Final Steps

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/27/final-steps/

by Moshe_Silnorin • 11 years ago

149 97 11 years ago

blog.ethereum.org

jMyles4• 11 years ago

Blockchain tech is finally getting interesting.

Of the part of the population that is reasonable well informed about the workings of bitcoin, there is a huge sub population that, for one reason or another, regards it as less than a full viable implementation to accomplish the goals set forth in the whitepaper. I am among these.

Although the bitcoin whitepaper represents a compelling call to action and a mathematical head opener, the state of bitcoin today makes it clear that, like many first tries, this one didn't succeed.

However, announcements like this one provide a very powerful reminder that, taken generally, blockchain technology, as a movement, may yet have the evolutionary gravity that we imagined.

jsprogrammer6• 11 years ago

How do you say Bitcoin didn't succeed?

The currency currently has a market cap of about $4,300,000,000 USD, processes transactions equivalent to $300,000,000 USD daily and can be used globally by anyone.

It's been running completely decentralized for 6 years without compromise.

It has probably succeeded far beyond most expectations for it.

mizzao• 11 years ago

If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.

Touche2• 11 years ago

Is 90% of the market still speculation? Call me when it's not.

jMyles4• 11 years ago

To clarify: I meant that bitcoin didn't, and probably won't, for reasons attributable to the limitations of the implementation, supplant fiat currency and become a basis for deprecating the federal reserve, which I agree is a laudable goal.

Bitcoin did, however, succeed in proving that a distributed consensus mechanism can exist as a store of value. As you point out.

aakilfernandes• 11 years ago

Good luck guys! I'm incredibly excited. This feels like a modern day Apollo launch.

JustSomeNobody2• 11 years ago

I'm sorry, but no.

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

One could also interpret it as an indictment. If a blockchain technology is really as exciting as Apollo 11, then that must reflect poorly on us.

natrius7• 11 years ago

I think Ethereum (or something like it) will have a greater effect on many more lives than the Apollo missions did. If successful, it will reshape society by giving every individual reduced economic transaction costs that once required the economies of scale of a megacorporation to achieve.

Take the humble grocery store. The grocery store is a byproduct of economies of scale. Producers sell to grocery stores because it's easier to sell to them in bulk than to find each individual end customer to sell to. Customers buy from grocery stores because it's easier to get everything they want in one store than trying to find each producer to buy from.

Ethereum makes it trivial to connect producers and consumers. It could make the grocery store obsolete. Using an Instacart-style interface, customers could shop from every producer on the planet and have their purchases appear on their doorstep. No intermediary is necessary for this: consumers will pay producers directly, and pay the delivery people and storage centers along the paths from their goods to their homes. Software will do this for them.

Competing in this market is as easy as putting your goods up for sale and building up your reputation—not with a brand marketing campaign, but by selling your goods and services for lower prices until enough people rate them highly enough for you to demand higher prices. More competition and fewer middlemen will lead to lower prices and better products. Trade will be so easy that more trade will happen, and since every trade makes both sides more wealthy, mankind will be more wealthy.

This is why I'm excited about Ethereum. It's easy to dismiss if you don't understand what can be built with it. I encourage you to learn more about what it is and imagine new things that can be built with it.

itistoday22• 11 years ago

Forgive the downvoters Father, they know not what they do.

I'm right there with you on the edge of my seat. There might be no visible rocket explosion, but this will have a similar explosive impact on humanity.

Major congrats to the Ethereum team!

verisimilidude2• 11 years ago

It can't have an explosive impact, because it has none of the drama of three guys strapping their nuts to a massive rocket, hurtling themselves into space, and becoming the very first to walk on the big white ball in the sky—where said ball has captured the imagination of every human that has ever lived, ever. You're not going to have every TV set in the whole world tuned into the launch day for a blockchain.

If this does have an impact at huge scale, it's going to slither into everyone's lives by coincidence, convenience, or accident, over time. I would not call that explosive.

Perspective, people.

carterehsmith4• 11 years ago

> Good luck guys! I'm incredibly excited. This feels like a modern day Apollo launch.

Lol. So you are saying that Apollo Moon landing was as fake as this ;)

drcode9• 11 years ago

I agree, it feels like a really big deal... the fact that so few others are on board with this technology so far definitely means some exciting times are ahead, whether we're proven wrong or right.

tombh• 11 years ago

Just to chime in with the obligatory: sounds-interesting-but-for-the-love-of-turing-it's-infuriatingly-hard-to-find-a-basic-description-of-what-it-actually-is.

codezero• 11 years ago

Ditto, after reading several of the about pages, I'm still not sure what Ether is, or how it's used, or who the target audience is.

Something in there about a decentralized platform for running apps, but I don't want to guess too deeply about what this means.

Is it a cloud hosting platform that runs on Ether? Is the platform going to be used primarily for mining Ether? I'm not even sure, if anyone has a short description that will explain what this is, I'd love to read it!

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

After much moronic searching, these two tutorials seem to somewhat demystify the idea:

https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1634/tutorial-1-your-f...

https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1635/tutorial-2-rainbo...

chipsy• 11 years ago

Ether is a "computational currency." You earn it by running computations on your computer. You spend it by purchasing processing power on other people's computers. The computation is software defined, so that customized "distributed apps" are possible.

This is my outsiders understanding. I think there are potentially a lot of things that could be gotten wrong here - from the specific implementation and security measures to the economic plan. But it's one of several such experiments with using the blockchain, so I'm looking forward to see what they can do - that said I have no expectations for financial gain.

TheGrimDerp1• 11 years ago

I've been following the subreddit for over a year and I still haven't figured it out...

joeykrug• 11 years ago

One example of an app you'd want to run on ethereum is something like a prediction market (PM). A PM is a pretty general financial market and can be used to speculate on things from "Who will become the US President in 2016?" to "Will Russia invade Estonia by 2020?" to "Will American Pharoah win the Triple Crown?"

Ethereum is useful for this because it allows for distributed custody of funds. No one controls the funds stored in these contracts, so there's no one to run away with and steal all the money, and, since it's run on Ethereum, there's no middleman taking 5-10% fees. In fact, for the first time, we can have a truly global prediction market, and _anyone_ can create markets on it to boot! This is just one app possible on ethereum, and it's one I'm building - www.augur.net if you're interested.

Ethereum's basically a platform that allows you to create "smart contracts" (aka programs) that are practically guaranteed to execute the way you write them. And multiple people can interact with the programs and it'll still be executed the same way. This is a bit abstract, but the main huge advantage this allows is: you can finally send money to some program, and the program will do exactly what it says it will, and no one else can modify the results or even touch your money. Bitcoin allows you to send money around, Ethereum allows you to enter into complex contracts with money, and those contracts are always enforceable.

To take this into the real world, imagine you want to make a bitcoin prediction market. Since you can't run the complicated buy/sell machinery of a prediction market directly on bitcoin, you're forced to take deposits from users, match their orders, and then do payouts accordingly after the event occurs. You can run away with the funds at any time, and there's nothing stopping you. Sure, you could elect to use multisignature wallets or cold storage, but that didn't stop MtGox from happening. Heck, even InTrade, the largest prior prediction market had millions of dollars of funds embezzled by their later CEO.

Now with Ethereum, we can send funds to a contract, they're stored there. You can buy and sell and all orders go through the contract. At the end payouts are done by the code in the contract, and no one can take the funds held in the contract.

itistoday22• 11 years ago

Decentralized computing secured by a blockchain! :D->-<

Bognar• 11 years ago

I've still yet to find a "basic" description, but their whitepaper is actually quite useful in describing what it is and possible uses:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper

joeyspn• 11 years ago

A gentle introduction to Ethereum...

http://guide.ethereum.org/ethereum.html

arnorhs• 11 years ago

yeah, and the "about" section doesn't really answer the question very well:

What is ether?

Ether is a necessary element -- a fuel -- for operating the distributed application software platform we are building: Ethereum. Without the requirement of payment of ether for every computational step and storage operation within the system, infinite loops or excessive storage demands could bog down Ethereum and effectively destroy it.

baby• 11 years ago

check the audit LeastAuthority did on them: https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses

jameshart• 11 years ago

This seems like a good overview: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper

natrius7• 11 years ago

Ethereum is a global transaction computer that provides a platform for decentralized applications, like Augur (http://augur.net).

Today's systems have a centralized source of truth: corporate databases. There was no other way to build applications that involve multiple users interacting with each other, so companies built those systems and profited from providing a solution.

With Ethereum, we can write simple programs that run on thousands of computers and come to a consensus on the result. Nasdaq doesn't need to tell us the result of a trade or who owns what. We can build equivalent systems that no one controls. The result is a transfer of profits from middlemen to the rest of humanity.

Finance is easy to think about in a decentralized manner since it's all information that computers control. But these systems can apply to real world interactions as well by building reputation systems on top of this global computer. If you don't abide by the rules of the decentralized system you're participating in, your reputation score will go down and people will stop interacting with you.

In this manner, Ethereum can be used to replace every marketplace startup. Uber and Airbnb are so successful because they benefit from strong network effects. Decentralized applications also benefit from strong network effects: every new decentralized Uber application will use the data from the ones that already exist to bootstrap themselves. The user base will never splinter like it does when new centralized competitors attempt to enter the market.

Ethereum gives mankind the ability to coordinate interactions between ourselves more powerfully than ever before. Social systems that once seemed too unwieldy or too anarchic to work out might now be feasible, and they could make us wealthier and more free.

tajen• 11 years ago

No offense, but there has to be a simpler way to explain this. It sounds like you are passionate, and after seeing the video it looks like a good idea, but it also sounds like a parody of startup culture. References to "humanity" and "mankind" don't help, even if you've used them appropriately. Your comment is useful and exact after understanding the topic, but the message isn't easy to explain. And the source of this complexity is probably that the two startups you mention haven't yet crafted a message which would be simple enough to repeat.

On a side note, I've resigned from my previous startup a month after they've changed the values to "blah blah blah advance humanity blah blah".

skybrian• 11 years ago

It sounds like it would require a lot of throughput to run so many transactions. How do they plan to scale that?

Hexayurt• 11 years ago

Hi. I'm Vinay Gupta, the release coordinator for Ethereum.

I'll tell you exactly what Ethereum is: a blockchain for storing code. Bitcoin stores transactions, Ethereum stores programs. Those programs have persistent state on the blockchain and are capable of moving value around the system, hence you can build games, financial instruments and so on. These things are called "smart contracts" for historical reasons - nobody would call them that if they were invented now!

How's that? Clearer?

carterehsmith4• 11 years ago

> How's that? Clearer?

Not at all. We have been storing programs, building games etc for some 40 or 50 or 70 years now, without Ethereum. So, how does Ethereum does it better/cheaper than the existing solutions, is what people above are asking.

woah• 11 years ago

This post was not written for you. It is for people who already know what ethereum is and possibly backed it or are running the testnet. You can't expect every article on any technical topic to contain a full explanation of the underlying tech. Your comment is like saying "this react.js tutorial sounds intriguing, but please for the love of god can they tell what this JavaScript thing is?".

detaro• 11 years ago

What makes you think that he didn't look further than this post?

Really pointless comment, especially after others a) have echoed the sentiment and b) have provided answers.

Animats• 11 years ago

It's like Bitcoin, but a lot more complicated with lots of new features.

Last year, there was Paycoin, which was like Bitcoin, but a lot more complicated. It tanked. It seems to have been a scam.

ThomPete2• 11 years ago

Etherum allows you to treat digital entities as if they are physical. I.e. it creates scarcity in an otherwise abundant digital universe. It generalizes the principles behind bitcoin and allow you to use this scarcity for a lot of different purposes.

As for examples:

Digital Pokemón Cards. Basically the ability to create digital collectors items.

E-books that could gain value. You could sell ebooks at a premium and allow people to re-sell them. Because the history of their ownership is recorded you could even see them gaining value if they had been owned by a celebrity.

Private but public healthcare records. For research and usage. Store the health-records publicly as personas but allow individuals people to link it with their identity. This would help with research in completely new ways.

Voting made public but anonymous Make it hard to manipulate voting results by making the anonymized results available for everyone.

Artificial Intelligence Using the protocol to create automated consensus models.

Companies without owners Build a company with a political purpose without any owner.

gioele• 11 years ago

Etherum allows you to treat digital entities as if they are physical. I.e. it creates scarcity in an otherwise abundant digital universe.

I always hoped I could see a post-scarcity physical world in my lifetime. Now you are telling me that there are people trying to present me with a pre-scarcity digital world? No, thank you. :)

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

Quite.

Inspired by an earlier HN post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...

moistgorilla• 11 years ago

Hey, just a heads up. On your landing page the text in your Hero didn't render properly. I'm using Firefox version 39.0 on Windows 7

groby_b• 11 years ago

So, it seems to be "computational currency". Is it too much to ask that something that'd like to be a currency manages to have proper SSL certs?

(Both Chrome and FF reject the issuer certificate)

1_player• 11 years ago

Looks OK from here, Archlinux+Chrome.

Either you need to update your OS, or there's a MITM in your connection (can't rule that out, can you? That's what SSL has been designed for.)

treelovinhippie• 11 years ago

The Genesis block could very well mark a turning point in human history. The beginning of the complete decentralization of the global human society.

The global insurance industry replaced with autonomous smart contracts able to provide 10x value, at 10x cheaper cost than any current provider. Escrow services instantly replaced in the same fashion. Global marketplaces more nimble, efficient and cheaper than Uber, Airbnb, eBay and KickStarter (to the point where they will be forced to decentralize themselves to remain competitive). Distributed, autonomous hosting, DNS and CDN services that vastly outperform giants like AWS, ICANN and Cloudflare.

And that's just the low hanging fruit.

It will be many years before it reaches critical mass and invisibly seeps into mainstream ubiquity. But just as Bitcoin and the Internet cannot be shutdown, the Ethereum Genesis block will be an irreversible Singularity.

kristianp• 11 years ago

Why must these Bitcoin alternatives be so hard to install? Why do I have to manually generate my own Genesis Block? Even for testing.

drcode9• 11 years ago

The whole point of ethereum is to keep trust in a third party to an absolute minimum. Wait a month or two and much easier options will appear (created by startups happy to act as the trusted third party)

Udownvotemeudie• 11 years ago

How does the company behind it make money? Do they have 20% of ether supply or something?

drcode9• 11 years ago

They earned some money from people in a presale, they hold some modest ether, and everyone at the company can expect lucrative consulting contracts.

Final Steps

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