91–100 of 104 posts
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.
Inspired by an earlier HN post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...
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To clarify, Ethereum isn't a marketplace or a reputation system. It's just a good platform for building those things. Ordering from Amazon or Alibaba means paying them for the privilege. Systems that connect producers directly to consumers will have lower costs because there's no middleman that needs to skim profits. If such systems become popular, it will be a transfer of wealth from the Amazons of the world to ever…
>>Systems that connect producers directly to consumers will have lower costs because there's no middleman that needs to skim profits. Will it? Amazon and the likes operate on notoriously slim margins whilst buying at wholesale prices, and getting shipments in bulk. Whereas me buying 1 widget from Shenzhen, that will be retail price, plus shipment for 1 single item overseas, that will cost way more than Amazon is payi…
You won't pay to ship one single item. The entire batch from the factory that's heading for your country will go out together on one boat with lots of other stuff. Instead of going to an Amazon warehouse when it gets here, it'll just go to you, along with all the other goods from the port headed to your area. Decentralizing shipping will make it more efficient, too.
Another option is that a manufacturer who expects overseas customers can ship the goods to convenient locations for their customers to get faster shipping times. Amazon uses part of their markup to pay for that today. Customers will pay for it directly in the future. Customers will pay for everything directly.
Anyone with a warehouse will be able to make money by participating in the decentralized retail system, but today, it's impossible for those people to compete with Amazon and Walmart. Competition will drive down profit margins.
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No offense, but there has to be a simpler way to explain this. It sounds like you are passionate, and after seeing the video it looks like a good idea, but it also sounds like a parody of startup culture. References to "humanity" and "mankind" don't help, even if you've used them appropriately. Your comment is useful and exact after understanding the topic, but the message isn't easy to explain. And the source of thi…
There's a lot of humanity problems solving talk in cryptocurrency land. I think it's because the people that run in that scene can finally glimpse what this technology can do, when wielded correctly. That said, there's still a lot to do before we replace the government with a crypto contract! Ethereum uses a cryptocurrency under-the-hood called 'ether', which pays for 'gas': compute resources like networking, storage…
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No offense, but there has to be a simpler way to explain this. It sounds like you are passionate, and after seeing the video it looks like a good idea, but it also sounds like a parody of startup culture. References to "humanity" and "mankind" don't help, even if you've used them appropriately. Your comment is useful and exact after understanding the topic, but the message isn't easy to explain. And the source of thi…
There's a lot of humanity problems solving talk in cryptocurrency land. I think it's because the people that run in that scene can finally glimpse what this technology can do, when wielded correctly. That said, there's still a lot to do before we replace the government with a crypto contract! Ethereum uses a cryptocurrency under-the-hood called 'ether', which pays for 'gas': compute resources like networking, storage…
AFAIK, it was done on purpose: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25427/the-bitcoin...
How does the company behind it make money? Do they have 20% of ether supply or something?
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Right, the problem with Vinay's explanation is that it requires people to have deep understanding of blockchains already. I'd recommend to anyone who wants to understand ethereum to first perform some Bitcoin transactions, to get an intuitive feel for the appeal of blockchains. But the big difference is that programs in ethereum run on the "protocol level" not the hardware level. This means that correct execution of…
There's not really that much to understand about block chains... It's a globally shared immutable linked list... Umm... I'm pretty sure programs still execute on hardware...
That's what I mean by running "as a protocol" and not on hardware... it's a higher level of abstraction.
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> 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…
> A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me $12Mn USD per day 3600.00 BTC or $1m is paid as subsidy per day. Are you saying that people are spending 12x that on power? I dont think so.
You have all the relevant numbers in my post after all: maybe I made a mistake? That certainly possible :P, since you seem to be right about the rewards paid per day.
Or maybe people willingly factor in power costs as a price of speculating on a volatile, trending currency? Or maybe most power costs are actually carried in low-cost areas rather than North America and Europe, so my $0.05/kWh is an overestimate?
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…
Ethereum is useful for this because it allows for distributed custody of funds. No one controls the funds stored in these contracts, so there's no one to run away with and steal all the money, and, since it's run on Ethereum, there's no middleman taking 5-10% fees. In fact, for the first time, we can have a truly global prediction market, and _anyone_ can create markets on it to boot! This is just one app possible on ethereum, and it's one I'm building - www.augur.net if you're interested.
Ethereum's basically a platform that allows you to create "smart contracts" (aka programs) that are practically guaranteed to execute the way you write them. And multiple people can interact with the programs and it'll still be executed the same way. This is a bit abstract, but the main huge advantage this allows is: you can finally send money to some program, and the program will do exactly what it says it will, and no one else can modify the results or even touch your money. Bitcoin allows you to send money around, Ethereum allows you to enter into complex contracts with money, and those contracts are always enforceable.
To take this into the real world, imagine you want to make a bitcoin prediction market. Since you can't run the complicated buy/sell machinery of a prediction market directly on bitcoin, you're forced to take deposits from users, match their orders, and then do payouts accordingly after the event occurs. You can run away with the funds at any time, and there's nothing stopping you. Sure, you could elect to use multisignature wallets or cold storage, but that didn't stop MtGox from happening. Heck, even InTrade, the largest prior prediction market had millions of dollars of funds embezzled by their later CEO.
Now with Ethereum, we can send funds to a contract, they're stored there. You can buy and sell and all orders go through the contract. At the end payouts are done by the code in the contract, and no one can take the funds held in the contract.
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Some people will be turned off by claims that a technology can have a significant impact on humanity at large. Others will be curious to find out whether these claims can be substantiated. My audience is the latter. Learning how to build applications on top of Ethereum is one of the most important things an engineer can do if they want to maximize their impact on humanity. I am not ashamed of these claims, and encour…
Could you find me an inventor in history of a technology that actually changed humanity who made such a claim before it did so? Did Google claim or even knew their search engine would change the world? Did Apple? Did Facebook? Nope. You should focus your message on why your tech is useful, not that it might save humanity, most startups don't change humanity, heck, most startups fail. So it's a bit premature to claim…
(for those who don't know, I'm the founder :) )
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It sounds like it would require a lot of throughput to run so many transactions. How do they plan to scale that?
Excellent question. Here are some blog posts on the subject: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype... After skimming these, I'm comfortable assuming that someone will figure it out. Blockchain architecture doesn't excite me. Decentralized applications do.