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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

#21

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."

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

#22

Post by drcode »

id122015 wrote: post #17

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 ?

Yes, this is an issue with ethereum. However:

1. Geth/Mist now supports a "light client" mode that requires much less storage and maintains most of the strong crypto guarantees.

2. Most of the size problem is due to the complexity in efficiently optimizing the serialized data, this will improve in the near future.

3. Ethereum is on the forefront of research into scalable blockchain technology, which has the potential to resolve this problem.

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

id122015 wrote: post #17

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 ?

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by heliumcraft »

id122015 wrote: post #17

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 ?

If you use a light client the actual size is around 30 MB and takes ~30 seconds. If by "each project" you mean ethereum projects, then no since they share the same chain.

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

#25

Post by tromp »

id122015 wrote: post #17

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 ?

Popular cryptocurrencies process many thousands of transactions per hour, and many wallets choose to retain a large fraction of that data. In which case a few years of operations easily yields dozens of GB of storage.

In theory though, through the magic of Merkle trees, a superlight client could get away with needing only a few KB of storage, accounting for the paths through the Merkle tree that witness its spendable outputs. A discussion about such a setup for Bitcoin can be found for instance at

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88208.msg1896213#msg...

I don't know of any crypto-currencies that have implemented these UTXO commitments that would allow for such wallets though...

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

#26

Post by drcode »

Animats wrote: post #13
drcode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I definitely agree that's unfortunate, but no specific entity is holding those funds, they are locked into the contract.

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

#27

Post by Klinky »

drcode wrote: post #19
wyager wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was pandering to big stakeholders. That's the problem with all cryptocurrencies, they don't solve big players having huge influence over the underlying currency. It is still very much a "who you know" and "how much profit is at stake" kind of game, which is one of the main reasons people hate state-run currencies. The little guys lose thier shirt and get a "too bad,so sad" response. A big player losses thier shirt and they go cry to thier dev friends who fix the boo boo with a fork. How about we fork on every compliant of someone making a mistake?

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

#28

Post by drcode »

nunyabuizness wrote: post #16
drcode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). > n…

I think you've written an accurate description of what happened, doesn't really conflict with my comment.

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

#29

Post by erikpukinskis »

riprowan wrote: post #4

This article veers between erroneous sensationalism and strategic deception. I will attempt to debunk a few of the most important errors in this article. In short, the author takes the position that the promise of blockchains is immutability; and that by hardforking, Ethereum proves that "immutability" requires trust: > We aren’t actually trusting the blockchain technology; we are trusting the people that support the…

> anyone can create a fork - though it takes hashpower to protect a fork from hashpower attack.

Minor aside, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum doesn't use hashpower (proof of work) as its voting currency, it uses proof of stake.

So in order to convince the network of a lie, you need to be willing to put up monetary bets against the truth, and then pay them.

This is very unlike Bitcoin, where you buy your mining rig, and then own it. If you pay to fork Ethereum, your real money is at stake.

And the financial incentive for people with even more money than you is to call your bluff and put up a bigger bet against your lie and get the cash and get your lie taken off the books.

Although they have the price structure set up so that calling a bluff is much cheaper than lying. So really even someone with a tenth of your budget can afford to call your bluff.

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

#30

Post by DennisP »

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 devs didn't reverse it by themselves. There were multiple independent client teams who all agreed to code the change, then they had to convince the community to run the altered software. Not all the official devs were even on board with the change, some stayed neutral, and some of the community refused the change so now we have both ETH and ETC.

So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only if you've done something so horrendous that you've pissed off a large majority of the entire community, and in that case you'll likely still have your valid transaction on a working chain, it's just that a lot of people will have gone elsewhere.

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