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What is Ethereum?

etherscripter.com

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Re: What is Ethereum?

#81

Post by davidgerard »

Smart contracts are one of the worst ideas ever conceived.

Nobody actually wants smart contracts, for excellent and obvious reasons. Nerds think they're a good idea because they'll sort out all the annoying grey areas in social human interaction.

Dr. Strangelove is literally about an unstoppable smart contract going wrong.

No business actually wants smart contracts - they always, always want the option of lawyering out of a bad deal. Or stopping it if the government gets pissed off and says it will penalise you to a crisp if you proceed with that smart-arse contract you just put on the blockchain.

No consumer wants smart contracts, for the same reason "no chargebacks" is a loser. You always want a human to be able to fix the problem.

The only use I can think of for smart contracts is for businesses to screw over customers who have no other option, c.f. mandatory arbitration clauses. Note how the standard example of a smart contract is a car that stops working if your payment fails. Or the Internet fails. Unstoppably. Immune to human intercession, circumstances, etc. (Such locked cars already exist, only bought by people who have no other choice.)

Re: What is Ethereum?

#82

Post by davidgerard »

bachback wrote: post #44
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #39

Isn't fuzziness a feature of most legal codes? Treating the law like an absolute immutable contract sounds anathema to a healthy judicial system. I'm not sure why some technologists have such a fascination with legalism. I'm not against the idea of digital government and having laws be distributed under a free documentation license with the ability for citizens to discuss and amend laws. A standard version control an…

Good observation. There is a continuum in legal language between expressive power in the natural language and the legal formal language. "Absolute immutable contracts" are however very desirable in many cases where people interact with or through machines. Consider that modern computers, in terms of the hardware are extremely deterministic on a macro level, but a lot of the software is fuzzy (UI).

If there is a market for these, why don't they exist already?

Re: What is Ethereum?

#83

Post by natrius »

joosters wrote: post #41
kordless wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data for WEBSITE_ADMIN is set inside the Ethereum network . I think the term 'website' is tripping people up here. It's actually better defined as 'site with data' which can be accessed via the Ethereum APIs. If you are interested in playing around with the API calls, there is a Docker image for it. I put together a hosted version of this as well, so you don't have install anything to play with it: https://github…

Are you saying that Ethereum is a web hosting platform?

Ethereum is not a web hosting platform. It is not similar to Amazon's EC2 or anything like that. Conceptually, it is a single global computer that anyone can access. It's not the same kind of computer you're familiar with, though.

Programs on this computer can't be changed, and nothing can write to the program's storage except for the program itself. You don't have to trust a service provider to maintain their guarantees: it is impossible to break a guarantee.

These characteristics are useful for writing programs that coordinate interactions between humans. They're also useful for letting devices publish and access information about the world long after their manufacturers go out of business.

Entirely new kinds of software can be built to coordinate social and financial systems.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#84

Post by kordless »

joosters wrote: post #41
kordless wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data for WEBSITE_ADMIN is set inside the Ethereum network . I think the term 'website' is tripping people up here. It's actually better defined as 'site with data' which can be accessed via the Ethereum APIs. If you are interested in playing around with the API calls, there is a Docker image for it. I put together a hosted version of this as well, so you don't have install anything to play with it: https://github…

Are you saying that Ethereum is a web hosting platform?

No, it's not a web hosting platform. It's a new compute/storage/network platform though. Primary feature is a consensus mechanism and built in identity management.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#85

Post by kelvin0 »

I wonder if it is possible to pass an actual law which would render digital 'contracts' illegal. So all lawyers become coders/analysts? I find the idea interesting, but in reality this is never going to go further than an academic or research project ...

Re: What is Ethereum?

#86

Post by natrius »

dcosson wrote: post #30

Presumably smart contracts would very often depend on input external to the system - for example, imagine a will that says if Person A dies, Person B inherits the millions of dollars worth of Ether at a particular address that Person A owns. Somebody (or some other system) has to be in charge of the input to the Ethereum system to tell it that Person A has died. This seems like a huge single point of failure that doe…

You can decentralize the reporting of an individual's death using Schelling point consensus, which is what we use to decide Augur's prediction markets on Ethereum. In brief, we distribute a token to a "reporters." At the appropriate time, reporters submit their decisions about events. Reporters who deviate from the consensus lose some of their token balance, which is redistributed to the honest reporters. If an event is ambiguous, reporters report that fact itself instead of guessing at what everyone else will report.

Oracles will be fine for some use cases. Schelling consensus works for others. There are many ways to get real world information into Ethereum, and many ways to reflect how well real world actors adhere to their commitments.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#87

Post by natrius »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #73
616c wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure I have brought it up here before, but I will again. Here it goes. My father is an intellectual property attorney. Among colorful clients was a very active entrepeneur/inventor. One year he insisted the future was a digital nation. You see how people drool or get excited even with 1/4-of-the-way-there e-Estonia system? He was talking about this years ago, when I was finishing high school and starting college…

How would a distributed "digital nation" (which is, rather conveniently, very poorly defined) exercise force to enforce its "rules" on the physical world?

You'd probably have to limit the use of force to things almost everyone agrees on, like detaining people to prevent imminent harm. For other things, sanctions are probably effective enough. Given universal, stable, cryptographic identities, you as an individual would "enforce" your rules and desired contributions to public goods by consulting your chosen sanction list before trading with someone.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#88

Post by mempko »

ewzimm wrote: post #77
mempko wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand why contract enforcement leads to violence. In the real world, contracts among equals are always fungable and rarely enforced with violence. It is different when the contracts are between powerful and the not so powerful. Violence propagates down. Ethereum, by automating contract enforcement is going to end up being a tool for the powerful against the weak. A tool which brings the cost of lowering c…

You're right in general, but if two groups use a common software platform and write the rules of the contract into it, there's less need to build up an enforcement regime. I'm not sure exactly how you're interpreting contract enforcement leading to violence, so I'll try to explain a little more. Two people make a financial agreement, hire lawyers, and depend on a powerful police force and and penal system to enforce…

Contracts that are mutually beneficial typically don't need to be enforced because they are not often broken. People who consider themselves equals give each other slack in contracts. The only use case this software fits with is is handling contracts where one party does not trust the other. Typically the more powerful party is at an advantage.

There are two scenarios I see. This software is useful to powerful groups to make contract enforcement cheaper in which case they will essentially force the weaker party into compliance. Or this gives the weaker party an advantage, in which case this software never takes off. Because let's face it, I would never use this with people I like.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#89

Post by jsprogrammer »

natrius wrote: post #87
jsprogrammer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a distributed "digital nation" (which is, rather conveniently, very poorly defined) exercise force to enforce its "rules" on the physical world?

You'd probably have to limit the use of force to things almost everyone agrees on, like detaining people to prevent imminent harm. For other things, sanctions are probably effective enough. Given universal, stable, cryptographic identities, you as an individual would "enforce" your rules and desired contributions to public goods by consulting your chosen sanction list before trading with someone.

Ah the slippery slope of imminent harm.

I'm not sure I understand why I need a cryptographic identity to boycott certain vendors? I can already do that today.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#90

Post by natrius »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #89
natrius wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably have to limit the use of force to things almost everyone agrees on, like detaining people to prevent imminent harm. For other things, sanctions are probably effective enough. Given universal, stable, cryptographic identities, you as an individual would "enforce" your rules and desired contributions to public goods by consulting your chosen sanction list before trading with someone.

Ah the slippery slope of imminent harm. I'm not sure I understand why I need a cryptographic identity to boycott certain vendors? I can already do that today.

You need cryptographic identities for automated boycotts. Boycotts aren't very effective today because they're hard to organize, and some vendors have relative monopolies. I think Ethereum enables both effective boycott coordination and monopoly elimination.

Also, these sanctions apply to both sellers and buyers. I think economic isolation will be an effective deterrent to undesirable behavior. It's basically prison, just without force.

Imminent harm may be a slippery slope, but it's really all up to the individuals who support the enforcers. If someone detains someone who shouldn't have been detained, stop funding their activities and sanction them. Fund a different enforcement organization instead.

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