What Is Ethereum?

by songzme • 9 years ago

837 257 9 years ago

cslewis• 9 years ago

Few weeks ago I decided to spend a weekend to try to understand Ethereum. I found the whitepaper to be pretty instructive (it even helped me cement my understanding of bitcoin). Here is an annotated version of the whitepaper by vitalik:

http://fermatslibrary.com/s/ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...

revelation2• 9 years ago

This is drivel.

Protocols and decentralized applications around decentralized file storage, decentralized computation and decentralized prediction markets, among dozens of other such concepts, have the potential to substantially increase the efficiency of the computational industry, and provide a massive boost to other peer-to-peer protocols by adding for the first time an economic layer

nerdponx• 9 years ago

It's not necessarily drivel, it's just an unfounded assertion.

thatswrong0• 9 years ago

It's a bit silly to dismiss the whole thing because the cofounder is trying a little too hard to sell the technology.. it certainly doesn't mean the technological aspect of the paper is "drivel"

ChrisClark2• 9 years ago

At least each example in that sentence there already has one or more teams implementing it and actual working code you can run on top of Ethereum.

DennisP10• 9 years ago

File storage: Swarm, and several other file storage protocols getting integrated with Ethereum.

Computation: pretty much the whole point of the Ethereum VM, plus there are a couple projects that put proofs on the blockchain of larger computations than the blockchain can handle.

Prediction markets: Gnosis and Augur

Efficiency: at least developer efficiency, in my experience

Economic layer: because you have reliable currencies on the network, both ETH and roll-your-own.

It might sound like buzzwords but at this point it's all real code.

joe_the_user2• 9 years ago

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, an insecure site or whatever and viola, free money.

And this seems like a problem any interface with the "real world" would face. The idea of automatically occurring, no-appeal financial transactions sounds but I would claim it's always going to be problematic - only a fool or a crook would put their money in this kind of system and the crook only puts in enough money to remove the money of the fool.

The ideal of say, money, is it belongs to you, where you is a broad but understandable concept. Something that belong to "whoever has X, Y, Z pieces of information about you" may sound great until someone beside you gets that information and there is no recourse. Indeed, the person who had the information "did nothing wrong" if the account really, really did belong to "whoever has this information" rather than belonging to you.

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

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 be programmed into a smart contract.

blunte2• 9 years ago

This to me is one of the fundamental problems (or challenges) of smart contracts - they remove humans and human judgment from the core, but they just push it to the edges.

You still end up trusting a human - an "oracle". You trust the weather feed, or you trust some exchange to give you the accurate price of some other asset. If that oracle is mistaken (bug, intentional misinformation), the smart contract can be manipulated.

bitesports• 9 years ago

We're working on a decentralized dispute resolution mechanism to address that. You could add it into your smart contract, which would call our contract that has voting pools that make decisions when a dispute arises.

chrido• 9 years ago

An alternativ would be that the weather "oracle" has something on stake, e.g. if it lies or is hacked, it looses a deposit. But then it goes further, maybe you need a voting mechanism, or other weather "oracles" participating in the vote ... in the end you need to get it game theorically right to incentivise honest "oracles" and punish dishonest.

In general I see two really hard challenges with smart contracts. Getting them bug free (i think formal verification which is worked on will help a lot) and getting the incentives right to punish dishonest behavior. (So far I haven't seen a lot work being done here, I also don't know how you could automise that, maybe some kind of simulation with AI based actors)

joosters4• 9 years ago

Yes, the value of blockchains is in their 'trustlessness', however the moment you need to retrieve data from outside of the blockchain, you have to trust it. In which case, there's no point in using the blockchain at all.

prodtorok• 9 years ago

How important is the adoption of Solidity for Ethereum's success?

52-6F-622• 9 years ago

I've been reading a lot about Ethereum, and I am really interested in blockchain tech -- but I also wonder about this.

I am really curious as to whether it would be possible to develop new languages for the handling of smart contracts, or if it is possible to develop smart contracts (using a library or other resource) with existing, popular languages like c++, python, or javascript. I know web3 is already quite accessible and while I haven't looked at the source, it seems relatively easy to work with. But the core language for smart contracts... I think Eth would benefit from some flexibility on the development end. Or maybe I just don't know enough.

Anyway, I think that would be a big leap.

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

I know that Consensys (who is looking to hire hundreds of engineers https://consensys.net/open-positions/) is working on a special smart contract language that would be easy for lawyers to learn. The language compiles into EVM bytecode.

DennisP10• 9 years ago

There are several languages that compile to the EVM. Also there's a somewhat speculative project to transition to a restricted version of WASM, which would let languages like C and Rust be compiled into smart contracts on Ethereum.

Breefield5• 9 years ago

I made this website. I don't know the answer to your question. If you cruise down to "The Solc Compiler" on this page https://www.ethereum.org/greeter#cleaning-up-after-yourself, it seems you could potentially use other compilers to generate a Application Binary Interface.

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

I don't think it's very important. There are several other languages that can compile down to EVM bytecode. A cool one is Viper (https://github.com/ethereum/viper), which is NOT Turning complete, but decidable. This makes it easier to reason about the correctness of the code, and formally proving that your code is correct.

metroidfan832• 9 years ago

several? Really? Please link me other languages that compile to EVM bytecode.

merrickread• 9 years ago

Solidity is just the first try. I built a couple projects and ideas with it - found it to be a very uncomfortable language.

On the other hand you have Hyperledger, it's "contract" code is Go. Widely adopted language that was basically designed for networking efficiency.

kbody• 9 years ago

I'm quite surprised by the answers. The truth is that Ethereum's success comes from the seemingly ease of the Solidity. It made it possible to have a crazy amount of developer jump in.

As a Node.js developer, it was effortless to start coding with Solidity. But that's part of the problem; it seems so easy, but there are no safeguards and a lot of traps. That's why we get so many flawed contracts that were taken advantage of/hacked and ICOs delaying their distribution or processes because a bug was found.

90s cypherpunks that gave birth and worked on these ideas of smart-contract etc. saw the things a bit more responsibly, instead of development velocity on something that proves unsustainable even from a security perspective not to mention scalability-wise. Here is are some thoughts from one of the originals - Christopher Allen co-author of TLS standard.

I'm disappointed in the corruption of the term Smart Contracts. Bitcoin's Script, and in particular P2SH is a good start to them, but massive multiple execution of arbitrary code is not (aka IBM's Chain Code), and I would even argue that Ethereum's languages are not smart contracts either—just another chain code. I do agree that business logic is hard to do with Bitcoin's Script, but for all of us talking about Smart Contracts in the late '90's (Szaboian Smart Contracts?) we desired cryptographic composabilty, that the code could be analyzed at multiple levels to be secure (from language proofs to high level business logic atomic validation), limitable (i.e. expression complexity & evaluation cost can be determined) and could often just be validated by consensus of parties not every node in the world (which only at most need to see proof of execution, not the full contract). These would be true cryptographic Smart Contracts!

https://twitter.com/ChristopherA/status/715197498646593536

jamisteven3• 9 years ago

Can't trust ethereum or bitcoin for the same reason we can't trust the fed and their "quantitive easing": 1. It's way complicated 2. It's fiat 3. Nobody understand who really is in control of its value

mac01021• 9 years ago

What's wrong with fiat currency?

jamisteven3• 9 years ago

I think you meant to write intelligence and not ignorance.

jamisteven3• 9 years ago

Is this a serious question

Retra3• 9 years ago

If it weren't too complicated, then it would just as well be too simple. But really, you cannot measure the efficacy of a solution by measuring your own ignorance.

Cthulhu_2• 9 years ago

It's NOT fiat currency, it's a product that can be used to exchange funds, evade taxes, go around a country's poor economy, make a buck via day or long-term trading / investing, etc. It's an investment product; nobody uses it as fiat outside of dodgy darknet websites, and whatever webshop does accept it only does so to hold onto it for a while and hope the value increases.

There's too much inflation and uncertainty for it to be a fiat currency. I mean the value of BTC fluctuated 1000% in the span of just a couple of years.

notadoc• 9 years ago

Are we at the "mania" stage of cryptocurrency interest yet?

QML• 9 years ago

Pretty sure the majority of people don't know about cryptocurrency yet. On the other hand, less than 1% of Americans were invested in the stock market preceding the Great Depression..

booleandilemma2• 9 years ago

Not until we have cryptocurrency bootcamps and people pursuing degrees in cryptofinance.

craigc• 9 years ago

Or job postings asking for a minimum of 5 or 10 years of experience working with Solidity and Ethereum

ajdlinux• 9 years ago

Alas... https://digitalcurrency.unic.ac.cy/

joeyspn6• 9 years ago

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

MichaelGG3• 9 years ago

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 it out of an airplane, or boat, etc. People show off wealth in all sorts of ways...

zhoujianfu• 9 years ago

They can use this design I made!

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:165826

Techn0logist• 9 years ago

I read about it in the newspaper for the small town my parents live in, and I have a completely non-technical friend duped into a weird Bitcoin ponzi scheme. It's getting there.

abrkn2• 9 years ago

It's not even close. I've been told that at the height of the Dotcom bubble, companies received investments for simply having ".com" in their name. That's where we're headed.

Taek3• 9 years ago

There are companies raising >$100m with a prototype written by a single dev.

I think we are close to the top, how much worse than this can it get?

Everyone has realized there's crazy mania, and so now everyone is capitalizing on it. In a few months, the number of projects to fund will no longer be smaller than the amount of money being put towards funding.

dmead• 9 years ago

Sounds terrible.

dialupmodem• 9 years ago

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 works and solves real problems?

AVTizzle• 9 years ago

Lots of hype, for sure, but this criticism is too hard for what is still a still nascent frontier technology.

The innovations you listed in "last century"- PC, internet, etc - both went through their fringe, hobbyists-and-nerds-only phases, during which their future value to society was totally unclear and uncertain.

Only in hindsight are these technologies impacts obvious.

While I couldn't agree more about the fact that there's ridiculous hype and (most annoyingly) greedy speculation in crypto, I for one am hugely excited and optimistic about the potential society-changing implications of the this tech.

harryh• 9 years ago

Well, we got ubiquitous mobile computing this century. That's been working out pretty well so far.

Cloud computing is pretty great too.

ernesto95• 9 years ago

If your comparing centuries you probably should give this one a bit more time, I mean we're in our second decade...

allsunny• 9 years ago

and get off my lawn! :-)

SilasX4• 9 years ago

This doesn't seem to do it for me. The multiple explanations it offers are all either:

1) Extremely vague and handwavy, or

2) Links to extremely long documents.

Neither one is an explanation, something that hits the key points and gives you enough to know what to ask to get greater detail.

Edit: toned down criticism.

Breefield5• 9 years ago

Be my guest: http://github.com/Breefield/whatthefuckisethereum It's supposed to be a combination of layman information, reference material, and humor, I agree some of the content was rushed.

SilasX4• 9 years ago

As soon as I understand ethereum, I will!

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

Unfortunately it's simply not something that can be explained easily and clearly. Imagine trying to explain the Internet to someone who has never seen a computer.

This is actually a sign that something innovative is happening, because it can't be explained in terms of something that already exists.

SilasX4• 9 years ago

I hear that on every topic and have never found it justified. A high level explanation can illustrate the general structure of what you're explaining and then you can paint in details as necessary. It's always possible to find an "in between".

When I wrote understandingbitcoin.us, I explained it as a global ledger with mutiple versions floating around where everyone agrees to trust the version (out of the valid ones) with the most proven work invested in it. That provides the overall structure and allows me to dive into:

- How you sign transactions (public key crypto basics)

- How you know how much work has been invested in something (the guessing game and the crypto version with hashes and nonces)

- Why people invest work in it all (mining and transaction fees).

- Why people agree to follow these rules at all (dynamics that encourage people to follow vs reject a protocol and what effects that has for the network)

(I would like to see something similar for ethereum.)

If I were explaining the internet to someone in your example, I would explain what functions computers can perform, then introduce the concept of them communicating with each other and what that allows, and the flesh out the details of how the communication happens in a distributed way.

(The linked page also doesn't provide that kind of explanation.)

mikenew2• 9 years ago

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, and it would be so big the network wouldn't even accept it. Rather, you would create a simple contract that says "if you render this animation for me and prove that you did it right, I'll pay you X amount of Ether". Someone would take the job and the Ethereum network would process your contract and handle the payment. You would end up paying that person to do work for you, and you'd pay the network (using something called gas) to process the contract.

You could use Ethereum to create all kinds of interesting contracts for financial purposes, voting systems, insurance, or whatever else. But it's not some giant compute cluster that will run some big program for you.

bsmithers• 9 years ago

Thanks. In your example, how could one hope to prove they had rendered the animation correctly? Presumably each node must be able to verify the correctness of this in order to process the contract?

mikenew2• 9 years ago

I think that's still an open problem. You could render a few random tiles from a few frames to build some confidence in the result. You could also build a reputation system, also running on ethereum, to establish who is trustworthy.

ChrisClark2• 9 years ago

Definitely a very constrained system to write in. For anyone who loves to write compact optimized code though, Solidity is very fun to write. Squeezing out every last little bit of gas. With the Viper language in development being even more low level there could be a good market for developers who can create solid contracts. VISA recently posted a job opening looking for a Solidity developer. I think with how rare those developers are, you would be in a really great place to negotiate your salary.

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

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 smart contract is able to simulate 1 step of the computation. If there are N steps in the computation, it is possible to prove to the contract that the original person who did the computation cheated with log(N) transactions. After the contract is convinced that the original person cheated, he would punished by destroying his deposit.

Read the whitepaper and watch the videos if you want to learn more.

Breefield5• 9 years ago

Wow this is awesome!

MichaelGG3• 9 years ago

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 splitting up your work into much smaller pieces.

bstrom• 9 years ago

See also https://golem.network

nullc• 9 years ago

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 computation is a really foolish way to do what it can actually do-- which is conditionally allow changes only if a stated predicate holds.

Check out this presentation by my colleague:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGE6jrVmt_I

Slides: https://cyber.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/russelloconno...

contracts for financial purposes, voting systems, insurance, or whatever else.

Many of these applications are severely harmed by the lack of privacy in the recompute-everything model.

omarchowdhury4• 9 years ago

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

herval• 9 years ago

How would Ethereum “replace Facebook”?

gfody2• 9 years ago

Ethereum isn't trying to be some sort of generic distributed computing platform. The notion of writing a dApp to do distributed 3D rendering is outrageously stupid.

The idea is to program your money. Here's a dollar that can only be spent on healthy food. Give these to your kids for doing their chores or whatever.

tech_man72• 9 years ago

The Golem Network is the generic decentralized computing platform. https://golem.network/

rspeer6• 9 years ago

How do you cryptographically, trustlessly verify that food is healthy?

chriswarbo• 9 years ago

Here's a dollar that can only be spent on healthy food. Give these to your kids for doing their chores or whatever.

Are such restrictions meaningful though? One huge feature of these currencies/tokens is how easy it is to trade them; maybe your kids will trade their "healthy food dollar" for $0.75 of some unrestricted currency, hence "a dollar that can only be spent on healthy food" is actually "about $0.75, with an extra transaction step".

MichaelGG3• 9 years ago

The difficulty is "prove you did it right". I'd guess that only works for cheap-to-verify (trapdoor"?) functions. However, Intel SGX does enable this. You would need an SGX-attested renderer, but the output would include a signature on the inputs in addition to the actual output image. You could verify this signature was made by the SGX-secured renderer code, then you'd know it executed as designed (i.e. the person didn't just draw an image in paint).

SGX would also enable hidden contract data. Right now, you can't publish a contract like "guess my weight and win $100", because the guess code is public (has to be, for miners to exec it). With an SGX-enabled system, this is now totally doable. (Though, you must trust Intel, and assume hackers can't reverse engineer the Intel chips with magic physics or other breaks. So it's probably safe for a few millions but not billions of dollars. (Upper bound, for a few hundred billion you could acquire Intel and compromise SGX secrets.))

SGX is pretty exciting and I'm in the early stages of getting at least one project working with it. There's also research called "Town Crier" to enable TLS-retrieved website data into Ethereum contracts.

For all the people that cry about SGX being big, bad, DRM, it really has its upsides. Too bad Intel requires special licensing to use it - it should just be enabled for all purposes. Maybe they're worried about malware backlash?

Also, an SGX-enabled Ethereum, apart from the Intel/SGX trust issues, means you can skip the computation and just verify the result. It also means you could replace the proof-of-work multi-hash with a single iteration plus a sleep.

m-j-fox• 9 years ago

I don't know about SGX but worked on HDCP and maybe the license charge is for the same reason: lazy or malicious partners could leak a key and compromise the whole system. All the charges pay into the fund to pay damages to the injured if the system suddenly collapses like DVD encryption did.

mtgx• 9 years ago

The moment SGX reaches 5% of the market, someone will already show how to hack it.

rdl2• 9 years ago

The costs to subvert SGX are unfortunately far below millions. Probably hundreds or thousands after you have some one time research.

It is a viable additional client protection, especially against remote malware, software-only tampering (unless there are implementation bugs or backdoors), but not a viable server trust substitute.

mrb5• 9 years ago

"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".

omarchowdhury4• 9 years ago

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

flashmob2• 9 years ago

No, gas is a synonym for fee. However, gas is its own unit, separate from ETH.

Each op code in the EVM has a gas price, depending on the complexity of the instruction. Eg. A store op costs more gas than a comparison op.

When you do a transaction, you specify how much ETH you will pay for one unit of gas. Typical transactions use 21k gas, but contracts need much more.

More info about why it's like that:https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-the-gas-i...

I often see 'gas required' 'gas limit' and 'gas price' terms confused, so careful what you read in the comments on the internet ;-)

accountyaccount• 9 years ago

How does one prove they did it "right"?

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

Check out https://truebit.io/

elmigranto2• 9 years ago

So instead of hiring professional animator with good reputation and fair pricing, you write a sophisticated program to check correctness of animations (what would that do?), try to come up with fair price in somewhat cryptic market, and hope someone somewhere will take up a challenge of both, figuring required specs from your contract source code and actually have an expertise to do a job in question.

Revolutionary indeed.

rhaps0dy• 9 years ago

No, you check the quality of the rendering. The rendering is already done by computers. The animators tell the computer what to render.

killerstorm2• 9 years ago

I might be somewhat biased on this, but I strongly prefer database metaphor over computing metaphor.

Every blockchain is essentially a shared database. E.g. Bitcoin is a database which keeps track of address balances (as a first approximation) and enforces particular authorization rules. It's a fixed-functionality blockchain.

On the other hand, Ethereum can serve as an arbitrary, user-defined database. Ethereum smart contracts are essentially like stored procedures in SQL databases -- they can be used to enforce arbitrary consistency rules.

And the reason why transactions are quite expensive is that you're paying to update everyone's database. You can modify things locally for free, but if you need everyone to see your information, you gotta pay for it.

And computation is there just for the sake of enforcing arbitrary constraints.

kochthesecond• 9 years ago

I also prefer the database metaphor. Bitcoin is a set of rules that lets everyone take part in (in fact this is required) the creation of a database of transactions that has happened. To make sure there are no mistakes, every single node runs the transactions to verify their validity.

mettamage• 9 years ago

I just wanted to thank you because while I viewed it this way I've never seen it so eloquently in words. My way of putting it into words was still a bit chaotic, so thank you!

infogulch• 9 years ago

Interesting. Can I ask for a description of the Etherium database from the perspective of someone shopping databases? Paradigms, features, transactions, distributed consensus, etc.

shriek• 9 years ago

I'm failing to understand how this is different from say buying a compute power from AWS or GCE. Isn't it almost the same except the transaction is done through ether instead of traditional money?

chx2• 9 years ago

You could use Ethereum to create all kinds of interesting contracts for financial purposes, voting systems, insurance, or whatever else

Perhaps you could but currently no one does. There's still not a single real world legal application that needs cryptocurrency. Much as with the pro-life debate (to name a bad phrase) or with global warming now renamed climate change (to name a good phrase) the name of the thing frames the discussion. Calling it a "currency" makes people think it's not a Ponzi or a scam when it's decidedly one of them.

Tomis022• 9 years ago

global warming now renamed climate change

Actually not true, the phrase 'climate change' has been coined more than half a century ago. The idea that there was a rebranding of the phenomenon is false beyond doubt, and actually hurtful to the process of acknowledging we have a big problem.

JasoonS3• 9 years ago

currently no one does.

Clearly you haven't done enough research. Have you looked at the ethereum token (ERC20: https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard) launch contracts? They raise large amounts of money (its actually scary!) and securely and transparently tokens are distributed to participants. These tokens can then represent anything (really anything) from stock (blockchain capital etc), to voting rights in the organisation (districtOx), to a utility token (golem, basic attention token) to allow use for what ever protocol is being developed.

There already are private secure voting systems being researched. Here for example: https://github.com/stonecoldpat/anonymousvoting ZK-snarks is used to ensure privacy.

You can see some of the other applications here: https://dapps.ethercasts.com/ (most of these are just fun ideas, but you don't have to look far to see the potential in them).

There is real utility to Ethereum, it is just very very young as a technology, and all the issues of scalability etc are a work in progress. But if you want to use the trust-less and secure computational power to execute your code (smart contract) you need to buy Ether first. Is that a Ponzi? I think you are unfairly grouping ethereum in the same category as a large number coins that very much are ponzis.

dogma11383• 9 years ago

Blockchain != crypto currency.

There are quite a few private blockchains that are now running in the financial and healthcare industries at a pretty large pilot programmes that are very functional and bring destinct advantages.

ksteigerwald2• 9 years ago

Your right, but Golem will be. And golem is built on ETH.

zyngaro• 9 years ago

The proof of work system imposes that and the fact that all the nodes compete to mine the blocks to earn coins. May proof of stake can make things more optimized.

djrtwo• 9 years ago

My article on costs in the ethereum network cover this idea. https://hackernoon.com/ether-purchase-power-df40a38c5a2f?sou...

ksteigerwald2• 9 years ago

This is what Golem aims to do... and it's built on ethereum.

Galaxeblaffer• 9 years ago

Check out https://golem.network or https://sonm.io they are making a world computer on ethereum

wcummings• 9 years ago

If you want a laugh, read the ethereum sharding document.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ

puranjay2• 9 years ago

I'm very wary of buying ETH because I've seen it shilled VERY HARD on 4chan.

I don't trust anything that 4chan is telling me to buy.

ojr2• 9 years ago

the average 4chan user probably doesn't own a finney so I wouldn't worry about it, the development team for Ethereum is pretty solid I think that should be taken more into consideration before contributing money to a software project

DennisP10• 9 years ago

I doubt that opinions on 4chan have a strong correlation to reality in either the positive or negative direction.

aqsheehy• 9 years ago

A framework for creating ponzis

blunte2• 9 years ago

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 actually just moved it offshore.

Cthulhu_2• 9 years ago

Instead they can just go "sorry, my site / wallet was hacked, all the money is gone"

Frogolocalypse• 9 years ago

The problem with ether isn't the tech of contracts but the implementation of the network. There are very concerning scalability issues that have not only not been addressed, but who's 'plan' for resolution are either untried systems in development (sharding) or have significant architectural issues (proof-of-stake) that very smart people think will never be resolved. I hope they overcome these obstacles, but the jury is still well and truly out.

joeyspn6• 9 years ago

Ethereum has had a good start being the first mover in smart contracts, but EOS is coming and the value proposition is much more solid...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUZWZj1pu94

Blockchain tech is evolving...

Jabanga5• 9 years ago

EOS doesn't currently exist. It makes a lot of strong claims, and has delivered none of them yet.

joeyspn6• 9 years ago

Larimer has delivered them already in his previous projects: BitShares and Steemit. That's more proven track record than what Ethereum had in early 2014, and that didn't stop people from supporting the idea. I for instance have been a strong supporter of Ethereum since day 0, but now I feel EOS (with DPoS and Graphene) is the next step in blockchain tech.

skrowl• 9 years ago

Wow, I actually own some ETH on coinbase and had no idea it was more than just a competing crypto currency.

amadeuspzs• 9 years ago

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!

ksikka2• 9 years ago

What is Ethereum _useful_ for? When would I need it? Why is AWS (et al) not sufficient?

turblety• 9 years ago

Decentralization and auditing. If you put some code on AWS there are two potential issues.

Firstly you don't know if AWS has actually run your code. They could potentially replace your code with their own modified version which does something malicious (like add a bias). For example in a voting system, code could be modified to ignore X percentage of unfavourable votes, or change unfavourable votes to a more favourable candidate.

Secondly I don't know what your code on AWS does. This isn't great for financial and voting systems that should be audit able.

With Ethereum you can view the code for a contract to validate it does not "cheat". You can also trust the contract was executed correctly because the miners have validated it and added it to the block chain.

ksikka2• 9 years ago

Thank you.

CuriousCosmic• 9 years ago

well, not specifically ethereum but stuff like siacoin provide cheaper options than AWS and while I personally cannot attest to the performance, they seem to be interesting alternatives.[1]

In the case of siacoin, at face value it seems to be significantly cheaper than AWS or Google Cloud for providing bulk cloud storage.

[1] http://sia.tech/

hanklazard• 9 years ago

Even more exciting for me is IPFS and Filecoin. Seems like this pairing could allow for a truly decentralized Internet. Ycombinator had one of the founders / lead programmers on the podcast in the last few weeks and I highly recommend it!

Itsdijital• 9 years ago

siacoin is relatively slow, it took me ~2 minutes to upload 40mb of stuff. But really it's meant to be cold storage and at $2/mo/TB it isn't that bad. The speeds will also increase with adoption.

cm2187• 9 years ago

Another cryptocurrency? This is becoming a hyper inflation of crypto currencies...

thinbeige2• 9 years ago

Nice thread but the issue I always have with all discussions around cryptocurrencies is:

I never know if the person who just worshipped or criticized a specific currency has a vested interest.

Somebody who sits on billions of ETH will write totally different tham someboy who is shorting/margin trading ETH.

eyezick4• 9 years ago

A good litmus test is the level of technical depth of discussion, it's very easy to discuss hypothetical achievements at a high-level of any cryptoasset, but to be able to get into the details demonstrates knowledge beyond any regular trader as well as provides possibly objective reasons to be argued with.

thinbeige2• 9 years ago

Good point. There is one guy in he thread who doubts that ETH will scale. He stays quite meta but sounds credible because he gives one or two good reasons. Still it's hard to judge if it's just a claim or is it substantial, is it crucial for the success anyway?

This whole cryptothing feels like gambling, 'put all your money on red, red will win..'

qbaqbaqba• 9 years ago

Another cryptocurrency based scam?

moomin2• 9 years ago

I'm being sniffy here, and the technical achievement of Ethereum is considerable, but were I talking about a general contract computing platform, I'd want one where I could demonstrate the assertions the code makes. And that basically means a dependently typed functional programming language. I'd start with Idris, but even that might need strengthening before DAO-style issues were hard to find.

DennisP10• 9 years ago

Here's a masters thesis by someone who made Idris compile to the Ethereum virtual machine.

https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939...

moomin2• 9 years ago

That's cool (Idris seems to have an infinitely pluggable back end), but it's not the same thing. You can code in a higher-level language, but you can't inspect another program's guarantees and you can't safely use them within your own system.

kensai• 9 years ago

I love that the article ends in this line:

"Support this website! Send ETH to: 0x1c4d1804AD9d47de0D4209882843998E03E30dF9"

Mooty• 9 years ago

I was curious so I checked, actually two persons gave him some food : https://etherscan.io/address/0x1c4d1804ad9d47de0d42098828439...

~ 40$

sitepodmatt2• 9 years ago

The best way to think of ethereum is bitcoin with more flexibility, and its immutability define by owners* tolerance for loss. When vladmir and slock.it lose money they just roll it back. * owners being the slack group with 90% of the mining power. There exists shitcoins with more credibility than ethereum

RexetBlell11• 9 years ago

Can we please stop bringing up slock.it and the DAO fork. It was more than a year ago and it's time to move on.

sitepodmatt2• 9 years ago

Why? It is quite defining. I would judge a bank on how it behaved 12 months ago, or 24 months, or 10 years ago. if(lapsed > months(12)) { forget; } errr no..

pimeys• 9 years ago

What is the best place to have discussions about Ethereum? I tried to follow the Reddit group, but I don't really need all the hype. I just need information and opinions on writing contracts and developing applications that use Ethereum network. I'm also very interested in the psychological side of trading and different trading strategies. No fuzz, just reasonable discussion.

abrkn2• 9 years ago

Slack channels are widely used by developers in the cryptocurrency space. I also recommend trying to find local meetups.

DennisP10• 9 years ago

For dev, there's /r/ethdev and various channels at https://gitter.im/ethereum, along with https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/.

There are some attempts at serious trading subreddits, but so far nothing that seems that informative to me.

ruiquelhas• 9 years ago

Don't need a whole website to tell me it is just a vehicle for fraudulent securities.

amygdyl• 9 years ago

Can anyone help me with a reference for any study that has been published on the status of research for the conditions of successful crypto currency launches?

Or a serious reputable journal reviewing the literature comprehensively?

If I'm unable to find filling for the gaps in the study I seek, I'm inclined to think that I have a good chance of being able to work towards a (sincerely and despite being tempted by the ad rates) non spammy simple site to collate the references, this summer. So if you have any suggestions for the effort I will with about 70% probability undertake, I'd be happy to hear from you as well.

runeks2• 9 years ago

Ethereum is very simple in essence: it's a Turing-complete version of Bitcoin.

The way you transfer a bitcoin from one person to another is by creating a Bitcoin transaction that contains an input script that fulfills an in-blockchain output script with which a number of bitcoins are associated. The output script may say "provide a public key that hashes to <some_hash> and a signature, over a transaction (which sends the bitcoins to a new output script) that redeems this output, that verifies against this public key".

Bitcoins script language -- conditions be fulfilled to transfer tokens associated with one output script to a new output script -- is not Turing-complete, which means it's limited in how complex a condition can be set up for redemption. Ethereum's script language is Turing complete, allowing arbitrarily complex conditions for fulfilling an output script (which allows you to transfer coins/tokens from that output script to a new one).

Taek3• 9 years ago

Worth adding perhaps that Bitcoin is intentionally not Turing complete, as the complexity opens up a very big space for vulnerabilities. And indeed, we see a lot of those in ethereum contacts.

UncleMeat• 9 years ago

Yup. Why people would want turing complete contracts is completely beyond me. There is a reason why we use heavily restricted computational systems for high integrity systems. Until somebody is doing some sort of model checking on my smart contract you can count me out.

runeks2• 9 years ago

The DAO failed because of a lack of strong typing in the contract language, not because of Turing completeness.

The main problem with a Turing-complete contract language is that it becomes impossible to statically verify runtime properties, so a node can't know how long it will take to verify a transaction it receives. This opens up for denial-of-service attacks, e.g. embedding a transaction with an infinite loop in a block in the blockchain.

myautsai• 9 years ago

Ethereum is an awesome idea, but before any practical Ether application booms, it's more like a bubble.

If you're interested in why there's also a token named "Ethereum Classic(ETC)", you can search "DAO" on Google to explore more about why the first largest Ethereum application DAO was failed and why this leads to the hard fork(ETH => ETC, ETH) of Ethereum.

As far as decentralized storage is concerned, there's production-already a blockchain-based product named Sia (http://sia.tech/ ), but Swarm (which is a similar thing based on Ethereum) is still in very early stage.

aphextron2• 9 years ago

I'm still confused. Is this anything beyond another opt-in botnet at it's core?

retox• 9 years ago

An establishment backed control job.

ourmandave• 9 years ago

Wouldn't whatthefuckisethereum.edu make more sense for an educational site?

vultour• 9 years ago

.edu addresses are restricted to educational institutions in the US afaik.

Temasik• 9 years ago

Ethereum is not immutable centralized and full of bugs

Good luck in the long run

danra• 9 years ago

The time estimate listed for an in-depth reading of the Yellow Paper (54 minutes) is... optimistic.

flaviuspopan• 9 years ago

Yo songzme, I have to thank you for throwing this up because as a result, I've since stumbled on 3Blue1Brown and his awesome video on crypto and math in general. You linked his video the same day he posted it, and I couldn't have been happier to find something that explained it in laymen terms so well. I've been meaning to solidify my understanding for friends and family, so thanks for sharing! Cheers mate.

dahoramanodoceu2• 9 years ago

Link?

metasyn• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

djhworld• 9 years ago

What are people using Ethereum for though.

Outside of trading it between each other based on price speculation, is there a real world thing that isn't a prototype that people are using as part of the smart contract system?

ojr2• 9 years ago

I don't believe all ICOs are illegal

ICO tokens are digital commodities/assets that are more similar to app credits or in-app mobile purchases than securities.

Unlike with Ethereum apps/dapps, you can't trade traditional app credits/in-app purchases on an exchange but imagine if there were farmville ERC-20 tokens a few years backs, people will buy thousands off speculation alone, it'll be interesting to see how the SEC will regulate this

dewyatt• 9 years ago

I know I'll get hate for not commenting on the actual content of this article, but...why is this only taking up 1/3rd of my horizontal screen space? Perhaps all that space could be used to show the images alongside the text?

here’s what we’ll talk about: (with links if you want to jump to a specific section).

Holy smokes, it's got links! Good thing he pointed it out to me since I never could have figured that out by the visual indicators that every web browser adds to links.

peternicky• 9 years ago

Is the content on this website supposed to change based on the target audience selected in the dropdown? If so, it is broken on mobile safari.

What Is Ethereum?

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