Live data from Hacker News

What does $100 Ether mean?

medium.com

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#21
post #11

I think it means a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money than $1 Ether would have meant. 1. The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you l…

I routinely pay for things with ethereum - and if the target only accepts btc, then I can just shapeshift. The "Halting Problem" is a red herring here - eth transactions are technically not Turing complete since they automatically halt when they run out of the finite supply of ether attached to the transaction. Saying that ethereum isn't feasible because of the halting problem is like saying cars aren't feasible beca…

Here (and when I see people generally using the term) is the meaning of "shapeshift" simply that you go to shapeshift.io and exchange from one cryptocurrency to another?

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#23
post #12

They forgot the feature where if a smart contract doesn't go the way they want it, they create a default-opt-in hard fork of the currency. Sorry if I don't trust the "small group of legends" more than the government.

Was this around The DAO? Any good reading on it?

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#24
Bitcoin has had several drastic price corrections in its life. We are yet to see this from Ether. I suspect the fall will be greater if it starts >$100.

Of course, we will look back on this in 5 years and think $100 ETHER was cheap!

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#25

I think it means a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money than $1 Ether would have meant. 1. The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you l…

> The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you lose the millions of dollars as the DAO did after it passed audits. The Halting Problem states that yo…

"The naïve Ethereum people think they've cleverly sidestepped this with the notion of "gas" but actually all they're doing is cheating with this messy kludge: because simply saying "we'll arbitrarily make the program stop running at some point" does not make "smart contracts" written in Ethereum "decidable" - as we've seen, these contracts can still blow up / go wrong in other ways before they run out of gas." https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4p0gq3/why_turingcompl...

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#26
post #22

Should've bought more last year... way more. But I guess everyone says that now.

Hey, I knew about Bitcoin when it was $20.

You could buy now and dump it when it hits $900 - $1000. It will.

As far as I am concerned, the current iteration of *coin are just pump and dump basically.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#27
post #18
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Ethereum and Bitcoin both use proof of work (for now).

But does BTC randomly reward the miners like ETH does as being described in this post?

Both BTC and ETH don't actually reward randomly. Instead, everyone is just trying a large amount of 'solutions' until one works. The first to find and distribute such a solution is said to have 'mined' such a block and gets to add his reward into the record by modifying that block.

Because there is no way to know the true solution, everyone is just guessing so in the end it is random chance that determines who gets to mine a block, but those who spent more effort have proportionally more chance to win.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#28
post #7

I think it means a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money than $1 Ether would have meant. 1. The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you l…

"3. You can buy things with bitcoin. What can you buy with ETH? If you can't buy anything with a currency, it's not a currency." This is the one that really sticks out to me. What do people need any of this for? I think they did a fine job pitching the value of smart contract / blockchain technology. But why do I, or a bank, or society need anything beyond those? The tech may be useful, but what 99% of these discussi…

The main 'value' of ETH is in buying 'gas' for your smart contracts. Basically, you need ETH to use the Ethereum network.

So it makes more sense to view it as a commodity.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#29
The problem with smart contracts is that they are only 100% trustless as long as all the input data is already present on the blockchain.

Even something banally simple as "if such and such win the world cup deposit earnings there" cannot be 100% trustless. How does one overcome this problem?

I don't think smart contracts can overcome this problem while remaining 100% trustless.

Post reply on HN