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Final Steps

blog.ethereum.org

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Re: Final Steps

#31

Post by arnorhs »

tombh wrote: post #4

Just to chime in with the obligatory: sounds-interesting-but-for-the-love-of-turing-it's-infuriatingly-hard-to-find-a-basic-description-of-what-it-actually-is.

yeah, and the "about" section doesn't really answer the question very well:

What is ether?

Ether is a necessary element -- a fuel -- for operating the distributed application software platform we are building: Ethereum. Without the requirement of payment of ether for every computational step and storage operation within the system, infinite loops or excessive storage demands could bog down Ethereum and effectively destroy it.

Re: Final Steps

#32

Post by wmf »

pera wrote: post #22
mizzao wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.

I don't understand this recurrent point: computer power is "wasted" almost everywhere. At least Bitcoin use this power to build a decentralized currency.

It's wasted relative to other methods (e.g. proof of stake, Stellar) that many people believe can provide close enough to the same properties.

Re: Final Steps

#33

Post by jsprogrammer »

scott_karana wrote: post #30
pera wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this recurrent point: computer power is "wasted" almost everywhere. At least Bitcoin use this power to build a decentralized currency.

> computer power is "wasted" almost everywhere. At least Bitcoin use this power to build a decentralized currency. Pinning a GPU or ASIC at 100% undeniably draws more power than an everyday user idling around Facebook on their Macbook Air (~21W MAXED, so likely 7W) Whether it's worth it is the question. A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me $12Mn USD per day as the approximate global cost of electricity given t…

>$12Mn USD

per what?

This number is pretty meaningless without knowing what timeframe that amount of costs are incurred.

Re: Final Steps

#34

Post by optimiz3 »

tromp wrote: post #24
mizzao wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.

The best you could hope for in an alternative proof-of-work scheme is a shift from dominating electricity costs and rapid hardware obsolescence to use of commodity hardware, dominated by memory latency instead of computation. That's what my Cuckoo Cycle PoW scheme aims for... https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo On the other hand, some people argue that reducing waste is counterproductive as it also lowers the cost of a h…

How is Ethash compute intensive relative to Cuckoo Cycle?

EDIT: Ethash does 1 SHA3 at the beginning, 1 SHA3 at the end, and 64 rounds of FNV1-32 x 32.

Verification considers the intermediate digest, so really 1 SHA3 to verify.

You do more SHA3 rounds if you don't store the dataset, but this is a memory trap-door (and would require ignoring the mixDigest); the verification cost is still negligible.

In our mining pools, verification of hash values doesn't even account for 1% of of our overall CPU consumption (and this is with Scrypt).

SHA3 is also far more lightweight than SHA2, and much more parallelizable.

EDIT #2: If we want to talk about weaknesses in Ethash, I'm not sure it is FPGA resistant, given many FPGAs have DDR iterfaces on die and the access pattern of Ethash is read-only.

Re: Final Steps

#35

Post by scott_karana »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #33
scott_karana wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> computer power is "wasted" almost everywhere. At least Bitcoin use this power to build a decentralized currency. Pinning a GPU or ASIC at 100% undeniably draws more power than an everyday user idling around Facebook on their Macbook Air (~21W MAXED, so likely 7W) Whether it's worth it is the question. A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me $12Mn USD per day as the approximate global cost of electricity given t…

>$12Mn USD per what? This number is pretty meaningless without knowing what timeframe that amount of costs are incurred.

Oops, good save. Thanks!

It's per day. (I think. :P)

Today's average hashrate is ~397Mn GH/s, and I used 375 instead, to be conservative/fair.

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Re: Final Steps

#36

Post by Touche »

maaku wrote: post #19
Touche wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 90% of the market still speculation? Call me when it's not.

What does that even mean? If I were to add up every single transaction involving USD, what percentage do you think would be HFT and other Wall St speculation?

A fraction of the same type of transaction for Bitcoin.

Re: Final Steps

#39

Post by TheGrimDerp1 »

codezero wrote: post #8
tombh wrote: post #4

Just to chime in with the obligatory: sounds-interesting-but-for-the-love-of-turing-it's-infuriatingly-hard-to-find-a-basic-description-of-what-it-actually-is.

Ditto, after reading several of the about pages, I'm still not sure what Ether is, or how it's used, or who the target audience is. Something in there about a decentralized platform for running apps, but I don't want to guess too deeply about what this means. Is it a cloud hosting platform that runs on Ether? Is the platform going to be used primarily for mining Ether? I'm not even sure, if anyone has a short descrip…

I've been following the subreddit for over a year and I still haven't figured it out...

Re: Final Steps

#40

Post by jsprogrammer »

jMyles wrote: post #27
jsprogrammer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you say Bitcoin didn't succeed? The currency currently has a market cap of about $4,300,000,000 USD, processes transactions equivalent to $300,000,000 USD daily and can be used globally by anyone. It's been running completely decentralized for 6 years without compromise. It has probably succeeded far beyond most expectations for it.

To clarify: I meant that bitcoin didn't, and probably won't, for reasons attributable to the limitations of the implementation, supplant fiat currency and become a basis for deprecating the federal reserve, which I agree is a laudable goal. Bitcoin did, however, succeed in proving that a distributed consensus mechanism can exist as a store of value. As you point out.

>I meant that bitcoin didn't, and probably won't, for reasons attributable to the limitations of the implementation, supplant fiat currency and become a basis for deprecating the federal reserve, which I agree is a laudable goal.

That expectation is not described anywhere in the system's proposal[0]. I'm not sure that was ever a real expectation except among the biggest believers.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

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