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What Is Ethereum?

whatthefuckisethereum.com

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Re: What Is Ethereum?

#191

Post by djrtwo »

mikenew wrote: post #26

There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…

My article on costs in the ethereum network cover this idea. https://hackernoon.com/ether-purchase-power-df40a38c5a2f?sou...

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#192

Post by ksteigerwald »

mikenew wrote: post #26

There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…

This is what Golem aims to do... and it's built on ethereum.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#194

Post by mrb »

mbrock wrote: post #154
masklinn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds more like CPU clock cycles, may be confusing to those who see it that way? Having non-CPU cycles is extremely common in emulators and VMs, you can just say it's a "virtual cycle of the eth VM", something along those lines.

Gas doesn't only measure the computation resource but also memory and storage, so "cycles" too is an inaccurate metaphor.

Well "cycles" is good enough as a metaphor to convey the idea we are talking about a resource cost.

At least "cycles" and "ETH per cycles" makes it very obvious that you should multiply them to find the fee. On the other hand it's completely unintuitive you should multiply "price" and "cost" to calculate the fee. If gasCost was called gasQuantity, at least it would have been a little more logical (multiplying price with quantity).

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#195

Post by mrb »

tsukaisute wrote: post #132
mrb wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact the #1 comment on this HN submission refers to "something called gas" (as if it was an advanced concept) instead of "fee" is another data point showing the gas metaphor is confusing :) Also gas is not its own unit. gasPrice is the unit. Or... actually it's not even a unit. A "unit" implies a constant. But it's not constant since each tx can set its own gasPrice. The more I think about the cycles metaphor the…

Gas is its own unit, decoupled from ETH. Opcodes cost a certain amount of gas to execute [1]. When creating a transaction, a sender sets the maximum amount of gas that they are willing to pay. This is the "gas limit." [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m89CVujrQe5LAFJ8-YAU...

I know what gas is. It would be more accurate to call it a unitless number describing the relative resource cost factor of each opcode.

If you define the term gas as a unit then it refers to both a value, and the unit of that value, which is where most of the confusion comes from. The language "1000 gas" could mean either "1000 wei/szabo/whatever of gas" or "1000 gasCost" which are 2 completely different things!

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#196

Post by Galaxeblaffer »

mikenew wrote: post #26

There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…

Check out https://golem.network or https://sonm.io they are making a world computer on ethereum

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#197

Post by bpicolo »

tech_man7 wrote: post #71
MichaelGG wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only looked at it briefly. Very cool idea: Is it practical for heavy compute jobs though? Suppose a rendering takes 10 hours. If I don't know where the bug/difference is and just binary-search it, then they have to run at least 5 hours of computation to verify (out of the 2^^48 instructions, I'll start by asking for the 2^47th step). I guess that's solvable by requiring payment for verification runs and just splitt…

For heavy compute, it's the Golem Network (golem.network)

What's the benefit over throwing it at a cloud provider?

There's an active downside of random people being able to see your data, not to mention randomly sized boxes and shoddy network connections (which is a big deal for the microservices which they are touting as a use case, and also for big data. Data transfer is one of the slowest bits of data science). Running a web service on random devices where keys, sessions, whatever end up in memory on some box would be a security nightmare. The government doesn't need a back door if all they need to do is host some compute nodes.

Is it just that for some tasks that are very parallel and not sensitive it might end up cheaper?

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