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Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#151

Post by man-and-laptop »

russdpale wrote: post #127
stillbourne wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always tried to tell people that ask me about crypto currencies that not only do they not have any intrinsic value, but the only positive value that they have is entropy. I explained it like this over Christmas dinner, lets say I wanted to start a new commodity, for arguments sake lets say that this new commodity is based on matches. Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energ…

The difference, however, is that the compute is actually doing something: trustlessly verifying the ledger (or chain). Whereas in your description to your family members, your burning the match does nothing of any value, for anyone, for any reason. I find many other issues with your framing of bitcoin, but the above is the most glaring, to me.

Exactly. The value of Bitcoin comes from the fact that it's something scarce and un-counterfeit-able, just as money should be, while also being "de-centralised" and not tied to a government or corporation. The Proof of Work (the match burning) is just the means behind how that's achieved. It is absolutely not how Bitcoin derives its value; that's actually something we'd prefer it didn't need to do, but unfortunately it has to.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#152

Post by polyomino »

phlip9 wrote: post #124
pouta wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share those fixes?

First, some Proof-of-Stake setup: 1. Assume we have some set of "validators" who control the global consensus process. They come to consensus on the current global state of the system. These validators are vaguely analogous to miners in Proof-of-Work consensus. 2. These validators have coins bonded as collateral in exchange for more voting power in the consensus process. One key idea necessary for Proof-of-Stake is t…

Miners are not responsible for validating the Bitcoin blockchain. Users are responsible for validation, miners are responsible for ordering blocks. If a miner produces an invalid block, their block is not accepted by the network of users.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#153

Post by keymone »

man-and-laptop wrote: post #148
keymone wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're just trusting the network initially Yeah, let’s “just” trust random strangers’ computers to tell us the state of financial system. What could possibly go wrong. If you don’t understand importance of “don’t trust, verify” than you shouldn’t have anything to do with cryptocurrencies (or cryptography for that matter).

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but I disagree with you. A merkle tree is a recursive structure. If you trust a substructure of it, then you don't need to repeatedly re-evaluate that substructure. What that means in practical terms is if the merkle-tree entry summarising the state of the chain as it was a year ago is assumed correct, then you don't need to keep any of the transaction data from before that point.…

you are misunderstanding. you're given a state of accounts and it has "correct" signature (according to a third party) - without verifying every transaction that contributed to building that state you cannot be certain it doesn't contain invalid records. merkle has nothing to do with it, you either verify or you trust a third party.

checkpointing ethereum state or checkpointing bitcoin utxo set is a way to trade away security, decentralization and trustlessness for faster bootstrap. and ethereum folk have become way to relaxed about that fact.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#154

Post by bhaak »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #103

>Ethereum is becoming increasingly centralized. How do people see the forks, the ‘closed’ meetings, the pivots, the obvious influence that a couple devs have over the entire system - and still walk away with any notion there is decentralization?

The usual reply is "Ethereum Classic".

If Ethereum were as centralized as claimed ("cult of Vitalik", etc.), the survival of ETC wouldn't have been possible.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#155

Post by keymone »

bhaak wrote: post #150
keymone wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don’t. You only need to know consensus rules. You can use any software, you can build it yourself, you can order an audit, you can write software yourself . Proof of work committed to the chain that is valid according to consensus rules you know is universal and objective measure that everyone will observe equally. That’s where bitcoin’s security comes from and that’s how you can avoid to rely on trusting thir…

How do you know the consensus rules?

from the internet. are you now going to argue that there is no difference between knowing a couple pages of text that describe how a system should work from downloading and running opaque binary from untrusted source?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#156

Post by feanaro »

XorNot wrote: post #114
sparkie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor is a sacrifice of ones time, and one expects to receive compensation for that sacrifice. The medium of compensation could be anything, and is certainly not limited to regional monopoly currencies. The key distinction between the currency and Bitcoin is the government's use of force to mandate that people accept the currency as a unit of payment for services (and use it to pay taxes). There is no intrinsic value…

If Bitcoin is not backed by government force, then why is it worth anything? Because no one can be compelled to accept Bitcoin to extinguish my debts to them (i.e. by the courts) and I can't pay my taxes in Bitcoin to my local government (no, "just-in-time currency exchange doesn't count). So given these problems, what is the exchange rate of Bitcoin into anything else supposed to be? Given, again, that eventually, e…

Not all commercial transactions involve debt.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#157

Post by rictic »

aeternus wrote: post #131
phlip9 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, some Proof-of-Stake setup: 1. Assume we have some set of "validators" who control the global consensus process. They come to consensus on the current global state of the system. These validators are vaguely analogous to miners in Proof-of-Work consensus. 2. These validators have coins bonded as collateral in exchange for more voting power in the consensus process. One key idea necessary for Proof-of-Stake is t…

As a new user in a Proof-of-Stake protocol, how do I determine which chain to follow? With PoW I can choose the 'longest' chain (chain with the most total work).

I haven't looked into this in quite some time, but as I recall, a new user can look at the available chains and determine which has the majority of stake behind it.

Is there a subtlety that makes that unworkable?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#158

Post by bhaak »

keymone wrote: post #155
bhaak wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the consensus rules?

from the internet. are you now going to argue that there is no difference between knowing a couple pages of text that describe how a system should work from downloading and running opaque binary from untrusted source?

I would like to see that couple pages of text that describe the Bitcoin consensus rules in such a detail that you could do a clean room implementation of a Bitcoin client.

Hint: They don't exist. That's because the specification of the consensus rules are in the reference implementation of Bitcoin and every other implementation has to implement the same behavior as the C++ client, including any possible programming mistakes.

So you only know if your re-implementation works "correctly" if you download and run it against an opaque binary from an untrusted(?) source.

Whatever you do, you need to anchor your trust somewhere. You should always be aware where you anchor it and what trade-offs there are.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#159

Post by h1d »

jarfil wrote: post #66
berberous wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he seems to give BTC a pass. I'm not familiar with this guy and just skimmed his tweetstorm, but he seems to be part of a group that thinks BTC >>>> ETH.

ETH is theoretically better than BTC, while BTC is practically better than ETH. Depending on whether you want something cool to experiment with, or something to actually use, one is far better than the other.

Those are apple and orange. You don't necessarily say HTTP is better than TCP or JavaScript is better than HTML.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#160

Post by keymone »

bhaak wrote: post #158
keymone wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from the internet. are you now going to argue that there is no difference between knowing a couple pages of text that describe how a system should work from downloading and running opaque binary from untrusted source?

I would like to see that couple pages of text that describe the Bitcoin consensus rules in such a detail that you could do a clean room implementation of a Bitcoin client. Hint: They don't exist. That's because the specification of the consensus rules are in the reference implementation of Bitcoin and every other implementation has to implement the same behavior as the C++ client, including any possible programming m…

it is true that bitcoin has a reference specification, but only a small subset of that code is actual consensus code, but the rest of your message is just bs.

knowing consensus rules is the easy bit - code is open source, there are multiple implementations, there is community, there are users, merchants, exchanges - they all agree what consensus rules are. but what's most important - I CAN VALIDATE FULL BITCOIN BLOCKCHAIN IN REASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME AND VERIFY THAT I FOLLOW THE CORRECT CHAIN.

you seem to have forgotten what this thread is about. it's a short one - i'm sure you can track back and read it again, carefully.

edit: clarification.

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