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Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

ethereum.org

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Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#31

Post by kordless »

fragsworth wrote: post #25
benhamner wrote: post #14

Text content: http://pastebin.com/NCGRv74u (Saw comments that the site went down and still had it loaded on my machine)

I'm still trying to understand how the whole system works. It appears to be groundbreaking but I'm not really sure. The last sentence in the document should catch your interest: "As a result, we have a cryptocurrency protocol whose codebase is very small, and yet which can do anything that any cryptocurrency will ever be able to do."

Denomination is a wei. Weis are tied to compute jobs, basically. It's a distributed computing network/server with built-in trust. Holy shit.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#32

Post by gatehouse »

Trying to figure out a couple things (from pastebin link):

1. What protection against non-halting?

contracts are "funded" upon creation, and by those who issue transactions to the contract. if there are specific fees required by the contract to perform an action, it must be enforced by the contract itself. the cost of computation will eventually exhaust the contract's funding it fails.

2. what are the long-term economics? (i.e. is coin supply unlimited or limited and at what rate of decay)

    line 90
- planned fundraising period with issuance of 10000 ether per BTC contributed

- other coins will be issued so the initial money supply is 15000 times the contributed BTC amount, with 0.25x (i.e. 16.67%) to the founders, same amount to fund the Etherium organization. Division of BTC not specified.

- the mining reward will be 1/3 of the initial supply, per year, perpetually (i.e. 1/2 the contributor's reward.) So the money supply increases linearly.

3. if a person's only goal was to use the blockchain to store data, what would be cost per byte, and is there a max rate?

    line 385 to 399
- A contract is "funded" when it is created, and the computation performed by the contract consumes the funds.

- storage of a "data item" in contract memory costs 100x where x = floor(10^21 / floor(difficulty ^ 0.5))

- don't see the limit/cost of data items bound to transactions as per transaction definition on line 133

anyway it takes courage to name a currency after a drug like ether.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#33

Post by fragsworth »

nullc wrote: post #26
bgwhn wrote: post #5

I think the clever idea here (IMO) are the fees. An argument against implementing a Turing complete language inside Bitcoin or an Altcoin might be that it's hard to determine when execution should end. The fees allow arbitrarily complex constructs without any hard cap, while preventing abuse.

Except it pays the wrong people. In Bitcoin, at least, miners are kept honest by other people running nodes that limit what miners can do. In this protocol the validation would become very expensive but only the miners are paid. This sounds like trouble.

Don't all the miners have to run the entire program, so they are validating each other?

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#34

Post by kordless »

maaku wrote: post #17
jaekwon wrote: post #12

I don't understand who does all the turing complete contract computation. Presumably the miners, but they're paid to do some useless proof-of-work work, not the turning complete computation of the contract.

The fee goes to the miner who happens to find the containing block, yes. But not to the thousands of validating nodes integral to the network. And over time fees are given proportional to hashpower... which doesn't make any kind of sense. The incentives are all messed up.

There aren't thousands of validating nodes. All nodes are computing on jobs in the system. The incentive is you get paid for processing code for someone. It's a trusted cloud framework with payment built in. The Dagger page is down. That'll have the detail on the rewards details for compute.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#35

Post by kordless »

nullc wrote: post #27
kordless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This allows for the implementation of a completely distributed trading platform.

No it doesn't. Or rather— it's not necessary or sufficient: you can already trade distributed cryptocoins, and no amount of cryptocoin magic can completely distribute USD or other non-cryptocoin assets because their differential counterparty risk makes every promise different.

You need a central agency ATM for trading coin. Those guys have to run wallets and do the transactions in non-trusted space. This skips that.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#37

Post by Geee »

gatehouse wrote: post #32

Trying to figure out a couple things (from pastebin link): 1. What protection against non-halting? contracts are "funded" upon creation, and by those who issue transactions to the contract. if there are specific fees required by the contract to perform an action, it must be enforced by the contract itself. the cost of computation will eventually exhaust the contract's funding it fails. 2. what are the long-term econo…

I don't think anyone associates ether with a drug first.

From Thesaurus: "ether - the fifth and highest element after air and earth and fire and water; was believed to be the substance composing all heavenly bodies"

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#39

Post by kordless »

kordless wrote: post #35
nullc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Or rather— it's not necessary or sufficient: you can already trade distributed cryptocoins, and no amount of cryptocoin magic can completely distribute USD or other non-cryptocoin assets because their differential counterparty risk makes every promise different.

You need a central agency ATM for trading coin. Those guys have to run wallets and do the transactions in non-trusted space. This skips that.

> 6) A full-scale on-chain stock market. Prediction markets are also easy to implement as a trivial consequence."

Line 283 of http://pastebin.com/NCGRv74u

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#40

Post by kordless »

Geee wrote: post #37
gatehouse wrote: post #32

Trying to figure out a couple things (from pastebin link): 1. What protection against non-halting? contracts are "funded" upon creation, and by those who issue transactions to the contract. if there are specific fees required by the contract to perform an action, it must be enforced by the contract itself. the cost of computation will eventually exhaust the contract's funding it fails. 2. what are the long-term econo…

I don't think anyone associates ether with a drug first. From Thesaurus: "ether - the fifth and highest element after air and earth and fire and water; was believed to be the substance composing all heavenly bodies"

"composing all heavenly bodies"

Perfect name.

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