What does $100 Ether mean?

> By all and any standards, this is a success beyond anything dreamt of when the project started

I doubt this is true. When Bitcoin came out I think a lot of people realized a whole new game was afoot. An autonomous ledger was demonstrated and the race was on to create the autonomous everything else. An autonomous application host was the obvious brass ring, and whoever got it seemed assured to spark a market at least as big as Bitcoin.

I can't imagine Vitalik was thinking anything other than "if this works, it will be huge." That's a big if, but I think the stakes were clear.

In what way is a voluntary network of independent miners a central authority?

> 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 lose the millions of dollars as the DAO did after it passed audits.

While others have pointed out that this is wrong, it's worth amplifying: Turing machines are deterministic. You can run the contract locally and observe how it behaves, and it will behave the same way in the same environment elsewhere. If this wasn't the case, you couldn't have consensus at all.

> 2. Competing implementations of consensus code in different languages greatly increases breakdown of consensus. (more millions have been lost over this, and it created a fork at about 10 percent the value of the old chain.)

The DAO hard fork had nothing to do with a consensus failure. There's been one single short-lived mainnet fork due to a consensus issue, which was quickly resolved with - to the best of my knowledge - no financial loss.

> This comment is simply incorrect. The gas limits do make smart contracts decidable. It is a mathematical fact.

This line of reasoning does not help me write better code, and does not address the parent's concerns. Using this argument, I can say that every single program I will ever run in my lifetime is also decidable, since eventually the computer I'm using to run it will stop working. This of course does not mean that I will write bug-free code, nor does it mean that I will write code that is feasible to prove correct.

What I want is a decidable programming language where it is always feasible to reason about the smart contract's halting states for arbitrary input. Bitcoin and its derivatives let me do this. Ethereum does not.

The top 5 ETH pools control about 75% of the hash rate. Buterin (for whom I have lots of respect) and others have routinely commented that centralization is a problem in both PoW and PoS systems. In both systems, the problem is "the rich get richer" (as PoW is essentially "proof of stake" in the form of expensive hardware and electricity).

But more to the point, look at what happened with ETH and ETC. The Ethereum Foundation could have decided to hard fork without any particular % of support. Consensus was needed for price support, not to complete the fork. Let's say they forked with only 25% support. The new fork retains the ETH brand. The old chain rebrands (i.e. ETC). The market then votes on how much they value the old versus the new. Now look at ETH/ETC since the fork: the market is saying that they feel more comfortable with a known, trusted authority (i.e. small group of developers with trademarks and a conference schedule) than they do with true democratized first principles of immutable code. I'm not a righteous zealot, I agree with what ETH did and would have done the same thing; I am just calling it out for what it is.

Humans love to collect, horde, and trade items: puka shells, tulips, dot com stocks. Speculation is hard-wired into the human DNA. At some points, asset prices become hopelessly disconnected from the value and utility of the underlying asset. I think the initial rush into crypto was healthy because it funded (and continues to fund) hundreds of full-time researchers who can push the field forward. But at some point the speculative fever becomes a disease that can hurt more than it helps. The sooner we develop real-world applications based on public blockchains as an anchor-point to reality, the better.