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Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#161

He’s criticizing Eth for being a “ science experiment”? The entire crypto ecosystem is just an experiment, including bitcoin. It’s all immature and unstable.

What’s unstable about bitcoin apart from the price obviously?

Fact that without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point.

You don't see the instability, it's just people can't use it much more with the current implementation. Unstable future perhaps the parent meant.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#162
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 BLOCK…

How do you know you got the right source code?

If you have multiple implementations that disagree how do you decide which one is the right one if there are also 2 competing blockchains available?

You said "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." and that's plain wrong.

You need to ensure you got the right consensus rules. This is not as easy as you put it.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#163
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s unstable about bitcoin apart from the price obviously?

Fact that without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point. You don't see the instability, it's just people can't use it much more with the current implementation. Unstable future perhaps the parent meant.

> without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point.

that's a pretty stable thing you're describing. and lightning is actually in beta now and has grown quite a bit.

> Unstable future perhaps the parent meant

the only stable thing about future is heat death of the universe. and even that is possibly up for debate.

shifting goalposts much?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#164
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 BLOCK…

How do you know you got the right source code? If you have multiple implementations that disagree how do you decide which one is the right one if there are also 2 competing blockchains available? You said "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." and that's plain wrong. You need to ensure you got the right con…

i make a choice and i

VALIDATE THE FUCKING BLOCKCHAIN

what is so hard to grasp about this?

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#165

>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?

None of the things you mention have anything to do with the decentralization problem he's talking about. See the attached tweet.

It's about not being able to run a full node yourself, which consequently means everyone is using third-party services such as Infura.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#166

>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?

Because there are several different kinds of decentralization and it's not black and white.

Miner decentralization is important is the whole security model relies on nobody controlling >50% of hashrate.

Developer centralization is another important point. BTC arguably fails at this when a small group, combined with extensive propaganda campaigns, artificially constrains Bitcoin's throughput. There are no valid arguments against raising the blocksize to 2MB for example.

Then there's node centralization, wealth distribution and maybe other types I'm missing.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#167
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?

So you're trusting someone on the internet to tell you protocol specifications (and then, since you don't trust the software distributor, doing a full audit of their software or writing your own client).

With Proof of Stake, you're trusting someone on the internet to tell you the hash for the most recent valid block.

And in practice the difference is even less significant. In reality, very close to every new user of a PoW blockchain just trusts the software distributor to be providing them with a client that works with the protocol commonly known as (Bitcoin-Cash, Ethereum, etc).

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#168
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact that without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point. You don't see the instability, it's just people can't use it much more with the current implementation. Unstable future perhaps the parent meant.

> without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point. that's a pretty stable thing you're describing. and lightning is actually in beta now and has grown quite a bit. > Unstable future perhaps the parent meant the only stable thing about future is heat death of the universe. and even that is possibly up for debate. shifting goalposts muc…

This link is only 6 months ago. I don't know yesterday's state but I also don't know your definition of beta. I thought it meant quite ready for production use, just getting rid of corner cases.

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/06/26/lighting-network-...

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#169
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point. that's a pretty stable thing you're describing. and lightning is actually in beta now and has grown quite a bit. > Unstable future perhaps the parent meant the only stable thing about future is heat death of the universe. and even that is possibly up for debate. shifting goalposts muc…

This link is only 6 months ago. I don't know yesterday's state but I also don't know your definition of beta. I thought it meant quite ready for production use, just getting rid of corner cases. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/06/26/lighting-network-...

Yes, trying to send a transaction which is at or near the limit will result in it failing.

But that article doesn't mention that the limit is artificially imposed so that people aren't risking too much money on unproven code.

As the system is shown to be stable, that limit will be raised and eventually removed, and the issue here will no longer exist.

Plus, failure in this case means "using the blockchain", and for larger amounts of money the fees are generally a fraction of the amount transferred, even during times of high mempool.

Re: Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

#170
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point. that's a pretty stable thing you're describing. and lightning is actually in beta now and has grown quite a bit. > Unstable future perhaps the parent meant the only stable thing about future is heat death of the universe. and even that is possibly up for debate. shifting goalposts muc…

This link is only 6 months ago. I don't know yesterday's state but I also don't know your definition of beta. I thought it meant quite ready for production use, just getting rid of corner cases. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/06/26/lighting-network-...

Lightning network is not Bitcoin. I was asking what’s unstable about Bitcoin.
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