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Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

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Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#11

Post by erikpukinskis »

mistermumble wrote: post #5

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum". The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company…

I am also bullish on Ethereum. A few points to notice:

- the price is pretty stable relative to early Bitcoin.

- Vitalik and the other devs are still building out economic/game theory models. And Ethereum has successfully made a hard fork. That suggests the organization has some leeway to skate where the puck is going, so to speak.

- it's very early days in terms of building out the "standard library". Lots of people working on this, collectively and privately. It's a little like the railroad tracks have been laid but they are still building the trains, not to mention stations.

- Ethereum has the benefit of being overshadowed by Bitcoin, which insulates it a bit from speculators and scammers. This is only a temporary effect, but I think obscurity helps Ethereum grow smart and slow right now.

- the forums are all about things being built with Ethereum. Bitcoin has a chicken and egg problem, where retailers need to get on board for consumers to care. But nerds can sit down and make something useful on Ethereum today.

I would put one check on this endorsement, though. Ethereum is uniquely useful in situations where you can't trust anyone. It shines in that environment.

Mostly though, we do trust the people around us. I think once the Ethereum community starts releasing big trustless e-institutions, it will be clear that most of them could run just fine with Venmo, WebRTC, and a little JavaScript.

So I think Ethereum will always have a more back-office feel, and I don't quite see it being on The Today Show any time soon.

But Vitalik Buterin is very smart and I wouldn't bet against him.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#12

Post by heliumcraft »

Animats wrote: post #9

The only reason there was a hard fork was because it was Buterin's company that got ripped off. If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money. As for "The DAO", the biggest question on their forum is "How do I get out?"[1] Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money. [1] https://forum.daohub.org/

First of all the DAO was a decentralized organisation, it didn't belong to Buterin, it isn't "Buterin's company"...

The hard fork had a lot more to do with the fact the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor. There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen money to their original owners, there was consensus to do the fork and so the fork happened.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#13

Post by Animats »

drcode wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #9

The only reason there was a hard fork was because it was Buterin's company that got ripped off. If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money. As for "The DAO", the biggest question on their forum is "How do I get out?"[1] Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money. [1] https://forum.daohub.org/

You are spreading misinformation: It's true some employees at the ethereum foundation had personal money invested in the DAO. Vitalik himself had a small amount invested as well. However, the Ethereum Foundation was not involved with the DAO. > If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money This is idle speculation, and I personally don't think that's true. > Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to…

It looks like there's about $10 million unclaimed in DAO tokens.[1] Soon it will no longer be possible to redeem them, because the infrastructure is disappearing. Getting them back is really complicated.

[1] https://medium.com/curator-multisig-phf-official-channel/dao...

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#14

Post by deegles »

mistermumble wrote: post #5

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum". The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company…

How did hard forking after the DAO hack increase trust? Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract?

Now it's established that there's a chance a contract can be "too big to fail".

I think it would have built more trust if they had let the money go. To paraphrase a saying, they would have spent 15% of ETH on training everyone to build safe contracts, and to vet contracts properly before "investing" in one.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#15

Post by wyager »

mistermumble wrote: post #5

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum". The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company…

Not sure how anyone could trust it after they reversed a perfectly legitimate transaction.

The whole pitch of ethereum was that it was supposed to be an objective platform, free of human bias, to execute contracts. "The code is the law", they said.

Of course, that was a big fat lie; someone made a shitty contract with a loophole in it. When someone took advantage of that loophole, the devs said "uh, just kidding" and reversed the whole thing.

If I wanted a contract system where humans were able to void contracts, I would use the traditional legal contract system. Ethereum no longer has any advantage.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#16

Post by nunyabuizness »

drcode wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #9

The only reason there was a hard fork was because it was Buterin's company that got ripped off. If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money. As for "The DAO", the biggest question on their forum is "How do I get out?"[1] Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money. [1] https://forum.daohub.org/

You are spreading misinformation: It's true some employees at the ethereum foundation had personal money invested in the DAO. Vitalik himself had a small amount invested as well. However, the Ethereum Foundation was not involved with the DAO. > If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money This is idle speculation, and I personally don't think that's true. > Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to…

> It's true some employees at the ethereum foundation had personal money invested in the DAO. Vitalik himself had a small amount invested as well. However, the Ethereum Foundation was not involved with the DAO.

The Foundation itself may not have been invested, but many of the members and core contributors were (Gavin Wood, core contributor of the Rust implementation, was rumored to have over $100k in DAO tokens).

> neither the creators of the DAO, nor the Ethereum foundation has kept any money that was lost in this unfortunate incident.

The hard fork, by definition, allowed everyone to keep what would have been lost.

And it wasn't an "unfortunate incident", it was a publicly stated inevitability, advertised not only by the platform (with the words "unstoppable code" on the home page) but by the authors of the DAO themselves ("Any and all explanatory terms or descriptions are merely offered for educational purposes and do not supercede or modify the express terms of The DAO’s code set forth on the blockchain;").

I didn't agree with the fork, and I choose to follow the majority of miners anyway because I still believe in Ethereum, but quit trying to rewrite history.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#17

Post by id122015 »

I started to read about Ethereum and installed the Wallet but I dont understand why the blockchain size increases so big and how fast ?

It downloaded 500MB on my SSD and I stopped it, I've read that it has to download about 15GB. Thats too much for me. Do the other projects download such big blockchains also ? I mean 15GB for each project ?

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#18

Post by drcode »

deegles wrote: post #14
mistermumble wrote: post #5

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum". The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company…

How did hard forking after the DAO hack increase trust? Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract? Now it's established that there's a chance a contract can be "too big to fail". I think it would have built more trust if they had let the money go. To paraphrase a saying, they would have spent 15% of ETH on training everyone to build safe contracts, and to vet contr…

> Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract?

If you hold this view you're going to be very unhappy with the many innovations we'll see in the blockchain space in the coming years: Almost every technology in the future is going to put the desires of the community ahead of any specific piece of code- Computer code is a tool, not the final decision maker.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#19

Post by drcode »

wyager wrote: post #15
mistermumble wrote: post #5

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum". The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company…

Not sure how anyone could trust it after they reversed a perfectly legitimate transaction. The whole pitch of ethereum was that it was supposed to be an objective platform, free of human bias, to execute contracts. "The code is the law", they said. Of course, that was a big fat lie; someone made a shitty contract with a loophole in it. When someone took advantage of that loophole, the devs said "uh, just kidding" and…

> "The code is the law", they said.

And the law can change if the community deems it wise.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#20

Post by nunyabuizness »

heliumcraft wrote: post #12
Animats wrote: post #9

The only reason there was a hard fork was because it was Buterin's company that got ripped off. If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money. As for "The DAO", the biggest question on their forum is "How do I get out?"[1] Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money. [1] https://forum.daohub.org/

First of all the DAO was a decentralized organisation, it didn't belong to Buterin, it isn't "Buterin's company"... The hard fork had a lot more to do with the fact the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor. There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen…

> the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor

The author of Casper, Vlad Zamfir, clearly stated on numerous occasions on Reddit that there was no risk to PoS b/c of the hack.

> There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen money to their original owners

That's a really nice way of phrasing "we have a moral right to help gamblers recoup their losses."

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