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What does $100 Ether mean?

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Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#71

Post by nicksdjohnson »

nugget wrote: post #66
nicksdjohnson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And my point was that if you look at ETH/ETC, 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. But the fork wasn't a referendum on the governance model of Ethereum. If you picked ETC, you get your liberterian utopia - but you also get…

Pre-fork ETH owners didn't necessarily have to pick one over the other. Miners had to allocate their resources between the two chains (but could split their bets, and some did so). Pre-fork ETH owners ended up with both chains in a kind of 2-for-1 special. Every market transaction since then has been a referendum on which model the market prefers. Ultimately, the market price dictates a LOT of down-stream behaviors,…

But that's completely beside the point: the point is that you can't have the libertarian-utopia-chain without also getting the hacker-got-away-with-his-loot chain.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#73

Post by makomk »

benchaney wrote: post #42
RichardHeart wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The naïve Ethereum people think they've cleverly sidestepped this with the notion of "gas" but actually all they're doing is cheating with this messy kludge: because simply saying "we'll arbitrarily make the program stop running at some point" does not make "smart contracts" written in Ethereum "decidable" - as we've seen, these contracts can still blow up / go wrong in other ways before they run out of gas." https:…

This comment is simply incorrect. The gas limits do make smart contracts decidable. It is a mathematical fact. Bringing the idea that things have gone wrong with Ethereum as proof to the contrary is completely absurd. Things have also gone wrong with Bitcoin [1]. Is it undecidable now too? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

Indeed. All you have to do is test every possible input, in much the same way that any computation on a real computer is technically decidable because the limited amount of RAM means that it can only have a finite number of states. Neither of those limits actually makes solving the problem feasible in practice.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#74

Post by nexus9 »

If you're wondering why there is so much negativity toward Ethereum on Hacker News, the answer is likely to be 1 of 7 things. The individual making the remark is 1) brainwashed by the Bitcoin or Altcoin propaganda machine, 2) trying to prop up their personal crypto portfolio, 3) a shill and/or troll paid to astroturf social media, 4) bitter or jealous for not getting in at the beginning, 5) afraid of Ethereum and what it might do to their industry or career, 6) angry that their existing skillset will be devalued or obsoleted by decentralized technologies, and/or 7) largely ignorant.

Honestly, the criticism I read on these threads just reeks of desperation and stupidity. The same misinformed talking points are repeated over and over again, continuing a kind of misguided and most likely financially-motivated crusade against Ethereum. The Hacker News community has been at it for over 2 years now. And yet, Ethereum continues to prove itself. It continues to innovate and grow. It continues to attract more users, penetrate new markets, and realize its vision for a more decentralized internet. It's starting to look more and more like the so-called skeptics on here are just too arrogant to admit they were wrong, too disdainful to simply give the Ethereum project the credit it deserves and just too pretentious to recognize they don't know what they're even talking about. Seriously - get over yourself.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#75

Post by djtriptych »

leashless wrote: post #48
djtriptych wrote: post #6

This guy Vinay Gupta really has a gift for writing about technology. Lots of clear technical concepts without resorting to jargon, bright syntax and style, and never pedantic.

Thank you! Much practice. I am old (45)

I'm getting old (36) but I don't write about tech enough. Time to start a blog :)

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#76

Post by jude- »

nicksdjohnson wrote: post #64
jude- wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure it does - the marvelous thing about a turing-complete virtual machine is that you can write a decidable language that compiles to EVM bytecode.

Sorry, I didn't qualify "always feasible" well enough. What I meant was, I want it to be feasible to reason about the halting states of every single smart-contract that will ever interact with my code. Not just the ones that I write, but also the ones that are reachable from my smart contract's call graph, and the ones that call into my smart contract.

If I can do this, then I can feasibly reason about how my code will react to other peoples' inputs (e.g. I can prove the absence of DAO-like re-entrance bugs). The fact that Ethereum allows smart contracts to be written in undecidable languages means that this is not feasible in practice.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#77

Post by jude- »

nicksdjohnson wrote: post #55
RichardHeart wrote: post #2

I think it means a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money than $1 Ether would have meant. 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 l…

> 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 t…

> 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.

"Deterministic" != "feasible to reason about halting states for all inputs." Running it locally to see how it behaves for a handful of inputs is definitely not sufficient for claiming that the code behaves correctly (i.e. is "secure").

Recall that people lost money in the DAO not because they didn't test how the DAO behaved when they sent their Ether to it. They lost money because someone discovered the contract as implemented did not behave the way it was expected and advertised to behave. Had it been possible to reason about the DAO's halting states for all possible inputs, the re-entrance bug would have been caught and fixed before the DAO was released.

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#78

Post by nmca »

jude- wrote: post #77
nicksdjohnson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. "Deterministic" != "feasible to reason about halting states for all inputs." Running it locally to see how it behaves for…

Formal analysis will help sort this out. Larry Paulson trained up these guys: https://www.imandra.ai/

And similar tech can be applied to smart contracts. Would have spotted the DAO bug. Not ready for prime time yet, but will be around the same time as sharding maybe...

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#79

Post by nicksdjohnson »

jude- wrote: post #76
nicksdjohnson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does - the marvelous thing about a turing-complete virtual machine is that you can write a decidable language that compiles to EVM bytecode.

Sorry, I didn't qualify "always feasible" well enough. What I meant was, I want it to be feasible to reason about the halting states of every single smart-contract that will ever interact with my code. Not just the ones that I write, but also the ones that are reachable from my smart contract's call graph, and the ones that call into my smart contract. If I can do this, then I can feasibly reason about how my code wi…

I don't think I follow - why would you need to reason about your callers' internal states in order to prove properties about your own contract?

Re: What does $100 Ether mean?

#80

Post by Jenya_ »

RichardHeart wrote: post #2

I think it means a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money than $1 Ether would have meant. 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 l…

Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) and his tweet about Turing completeness (now I only need to understand what a "rich statefulness" is):

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/854271590804140033

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