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Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

ethereum.org

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that, if the transaction is rejected, then no fees are awarded -- I could be wrong though.

yeah, I'm thinking that if that is the case, it would allow you to create a "spike" contract, a highly funded contract designed to use a lot of miner resources until it inevitably fails. then you could send out transactions to this contract which would cause it to execute and fuck with all the other miners, where you just ignore it because you know it will fail. Maybe the cost for computation makes this unreasonable…

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Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#52

Note that Bitcoin is purposefully not turing complete. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/17258/turing-comp...

I don't really see any reason why it couldn't be Turing complete, as long as it was completely deterministic (no "rand()" etc) and the specification included a maximum number of operations (which Bitcoin's Script already does)

What am I missing? Is the idea that without loops the transaction size can be used to estimate the computation required without actually performing it, and thus the appropriately sized transaction fee required?

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#54

Ripple is also working on the same thing and is supposedly releasing them "soon": https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts

Unfortunately, Ripple is a worst-case example of pre-mining. I would really hate to see it take off.

Fair enough, although their technology can be appreciated separately from the pre-mine. Anyone can fork it and do a purely mined version.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#55
post #37

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"

Though another spelling of that is "aether" (I think this is more common than "ether").

Ethers are also a group of rather common organical compounds in chemistry. This is the page Wikipedia gives you when searching "Ether", as gateway allures to. Apparently, a specific compound of those (diethyl ether) can be used as a drug. Seems rather unlikely to me that people would connect the name to the drug first.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#56
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have the text for the dagger page?

The dagger page is cached by google here. Note that this is from 29 Dec and has probably been significantly updated since. But here it is for what it's worth:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0RAOB-M...

I don't see anything regarding compute rewards here. It's all about the mining PoW. If all nodes are validating the Turing-complete scripts, and only the miners are getting paid, how does that work? What am I missing?

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#57
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a distributed block chain right? And each fully validating node needs to validate each of the scripts, right? So every full node on the network is replicating every single computation. But only the miners are getting paid.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#58
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, the mine pool operator has to, but no more than once to cover every miner in his pool. To draw a comparison to bitcoin, there might only be a dozen or so pool entities which receive nearly all of the subsidy and transaction fees, but thousands of non-mining full nodes.

Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency

#59

The page doesn't say who is behind it, but the wiki is edited by user "vbuterin". So maybe it's Vitalik Buterin, one of the more interesting cryptocurrency thinkers out there. Hmm. http://about.me/vitalik_buterin

Also, the subreddit /r/ethereum is modded by and features a welcome post by "vbuterin".
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