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What Is Ethereum?

whatthefuckisethereum.com

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Re: What Is Ethereum?

#61

Post by joeyspn »

MichaelGG wrote: post #47
joeyspn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not until Nicki Minaj or Drake appear in a music video with a bitcoin necklace...

Certainly makes it easy to have a high-density, high-value object - much more dense than casino chips. Put the only copy of a wallet with tons of BTC on a microSD. Fun marketing gimmick, too. Put $100 worth on a bunch of micro SDs, spray 'em gold, toss em out at concerts or stuff. Would totally get headlines if someone put $1M worth on an SD, then laughed and ate it live on TV and said good luck finding it. Or tossed…

Ever heard about Casascius coins? Gold + BTC... there are physical coins with 1k BTC (~$2.5M) inside

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Casascius_physical_bitcoins

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#62

Post by omarchowdhury »

nullc wrote: post #39
mikenew wrote: post #26

There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…

> There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. Yep. Unfortunately the creators of Ethereum marketed it heavily as a "world computer" on promotional roadshows, claiming it would replace Facebook and whatnot. Perhaps more interesting is that, in my view, Ethereum has it wrong: re-executing computati…

I'm curious to know what roadshows the Ethereum people were marketing in?

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#63

Post by omarchowdhury »

mrb wrote: post #48
mikenew wrote: post #26

There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…

" using something called gas " gas is ETH. It is simply a term they chose to refer to the ETH fee paid to execute the code. I don't like their terminology. Calling it "gas" make it sound like it's a different currency. They should have just call it the "ETH fee".

Yeah. Gas, wei. They need it to KISS.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#64

Post by RexetBlell »

MichaelGG wrote: post #57
RexetBlell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do more intense computation, https://truebit.io/ has a cool solution. It's exactly what you said, it allows you to pay someone to do the computation for you and publish the result to the contract. After the result was published, anyone can verify that it's correct by re-running the computation. If the published result is not correct, you can interactively prove this to the smart contract because the sm…

I only looked at it briefly. Very cool idea: Is it practical for heavy compute jobs though? Suppose a rendering takes 10 hours. If I don't know where the bug/difference is and just binary-search it, then they have to run at least 5 hours of computation to verify (out of the 2^^48 instructions, I'll start by asking for the 2^47th step). I guess that's solvable by requiring payment for verification runs and just splitt…

Yes, I think splitting up the work is a good idea.

The authors already thought about how to incentivize verification runs. It's really cool. Check out this informative podcast with some of the team members: https://youtu.be/QY0OUTaIWIc

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#65

Post by amadeuspzs »

Hats off to attempting to explain a deeply technical topic to a variety of audiences, acknowledging different learner needs. A lot of posters here would probably benefit from taking a humanistic approach to explaining what they do to non-hacker news readers!

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#66

Post by RexetBlell »

MichaelGG wrote: post #47
joeyspn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not until Nicki Minaj or Drake appear in a music video with a bitcoin necklace...

Certainly makes it easy to have a high-density, high-value object - much more dense than casino chips. Put the only copy of a wallet with tons of BTC on a microSD. Fun marketing gimmick, too. Put $100 worth on a bunch of micro SDs, spray 'em gold, toss em out at concerts or stuff. Would totally get headlines if someone put $1M worth on an SD, then laughed and ate it live on TV and said good luck finding it. Or tossed…

You could get one of those Ether cards (https://ether.cards/) and put $1M worth on it.

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#67

Post by accountyaccount »

mikenew wrote: post #26

There's one point in particular that took me a while to grasp: while you can write code that runs on the Ethereum network, every single node has to process that code. So if, for example, you had a big 3d animation sequence that you wanted to have rendered, you would not just send that code off to the network to be processed. You would have to pay to have every single person on the network process that job for you, an…

How does one prove they did it "right"?

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#68

Post by [deleted] »

blunte wrote: post #55
aqsheehy wrote: post #32

A framework for creating ponzis

I'm sure you're only partly joking, but sadly it does seem to be one of the biggest first uses. Oh and lotteries - those are popular. On the other hand, people will continue to run ponzi schemes as long as there are greedy/ignorant people to attract, so it might as well be done all visibly. At least then the guy running the ponzi can't just tell everyone "sorry, feds raided the bank, all the money is gone" when he ac…

[deleted]

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#69

Post by rspeer »

RexetBlell wrote: post #49
joe_the_user wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting; The document mentions creating a crop-insurance application that would depend on a weather feed. The problem is if the weather feed isn't something that's uniformly secureable the result could be bad given that the insurance application would take action automatically and no appeal to any higher authority concerning the fraud would be possible - without a "fork" as happened earlier. Hack an insecure feed…

The weather feed can provided by several oracles, and the contract can take the median value. You could program whatever logic you want into the insurance. For example, some kind of dispute resolution system that appeals to a higher authority. How do insurance companies deal with this problem today? Why do you trust the insurance company not to lie and say that the weather was fine? Whatever that mechanism is, it can…

> How do insurance companies deal with this problem today?

The legal system. It can put people in jail for fraud if necessary.

Do you really want "smart" "contracts" to have the power to put people in jail? Really?

Re: What Is Ethereum?

#70

Post by allsunny »

dialupmodem wrote: post #14

So tired of seeing blockchain, machine learning, and JS in hte news. Things like Ethereum and even Bitcoin are 100% hype, "what if", and are nothing more than dreams. Last century gave us things like the personal computer, the internet, and so on. What about this one? Fancier webpages? Selfies? Tweets? All of this blockchain and cryptocurrency and JS hype is tiresome to see. What happened to making real stuff that wo…

and get off my lawn! :-)
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