Live data from Hacker News

Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

ethereumdev.io

241–244 of 244 posts

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#241
post #208
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You wouldn't trust a bank with an SQL-injection vulnerability or a hospital running on an old version of Windows either but that doesn't mean all banks and hospitals are not trustworthy I would and do, because that's the reality of things. You're discounting the fact that if my bank has a SQL-injection exploit used against it and my account is drained, the federal government will reimburse me up to $250,000. That t…

it is because the federal government mints and controls the currency of dollars, with Ethereum you can create an arbitrary token and mint this token to any amount, essentially be your own federal reserve, Ethereum is an interesting software platform. Coinbase is fully insured all their digital currency is backed if a breach was to happen the customers will be refunded. So I suggest you keep your $250000 in there.

How often do you hear of someone loosing thousands of dollars perminantly because of a banking error? Almost never, because if a bank did not reimburse people who lost money, their reputation would be destroyed. How often do you hear of people losing thousands of dollars because of a cryptocurrency? All the time, because no one is responsible for the lost money, so no one will replace it or work extra hard to ensure it is safe. Security doesn't matter when you have a central authority dedicated to ensuring you don't loose your money, and which had been successfully doing so for decades.

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#242
post #97
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep that is why there is a notice and link about random number generation in the tutorial.

try this lottery code instead https://github.com/renasboy/ETHLottery

Is it correct that the betted value doesn't influence any winning chances?

Also, is the last byte of the blockhash function return value guaranteed to be equidistributed?

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#243
post #2

Maybe it's because I don't have a use for it yet, or at least don't know if I have a use for it. But, the whole Ethereum universe seems vague and seems like they could explain it more than they do. "Install Ethereum wallet, write a contract, ..., Profit!" ?? Is there a better source that might explain what it is, how it works (a glancing explanation not a full network inner workings)??

Yeah people. Explain Ethereum without using the words "smart contract" please.

Ethereum is a cloud computing service. It has two advantages over other cloud computing services: (1) it is extremely highly available (2) the person who uploads a program cannot modify that program afterwards and has no special admin access over that program's data storage; furthermore all data stored including program code is publicly viewable.

Because the program author has no admin privileges, users don't have to worry about the service provider abusing their admin privilages to secretly modify the database (which may otherwise be a concern for high-value applications such as, e.g. vote-counting, e.g. a database that stores bank account balances, etc).

The disadvantages are (1) it is much more expensive compared to other cloud computing services, (2) since the uploader doesn't have admin access, they can't fix bugs, and since everything is transparent, it's hard to store secrets.

Re: Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

#244

Programmable smart contracts are a great idea in a world where programmers write bug free code. That world does not exist yet. Until we have near-perfect code writing AIs every new smart contract is just a disaster waiting to happen.

We put our lives in the hands of code written by humans every day, e.g. cars, planes, trains, etc. Perhaps the permanence of executing solidity contracts will at least motivate some safer, more secure practises, in the same way that the permanence of death does when programming vehicles that carry human lives. It would be cool to see APIs for compiling Solidity contracts from safer languages with more concise type sy…

You might appreciate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835977#14839943
Post reply on HN