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Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

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Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#81

Post by akyu »

tinco wrote: post #79
3np wrote: post #7

I think many developers getting sucked into a new exciting technology feel similarly at some point once it gets enough traction. "I know; it's such a hipster statement." might be all there is to it, and that's fine. I had the same phases with web and ML and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a bit of a hipster in that sense. I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen to yourself, but also realize that yo…

Vitalik is always bitching about the greedy community, but that's really not what is killing Ethereum. What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace. It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have been. An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've solved any othe…

Agreed. Anyone who's been in software long enough can take one look at Ethereum and see the telltale signs of puttering, meandering development. Creating solutions in search of problems, and favoring whats clever over what works.

It seems that the Ethereum core development community puts overly high value on cleverness and not nearly enough on hardcore engineering fundamentals.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#83

Post by bitcoin01 »

And there I was entertaining the idea of becoming a smart contract developer for fun and profit. Programmable money sounds very appealing and I can see so many usecases... if only we could use a proper language like Kotlin to develop smart contracts..

Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like to work full time on this platform? P

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#84

Post by siraben »

> I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless.

Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages, better compilers and better dev tooling.

As our smart contract written in Vyper (for ease of auditing) grew larger and larger, eventually we failed to deploy on the testnet, and closer inspection reveal that the compiler was blowing up code size which I had to patch[0]. Down the line upstream further increased gas costs by emitting code that zeroed out every member of an array (note the EVM already has all memory set to 0). To support efficient insertion/deletion of bids we had to handroll a skip list on the blockchain(!), because there are no Vyper libraries.

On the language development side, things don't look too pretty either, I ended up having to write an EVM assembler from scratch[1], but deeper still are problems such as a lack of a separate call stack in EVM, so procedure calls always end up clunky and implementation-dependent. LLVM to EVM[2] is still experimental, so anyone who is writing a compiler will have to write codegen from scratch.

Perhaps eWASM will alleviate some of these concerns. But until then, the entire dev process for writing smart contracts is painful.

[0] https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488

[1] https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs...

[2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#85

Post by itsdsmurrell »

fredgrott wrote: post #59

The underlying problem with bitcoin is the same one with P2P and it's still has not been solved. IE, scalability of a decentralized network. Internet went the other way with a live-able scaling solution based on mixing non decentralized with decentralized. My prediction is that it will go the way of internet in that a set of orgs that are transparent will form the centralized structure to scale it at live-able terms…

Try Bitcoin Cash. It's the one that implemented Satoshi's suggested upping of the block size limit, has the same block history as BTC up until the fork, and solves moving value at low fees. This operation is the one people should care about the most. Fancier things will take time. The community hangs out at r/btc by historical accident.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#86

Post by joosters »

qznc wrote: post #9

Vitalik recently blogged [0] that prediction markets might be there most important thing in Ethereum. > it is one of the Ethereum applications that have provided to me the most concrete value. [0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html

That's a short-sighted, american-centric view. In the rest of the world, prediction markets (e.g. Betfair) have existed for decades. It's not a technology that needs decentralisation or its own currency, so why on earth is it expected to be a killer app for crypto?

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#87

Post by antupis »

drom5 wrote: post #5
heterodoxxed wrote: post #2

| "What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. I don't see any evidence of this being true.

I would say that the killer app currently is decentralised finance, lending and trading for example on the chain. The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain.

I would say NFT and micropayments are killer apps. It would be fantastic if we had browser addon where you can 1-click pay something like 0.01$ to read article.

NFT for gaming is going to be huge industry eg pro-gamers could sell their character skins same way now eg basketball players sell their jerseys or you could import that Hearthstone deck to complete new game.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#88

Post by josu »

>But I'm telling you that no sane Joe will touch that shit without a serious cryptographic specialist by their side.

One would think so, but people in the space are calling each other "degens", one of the best Ethereum devs joked about "testing in production", and for the past year there have been dozens of +1M USD hacks in the space.

So yeah, projects are already launching based on zk-rollups and other complex cryptography without "serious cryptographic specialist by their side".

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#89

Post by samtheprogram »

TeeWEE wrote: post #52
samtheprogram wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too. As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was firmly in your camp, I don’t really see an “up to snuff” argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and JavaScript definitely has them, but it’s not alone in that regard, especially c…

> Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too. This is a fallacy argument. Because other users it, doens't mean its good.

Thanks for pointing this out. While I think that speaks to the productivity it has provided (I guess that’s a stretch / could be coincidence), what I really should have conveyed is that through a thriving ecosystem and updated standards, it’s gotten a lot better over time. Node v8+ and latest versions of NPM are very far from where they used to be. Again, JavaScript is not without it’s quirks, but I don’t think any language is free from that statement, and JavaScript’s are easily managed in my opinion.

It’s single threaded, but again, right tool for the right job.

Re: Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

#90

Post by balaa »

oilbagz wrote: post #24

Its the stack. I can't get interested in any crypto currency or related technology that doesn't provide, at a minimum, a linkable C library or .. even better .. a luarocks module .. to do all the work. If I even have to think about using npm or javascript to join the new hipster cult, I'm out. These tools are not up to snuff. C'mon crypto guys, give us systems programmers the libs we need. Javascript is OUT. Your fan…

Check out substrate which uses Rust
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