state tracking problems of Solidity.

Post reply on HN