Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

blockgeeks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#21

Post by komaromy »

kefka wrote: post #17
devmpk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real story of what happened during the DAO to me seemed like fast, responsive, and intelligent leadership. They had a problem, they asked the community how they would like it dealt with, and acted accordingly. Saying the founders were losing too much money so they hard forked it is a gross misrepresentation of the reality. It's like a Fox News representation of what actually happened.

It's completely the wrong way to handle this. To me, this "currency" is dead. There is no trust, other than if the creators lose more money on a venture, they'll "convince" the community to reverse it. I remember reading and playing around with it when it came out. It was raw, bare, and frankly awesome. The base tenant was that: "The Contract is the Code, and the Code is the Contract." It was a programmers no-man's l…

> 2/3's of the total amount was owned by Ethdevs

Source?

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#22

Post by [deleted] »

kefka wrote: post #3

And remember, that there's a special function called VIP() . This is an implied function that wraps around your full code. This is instantiated if/when core founders are losing money on a function that possibly had a bug in it. This function returns the wrapped function, under the guise of a new blockchain, with invalidations applied to all 'unintentional' side effects of bad or buggy code. It happened with the DAO,…

[deleted]

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#23

Post by gricardo99 »

kefka wrote: post #3

And remember, that there's a special function called VIP() . This is an implied function that wraps around your full code. This is instantiated if/when core founders are losing money on a function that possibly had a bug in it. This function returns the wrapped function, under the guise of a new blockchain, with invalidations applied to all 'unintentional' side effects of bad or buggy code. It happened with the DAO,…

Just replace "code" with "valuable resource", and "founders" with "interested actors", and your comment is much more broadly applicable, if not universal.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#24

Post by kefka »

komaromy wrote: post #21
kefka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely the wrong way to handle this. To me, this "currency" is dead. There is no trust, other than if the creators lose more money on a venture, they'll "convince" the community to reverse it. I remember reading and playing around with it when it came out. It was raw, bare, and frankly awesome. The base tenant was that: "The Contract is the Code, and the Code is the Contract." It was a programmers no-man's l…

> 2/3's of the total amount was owned by Ethdevs Source?

I was in the irc room during that time. It was the number batted around by ethdevs in freenode #ethereum.

Regardless, the very people who build the protocol, application stack, and seed blockchain machines were also the ones who had massive stockpiles of eth from the auction... You do remember the auction, right?

They had absolute fiduciary reason to undo their losses.

Edit: And in all honesty, this would be compute-expensive, but the nature of the blockchain would be able to tell how much ethcoin came from before the auction rather easily. After all, a blockchain is just a append-only distributed ledger. Well, we did know the transactions, but you'd likely have to go to Ethereum Classic and replay what addresses put money in.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#25

Post by kej »

zeven7 wrote: post #13
jameskegel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this turns me off to the entire tech, no matter how stupid and kneejerk that sounds. If the biggest draw to get me using your technology (immutable contracts) is actually not true, then I'm less inclined to give it a shot outside of novelty value.

Unfortunately it's not an honest portrayal of events. Disclaimer: I was a DAO investor. The DAO held 5% of my Ether at the time of the attack. Having said that, it's not as simple as saying: I support the DAO refund because it was in my best interest. That doesn't necessarily follow, and it didn't necessarily follow for most of the other DAO investors. I still held 95% of my crypto $ in Ether. I would have been happy…

Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that what happened with the DAO was "theft".

All the publicity for the DAO explicitly said that the code was the full specification of the contract even if it disagreed with any other statements, and the code allowed someone to transfer the funds to their own child DAO. What crime, exactly, are you accusing them of committing when everyone agreed to a contract that allowed them to do what they did? How do I know using another contract won't be labeled theft and rolled back?

> Most of the market agrees with this decision.

This is exactly the problem. Ethereum would have been interesting if it could enforce unpopular decisions because they're specified in the code and them's the rules. Instead it will enforce them as long as there's not too much public outcry. No thanks.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#27

Post by jhildings »

kej wrote: post #10
flomble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Solidity contracts can run on Ethereum Classic, which you can be confident won't be forked since its users tend to believe in the principle of the immutability of the code.

The classic branch is still susceptible to the same problem, though. They didn't fork because of the DAO, but who's to say they won't fork because they don't like the result of a different contract? If I'm going to trust the enforceability of my contract to some group of people, I trust the established legal system--warts and all--much more than the mob rule of the Ethereum crowd.

>much more than the mob rule of the Ethereum crowd.

Also known as "miner consensus", same for all crypto currencies including btc

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#28

Post by otoburb »

PetrolMan wrote: post #9
otoburb wrote: post #5

One of the main Ethereum co-founders is working on a new experimental contract language targeting the Ethereum Virtual Machine called Viper which still seems to be under relatively active development[1]. Why pick Solidity if Viper and other languages like Low-level Lisp-like Language (LLL) by Consensys[2] are around the corner? Or is this just a matter of language flavour similar to how anybody can pick from a pletho…

Viper is not completed, and it might never be completed. Solidity is here now, and the demand for Solidity developers is growing by the hour.

>>[...] it might never be completed.*

"Complete" is certainly in the eyes of the beholder, but Viper's author seems to think the language is "complete enough" to have started writing Ethereum's new Proof-of-Work/Proof-Of-Stake hybrid system (aka Casper contracts[1]) in Viper[2][3].

[1] https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-stake-vitalik-buterin-share...

[2] https://ethereumclassic.github.io/blog/2017-03-13-viper/

[3] https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/README.md

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#29

Post by splintercell »

kej wrote: post #25
zeven7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it's not an honest portrayal of events. Disclaimer: I was a DAO investor. The DAO held 5% of my Ether at the time of the attack. Having said that, it's not as simple as saying: I support the DAO refund because it was in my best interest. That doesn't necessarily follow, and it didn't necessarily follow for most of the other DAO investors. I still held 95% of my crypto $ in Ether. I would have been happy…

Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that what happened with the DAO was "theft". All the publicity for the DAO explicitly said that the code was the full specification of the contract even if it disagreed with any other statements, and the code allowed someone to transfer the funds to their own child DAO. What crime, exactly, are you accusing them of committing when everyone agreed to a contract that allowe…

Your two points:

> What crime, exactly, are you accusing them of committing when everyone agreed to a contract that allowed them to do what they did?

And

> How do I know using another contract won't be labeled theft and rolled back?

What the DAO hack revealed is the following fact, which I learned over the past year:

That there are two kinds of cryptocurrency holders, one group demands immutability at any cost, the other group demands 'reasonable immutability'.

The reason why ETH/ETC split was 90/10 because majority of the Ethereum holders fall in the second group, and majority of the people who fall in the first group holding nothing but bitcoins.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#30

Post by kefka »

kej wrote: post #25
zeven7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it's not an honest portrayal of events. Disclaimer: I was a DAO investor. The DAO held 5% of my Ether at the time of the attack. Having said that, it's not as simple as saying: I support the DAO refund because it was in my best interest. That doesn't necessarily follow, and it didn't necessarily follow for most of the other DAO investors. I still held 95% of my crypto $ in Ether. I would have been happy…

Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that what happened with the DAO was "theft". All the publicity for the DAO explicitly said that the code was the full specification of the contract even if it disagreed with any other statements, and the code allowed someone to transfer the funds to their own child DAO. What crime, exactly, are you accusing them of committing when everyone agreed to a contract that allowe…

> Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that what happened with the DAO was "theft".

So did the Ethereum Devs, who owned a bulk of coin from the initial auction. And they just so happened to also control development of the protocol AND the client programs. This was the message they "asked" users... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Et...

"....IN WHICH FUNDS RELATED TO THE EXPLOIT ARE RESTORED...."

Consensus is nice, especially when you can manufacture it. Noam Chomsky talks about this in great detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU

Chomsky: "The first place to look is, who's in a position to make the decisions that determines the way a society functions."

Post reply on HN