18 ms·

Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer

413 points by hunglee2 11y ago

harryf 11y ago
Does Ethereum provide any solution to the [ever growing Blckchain](https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size) ?
- eco 11y ago
  Yes. See Vitalik's post from last year about State Tree Pruning: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/
t0mk 11y ago
I wonder to what extent is the price rise a bubble, and to what extent it's valuation of the potential.
- jnpn 11y ago
  Look at the full stock price history of any company which became very valuable, and you'll see bubbles and busts along the way. Whether the market's calculations of Ethereum's potential is correct remains to be seen, we'll have to see what gets built on it over the next few years.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  It was a pump'n'dump. Lots and lots of people on the Reddit bitcoin-related subs reported PM spam about Ethereum, for instance.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    Pump and dump the way you phrased it, seems to auggest the entire thing is a pump and dump scheme. Either way, the price fluctuates woldly as people try to do this scheme, but the company raised $15m and appears to be actively developing the tech. So whether it works(it appears promising) or not, they seem to be svidly trying
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      I'm speaking specifically of the price rise then fall in the last couple of weeks. The fundraiser, of course, was a pre-mined altcoin.
      - vonklaus 11y ago
        Interesting take. To summarize, you believe that speculators manipulate markets and prices decouple from value because self interested parties force it to communicate information incorrectly? Also, you point out that the announcement of the intention to premine ether ended up leading to the Ethereum project implementing a plan to premine ether and sell it at a known and predetermined rate? Riveting conclusion, surprised more people aren't talking about this. I for one don't buy into the "conspiracy theory" that our society is built on debt, and monetary and fiscal policy have been managed poorly such that capital can not be incentivized to loan. Instead, rates will penalize banks for not lending, as economists try to force staples like food and oil up to introduce inflation into the system as they have lost control on spending as well as flooring rate levels thus losing both measures to fix the problem. If that were true, it would be bad. All above was obvious satire
fiatjaf 11y ago
So this thing is live yet? I thought they were having problems with the algorithms and so on.
- aakilfernandes 11y ago
  Its technically in the "frontier" stage, which means that its in "beta" of sorts. There are lots of developers working on Ethereum dapps and it is more than useable, however consumers should be aware there may be loss-causing bugs around.
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    - fsiefken 11y ago
      I think he means http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ Not sure if these are used for any serious use case yet.
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    - delluminatus 11y ago
      Who would use a beta version of a crypto product in a production setting?
    - phpnode 11y ago
      > Bitcoin is used by millions of people a day now. Tangible example please. Bit Coin transaction volume is about 200k/day, so how are these millions of people using it?
    - crazydoggers 11y ago
      Why does there have to be large scale production use while it's in beta? Bitcoin's genesis block was mined in 2009, but it took years for it to come out of "beta" and see production adoption. Ethereum adoption actually is already outpacing Bitcoin's adoption. Ethereum has only been live since July of this year, and already has seen adoption by numerous corporations (even if it's largely development projects at this point). For example Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service runs Ethereum. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-blockchain-as-a-service-now-on-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-blockchain-a... And here's a large test run conducted with 11 Banks across the globe: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banks-distributed-ledger-using-ethereum-microsoft-azure-1539044 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banks-distributed-le...
roymurdock 11y ago
What are the costs like for building resource intensive apps on ethereum? Would be interested in comparing with centralized compute providers.
- replies_to_all 11y ago
  A lot more expensive. There will be no comparison in cost, or at least that is the wrong comparison to be making.
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm reading ethereum right, but it sounds a lot like mesh computing, where a user can bid for unused cycles on a bunch of networked computers, or one "world computer" if you agree with the author's characterization. If that is correct, then ethereum and Amazon spot instances could be interchangeable - low availability, but potentially lower cost due to the bidding process if there is a lot of excess compute power on the network.
    - aakilfernandes 11y ago
      Sorry, thats not correct. The only person who gets compensated for performing computations are the miners. Everyone else performs computation so they can have an up-to-date blockchain, but are not compensated. Ethereum is the most expensive computational environment you can imagine. However, it is also the highest trust. Its not for computationally-limited (gaming/data analysis) its for trust-limited (financial applications/privacy) There is an effort to build a computation market on top of Ethereum, but the computation happens off the chain. https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market
      - roymurdock 11y ago
        For some reason I thought Ethereum was different than a flavored blockchain, but I guess it's just the branding/dev ecosystem that is different.
shanehoban 11y ago
I get spammed daily on Reddit from bots supporting Ethereum (currency) - so the name causes hatred for me already.
- JimDabell 11y ago
  Ethereum supporters hate it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/415kx8/if_you_are_coming_from_rbitcoin_because_of_a_spam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/415kx8/if_you_are...
- aakilfernandes 11y ago
  Side note: Ethereum is the technology, ether is the currency.
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- DennisP 11y ago
  I get those too. All the messages I've gotten have had similar-looking random names from new accounts, so I think it's one idiot with a bot. Ethereum devs have asked this person to stop, subreddit admins have asked people to use the spam report button, but only Reddit employees can actually do anything about it.
- imglorp 11y ago
  There are speculators on all the blockchains, even on the chains not designated as currencies. They irritate and demoralize the developers with their trolling and hostility over unsatisfactory chain exchange rates--the only thing they're invested in--while the developers are merely attempting to build distributed apps to benefit society. These are the same breed of asshole who have ruined wall street, college sports, and anything else they can bet on.
teraflop 11y ago
The article is pretty light on technical details. Does Ethereum suffer from the same design limitation as Bitcoin, where every operation must be verified by every node? If so, I have a really hard time believing it will scale. Look how much difficulty the Bitcoin network is having with just a couple of transactions per second.
- empath75 11y ago
  That's a political problem with the miners and developers. There's no technical reason they couldn't raise the block size.
  - ufo 11y ago
    You shouldn't ignore political problems when it comes to distributed systems... Additionally, raising the block size cap is only a stopgap measure. Eventually you will reach hard bandwidth or disk storage limits and the only way will be to throw some transactions outside the blockchain.
    - nickik 11y ago
      Bishares is a blockchain that can do as many and more transaction as Visa. Their does not seem to be a fundamental problem as long as you accept that Worker(miners) are fast servers with good networks.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    Is this true? I believe there is a tradeoff but want a more in depth explsnation if possible
    - maxander 11y ago
      As I recall (and this may not be the whole of it), the "tradeoff" was that a larger block size would risk getting attention from China's great firewall, effectively splitting the network and rendering Chinese users' funds effectively worthless. And it turns out a set of Chinese users have a controlling interest in the network currently... so yes, its a political problem par excellence. It occurs to me as I write that Ethereum may have similar problems down the line, when platform updates turn out to be direly needed, but would disrupt the operation of well-established and lucrative apps.
srameshc 11y ago
What happened overnight ? Why am I seeing so much ethereum this morning ?
- aakilfernandes 11y ago
  I often notice HN topics come in groups. I think its because people read about a topic, get interested, do some research, and then start submitting articles they find.
powera 11y ago
I still don't understand how anyone can believe that paying ten to a hundred times as much for algorithmically provable trust or whatever will get any market traction ever.
- SolarNet 11y ago
  Because it's something that doesn't otherwise exist. It's actual innovation, where else in the world can you run trustless global peer-to-peer applications? It will be a while before it's commercially viable, sure, but it's something unique.
- jnpn 11y ago
  There are many services in this world which require a trusted intermediary between users. The fees these services charge are _not_ a function of compute cycles. They are, however, often a function of pricing power derived from competition (or lack thereof). Where decentralized computation is less expensive than the fees charged by incumbents in the trusted intermediary business, there is the opportunity for a new entrant to leverage the tech to profit on the spread.
- srameshc 11y ago
  I very much agree with you. Its hard to believe that this will rise to the bitcoin trust level. If anything I believe in sidechain.
- fragsworth 11y ago
  One tangible example is how there is significant legal and accounting overhead for banking contracts, particularly credit default swaps and other risk-mitigating things. Some of these can be automated in Ethereum.
- fragsworth 11y ago
  One tangible example is how there is significant legal and accounting overhead for banking contracts, particularly credit default swaps and other risk-mitigating things. Some of these can be automated in Ethereum.
tluyben2 11y ago
I built a PoC for a social benefits platform on this a while ago. It was not ideal; mostly tasks that needed to be guaranteed to run at certain times was a pain. Because of several of those issues the project was cancelled.
- jbpetersen 11y ago
  Were you using Ethereum Alarm Clock? If you were then I'd be curious to hear about issues with it and if not then taking a second shot at your PoC could be worthwhile.
na85 11y ago
Has it been six months since the last Ethereum post already? Is Ethereum still "engendering positive disruption"? I see they've updated their site to make it more approachable and read less like proecdurally-generated Venture Capitalist jargon. That's nice. I see they've added a javascript environment. Yuck.
- mbilker 11y ago
  They had the javascript environment for awhile now.
joshuakarjala 11y ago
Have built a demo app with Ethereum in November. The tooling was ok, but not amazing. IMO one of the main problems is that you need trusted inputs for most "interesting" or "valuable" computations.
- pipermerriam 11y ago
  Developing on the platform right now is akin to writing software to run on a VM that has no operating system. The services that are being written right now can be thought of as the operating system (foundation) that everything that will come next is built on. To do the really interesting stuff you have to first build all of the really low level tooling to support it. There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a few years away. Complex applications like those are going to require significant base infrastructure that just doesn't exist yet. The "Trusted" inputs problem is complex and I don't believe there will be a single solution. Some applications will be fine using trusted oracles. Others will need a more trustless model which is going to require on-chain reputation systems which in-turn is going to require some level of identity/anti-sybil system.
  - repomies69 11y ago
    > There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a few years away. At least a few years? LOL. I would give it 20 years.
Uptrenda 11y ago
Crypto has come a long way since Ethereum was first conceived and what was impossible only a few months ago is now 100% practical. Today there are A LOT of new techniques that allow us to largely implement decentralized autonomous applications on any blockchain (no matter how limited) - a fact I feel often gets missed out in all of the Ethereum hype. If you have a lot a techniques like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic computations, multi-party computation, indistinishability (sic) obfuscation (not quite practical yet), and various threshold schemes - you will quickly realize we could basically already do everything that Ethereum was designed for from the start. In fact - a lot of the new crypto techniques make it possible to scale DAC applications even better than what blockchains would allow since you can implement a lot of crypto-application protocols outside of the blockchain and keep only the hash-locked payments on the chain (which I honestly think is preferable.) It just seems to me like Vitalik largely invented Ethereum because he didn't want to bother messing around with all the crypto-hacking that's required to implement self-enforcing, autonomous contracts (which is half the fun.) My biggest problem with this is people act like this isn't possible with Bitcoin when we had working smart contracts (and special coins for smart contracts) before Ethereum even existed. Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment which means if you structure your crypto-protocol right you can essentially implement any self-paying, and self-running corporation as a never-ending complex chain of future problems. (I would speculate that it's even possible to build a universal turning machine on top of any bitcoin-style blockchain that can compute any problem off-chain and allow these computations to be proven and self-enforcing but that is a topic for future research.)
- cdetrio 11y ago
  > Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment Sure, bitcoin script can in theory compute any computable problem (as can any turing machine). But it doesn't have native access to the data it needs, so pretty much any input you'd want to use needs to be put there by a trusted "oracle" (through a clever encoding into UTXO logic). For example, bitcoin script can't compare the amount of coins sent to two different bitcoin addresses, so you'd need to use oracles to do that [1]. In ethereum script it is trivial to do it on-chain (no oracles needed), since it was designed from the ground up for such use-cases (i.e. "smart contracts"). 1. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36229/bitcoin-script-for-a-competitive-crowdfunding-like-contract http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36229/bitcoin-scr...
kang 11y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142 Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is it advantageous if a DSL is turing complete? It is not that bitcoin 'cannot have' a turing complete script but that it is unsafe & there is no need to do so. Turing completeness can be applied on an upper abstraction. There is nothing that ethereum can do that bitcoin cannot! The proof of it is RootStock which is ethereum implementation using bitcoin. Ethereum is full of buzzwords and the key one of them is DApps. Here [0] is how to build a dapp using bitcoin. Basically you can tell me any application of ethereum and I'll tell you how you can do it with bitcoin. Skynet type input requiring applications can't be done inherently by either ether or bitcoin but can be done by both using third-party oracles. Then are bitcoin & ethereum equivalent. No, they key is origin of money. Bitcoin is mined, ether was sold. The recent rise in price has attracted all kinds of attention but talk to any of the core-devs and they'll tell you that Vitalik used to come up with complicated explanations which they spent time studying and responding & then he'd come back with something even more complicated until they stopped caring. [0] http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowdfunding/ http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowd...
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  > Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is this your opinion because you truly believe it or because you have a horse in the bitcoin race? I'm not saying that Ethereum is superior to bitcoin but at least from a brief look over it, it seems to make quite a bit of sense. Whereas my experience with bitcoin is that it's an incredibly hacky and questionable system that primarily survives because of the collective investment into it, not on its technical merit.
  - jarsin 11y ago
    Yep ethereum has been out for what 6 months and look at all of development on top of it already. BTC has tons of VC money and I see nothing interesting beyond a few regulated exchanges. But oh ya we are all suppose to believe BTC can do all of this but apparently nobody really knows how. It's really just a bunch of people that think BTC is special because it was first, but it lost it's first mover advantage. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/43fm3w/the_core_value_proposition_of_ethereum_is_synergy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/43fm3w/the_core_... http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ http://dapps.ethercasts.com/
LAMike 11y ago
Is there a "Hello World" version of a DAC? What is the simplest contract I can make? And do I need a 3rd party oracle to confirm anything?
- drcode 11y ago
  It would look something like: contract Hello { string greeting; function setName(string name) { greeting="Hello "+name; } } The solidity compiler will automatically produce a "getter" function to retrieve the greeting.
  - csarva 11y ago
    It will only be exposed automatically if you mark it public, i.e., 'string public greeting'
- pre 11y ago
  Yep. Running it is about as far as I got with my investigations. https://www.ethereum.org/greeter https://www.ethereum.org/greeter
  - CephalopodMD 11y ago
    What is wrong with this website? It is glitchy looking as hell.
- splintercell 11y ago
  SimpleStorage is one of the 'HelloWorld' equivalents of DAPPs. http://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/introduction-to-smart-contracts.html http://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/introduction-to-sm... Third party oracle services are provided by Oraclize.it
- fudged71 11y ago
  I think the most logical DAC should be a distributed network of lemonade stand franchises :)
kefka 11y ago
Unfortunately, I'm trying to obtain a small amount of ethereum currency to experiment with this.. And I just killed my thread doing 1M hashes a sec, because I found out that 6MHash/sec = 5 Eth/month on average. I'll spend my time learning other things, mainly because this is inaccessible to me.
- jarsin 11y ago
  Just download the mist wallet and mine on the test network which is what you should be doing if you are playing with it anyway. https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
- cjm 11y ago
  You can buy the Ether on an exchange.
  - kefka 11y ago
    I was hoping for a roughly low barrier of entry, rather than try to figure out who will trade USB for ETH, as I have no BTC. In all honesty, I'm looking at distributed applications as well, which from what I read Ethereum says it does and doesn't do. It's a bit fast and loose from what I read about, about Ethereum's capabilities. I'll go back to my experimenting with TOR and how it might be possible to make your own distributed applications within the Hidden Services. That's free to use, and as low bar as I can think of. (Add machine, shows up as HS.)
    - xavieryvez 11y ago
      While developing, you would do it either on the dev (local, not connected) or testnet. Both these are easily mineable (I have 10k's on both), so there is nothing stopping you to actually playing around and putting together a dapp without having real ETH in your pocket. No expenses and you can play around all you like. When you want to go live, there is typically only a very small deployment cost.
    - crazydoggers 11y ago
jcfrei 11y ago
I've dabbled with the dev tools ethereum provided for a while and I can't imagine that the computations ethereum does will ever be fast enough for a general purpose, distributed computation platform. If I had to wager on yet another cryptocurrency™ I'd bet on Zcash (https://github.com/zcash/zcash https://github.com/zcash/zcash). They promise a real differentiator for cryptocurrencies with their zero-knowledge proofs.
- pipermerriam 11y ago
  Have you read up on the proposals and information on plans for Proof-of-Stake (Casper) and Scaling/Concurrency via sharding? Both of those are directed at fixing the "fast enough" problem.
- 7373737373 11y ago
  There is http://golemproject.net/ http://golemproject.net/, which builds on top of Ethereum and uses it for administrative purposes (e.g. payments).
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rodrigo-mx 11y ago
Let's everybody use our home electricity so that big companies save big money managing their big data!
rodrigo-mx 11y ago
Let's everybody use our home electricity so that big companies save big money managing their big data!
repomies69 11y ago
Are there examples of in/use DAPPS?
- httpagent 11y ago
  Augur, a decentralized prediction market, is the biggest anticipated release on the horizon.
repomies69 11y ago
"The Ethereum network is a distributed economy like Bitcoin, except it is much, much more powerful. The essential difference is that Ethereum is programmable. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to program a whole new currency like Bitcoin." AFAIK it takes 5 minutes to fork Bitcoin and create a new altcoin. Why would I use ethereum for my altcoin instead of doing a new altcoin?
- eco 11y ago
  They don't mean fork ethereum and create a new currency. They mean create a new currency running on the ethereum platform. A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it. Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has. Here is the tutorial about creating your own coin on ethereum. It's pretty short and interesting: https://www.ethereum.org/token https://www.ethereum.org/token People like to think of ether as another cryptocurrency like bitcoin but the ethereum currency is intended to be more like a commodity that is used to fuel the platform that runs all sorts of stuff (including currencies).
  - repomies69 11y ago
    I know what they mean. > A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it. Of course, you need miners. However the mining is the easy part, otherwise you need marketing, use cases, etc, for the currency to get any traction. I think an altcoin working on top of the ethereum blockchain would not be as convincing as invidual altcoin. However of course if we are speaking about some other kind of asset, it might make sense to do it on ethereum. > Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has. No. Maybe mining security or something, but trust? Why would anyone use these crappy in-ethereum tokens, when you can just use ether itself. Or bitcoin. You can make tokens as well inside bitcoin via colored coins and similar methods. They haven't gained much traction, I doubt that they will inside ethereum.
    - eterpstra 11y ago
Animats 11y ago
This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the typical football fan. Possible YC startup.
- repomies69 11y ago
  If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? I would bet my ass off that the end-users (gamblers) don't give a crap whether it is on blockchain or not, they just want it to be easy, quick and possibly cheap. And of course trustable. And by latter I don't mean "mathematical proof" trustable, they want brand that they know to trust.
  - jarsin 11y ago
    > they want brand that they know to trust. like fulltilt or leehman brothers!
    - repomies69 11y ago
      You have to take in account that for every failed banks there is something like 20 banks that have worked good enough. For full tilt, there has been many gambling services that haven't failed yet. When using banking services, you have a risk of a bank run. How big that risk is? How much work are you willing to do, or how much money are you willing to spend to migitate that risk?
  - aianus 11y ago
    > If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? Because it's not legal (in the US), obviously. But the feds won't be able to shut it down if it's on the blockchain. Look at bittorrent, still perfectly alive and well after so many years.
- 11y ago
ck2 11y ago
Heated my apartment two winters ago with litecoin and dogecoin mining. Too late for ether.
iamthepieman 11y ago
i see a browser plugin/app like "Cloud to Butt"[0] that detects phrases like "I would bet my ass off" or "I bet you that" or "I wager" and converts them to a prediction market link - creating the market if it doesn't exist or just linking to it if it does. [0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
nikkwong 11y ago
I'm still not getting this. Let's say I have a node server that can serve up some sort of front end application. How would something like that run on etherium? Are a number of computers in the network going to get a copy of my source code copied onto them so they can 'distribute' it effectively? That doesn't seem very practical to me.
- drcode 11y ago
  > That doesn't seem very practical to me. Ethereum has the highest uptime of any computing platform ever developed. It's probably something like 99.99999% uptime (assuming a 0.00001% yearly chance that the earth is destroyed in a given year from a giant asteroid impact) What would be a "practical" way of getting the same results with your node server?
vamur 11y ago
One issue with Ethereum is that smart contracts are expensive and must run on every node. These days a VPS with 2GB RAM costs $4 so Ethereum would not be competitive even in short term. Another issue is the blockchain size which is already 8GB and growing faster than the Bitcoin blockchain.
- drcode 11y ago
  Ethereum smart contracts have abilities far beyond a VPS, particularly around security, reliability, and trustlessness guarantees- Whether you think those abilities have value and justify a new platform is a separate question, but the argument that "this is like a VPS" is a misunderstanding of what ethereum is offering with its technology. The large blockchain size, on the other hand, is a legitimate problem with ethereum (as with all blockchain systems.) Hopefully the devs will be able to solve this problem- They are hard at work on a potential solution as we speak.
  - vamur 11y ago
    Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps. This would mean that for most applications trustlessness is not very useful. And for those apps where it would be generally useful, such as exchanges, betting. etc, the expensive nature of gas would mean that operating on Ethereum would be cost prohibitive and they would lose to their centralized competitors. And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS?
    - drcode 11y ago
      > Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps. I think that's a valid criticism- I, too, am a bit disappointed that there are few contracts yet with obvious utility. However, as someone deep in the community and talking to lots of people, it seems there's going to be tons of interesting dapps deployed in the next 6 months. Hopefully there will be a "killer dapp" among them. > And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS? If I store money on your VPS-based app, how can I be assured you can't steal it from me? If I use a feature on your VPS, how can I be sure you won't disable it tomorrow? Ethereum can provide these sorts of guarantees.
camelNotation 11y ago
Actually, you can turn it off in every way that counts as long as you turn off the Internet, which is entirely possible.
dudeonthenet 11y ago
I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question: When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the network (or other blockchain technologies) can perform. If we think of regular computers, then no matter in which language an application ( i dislike the word 'app' :) is written in, eventually we end up talking about the x86 instruction set, the microcode that makes up each instruction, and, finally, the actual transistors logic that run them. I somehow feel this is important to ask because we have to take into account the energy efficiency of computation. For example, if we think about the x86 ADD instruction, there is an approximately fixed amount of energy it dissipates when it is performed. ( This is a pretty interesting subject in intself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle ) What would be an equivalent ADD instruction or other basic unit of computation on the Ethereum computer and how expensive would it be? If it involves one or several distributed blockchain operations, then it seems to me that this model would be neither energy efficient, nor performant, especially if we take into account the distributed factor, which means that such an operation would be very costly since getting one bit of information from one end to the other requires an arbitrary number of routers along its path, and those consume energy to operate. So I guess what I'm trying to ask is if this is practical in any useful way.
- jarsin 11y ago
  opcodes cost gas. More in depth [1] and in the yellow paper linked in the stack exchange question. [1] http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-were-gas-costs-chosen-for-the-ethereum-virtual-machine-instructions/132 http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-were-gas-...
- alexfisher 11y ago
  Check-out the Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction set by reviewing Gavin's Yellow Paper. It start on page 22: http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf
ilaksh 11y ago
We need something like Ethereum or Bitcoin but built on a common platform such as web assembly which is an AST supporting multiple programming languages, with semantic versioning and an npm-like registry. This way it can evolve easily.
- jbpetersen 11y ago
  We're only one transpiler away from that.
bshanks 11y ago
The way i think about Ethereum is that it's a cloud computing platform upon which the whole world can see which program the server is running. The usefulness of this is that if you want to run a computing service that administers something of great value to others (such as a vote-counting service or a property registry), other people might be suspicious that you will use your administrative access to the server to corrupt the system. With Ethereum, the service provider doesn't have any admin access (and neither do the people upon whose hardware the program is ultimately running on); the cloud computer just runs the program you upload, and everyone can see what program that is. In addition, it runs your service robustly, and preserves the entire history of the computation forever. The downside is that these transparency and robustness features make the service a lot more expensive than ordinary cloud computing, as well as more difficult to program on. It doesn't really have much to do with Bitcoin or currency (except that (a) like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses blockchain technology to achieve these things; but that's an implementation detail (b) a Bitcoin clone is one of the many things you could build as an Ethereum application (c) for technical reasons you buy Ethereum server time via purchasing server-time-credits called "Ether"). As a project, Ethereum is very technically ambitious (they are not just working on a cloud computing platform, but also trying to advance blockchain technology in general, eg developing a new proof-of-stake algorithm, and eg developing a way to not have to replicate computations on every node on the network). They are trying to do a lot of new things at once, which is risky (but awesome).
happywolf 11y ago
Need somebody to shed lights on this: my understanding is Ethereum started with pre-farmed ethers and opened for sale in bitcoins. My two questions: 1) Any info on how many ethers the founders/founding company had farmed and holding in vault? 2) If Ethereum takes off (financially), and these early members start to dump the ethers for cash, will it crash the Ethereum economy? Bitcoin could have exactly the same issue, but I feel the difference is most people then wasn't sure if crypto currency would fly, and it is fair to reward on the risk for those who trusted and held bitcoins. Ethereum sounds like a more refined and polished business endeavour, and I feel it gets too much hype lately.
contingencies 11y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the missing piece for the crypto-anarchist spiritual lineage of fintech to take off is a business-level transaction protocol (and associated open source server) that is generic enough to embrace all of the different settlement mechanisms and transaction types out there, as well as incorporating an adequately comprehensible means of markup for risk models. Not "send <amount_of_bitcoin_portions> to <bitcoin address>", but rather "invoice X for service Y settle by datetime Z, available modes of settlement ABC, after which service Y (or good G) will be rendered. policies for various types of transaction failures are DEF. proposing node's risk model: R.". The idea is not to supplant Bitcoin/Ethereum but in fact to give them more market share by enabling them to be considered on a properly equal, pragmatic basis with conventional financial services or assets. This would encourage their selection (automatically or otherwise) versus some defined risk model (temporal, legal, etc.), over conventional financial services or assets. Things that come for free or almost for free when you adopt dynamic financial routing include settlement path redundancy, multi-path settlement, RFQs/bids, multi-hop routing, financial system reliability, etc. Something like real world aware IPv4, for money. I've already suggested an endpoint identification scheme - https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposals/iiban https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposa... - which is the native account identifier at Kraken. If anyone would be keen to work in this direction, I started https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposals/ifex https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposa... years ago, but had to give it up due to competing concerns. I'm ready to jump in again but don't want to go solo.
l_beka_l 11y ago
Awesome Ethereum https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-ethereum https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-ethereum

413 points by hunglee2 11y ago

Does Ethereum provide any solution to the [ever growing Blckchain](https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size) ?

eco 11y ago
Yes. See Vitalik's post from last year about State Tree Pruning: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/

t0mk 11y ago

I wonder to what extent is the price rise a bubble, and to what extent it's valuation of the potential.

jnpn 11y ago
Look at the full stock price history of any company which became very valuable, and you'll see bubbles and busts along the way. Whether the market's calculations of Ethereum's potential is correct remains to be seen, we'll have to see what gets built on it over the next few years.
davidgerard 11y ago
It was a pump'n'dump. Lots and lots of people on the Reddit bitcoin-related subs reported PM spam about Ethereum, for instance.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  Pump and dump the way you phrased it, seems to auggest the entire thing is a pump and dump scheme. Either way, the price fluctuates woldly as people try to do this scheme, but the company raised $15m and appears to be actively developing the tech. So whether it works(it appears promising) or not, they seem to be svidly trying
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    I'm speaking specifically of the price rise then fall in the last couple of weeks. The fundraiser, of course, was a pre-mined altcoin.
    - vonklaus 11y ago
      Interesting take. To summarize, you believe that speculators manipulate markets and prices decouple from value because self interested parties force it to communicate information incorrectly? Also, you point out that the announcement of the intention to premine ether ended up leading to the Ethereum project implementing a plan to premine ether and sell it at a known and predetermined rate? Riveting conclusion, surprised more people aren't talking about this. I for one don't buy into the "conspiracy theory" that our society is built on debt, and monetary and fiscal policy have been managed poorly such that capital can not be incentivized to loan. Instead, rates will penalize banks for not lending, as economists try to force staples like food and oil up to introduce inflation into the system as they have lost control on spending as well as flooring rate levels thus losing both measures to fix the problem. If that were true, it would be bad. All above was obvious satire

fiatjaf 11y ago

So this thing is live yet? I thought they were having problems with the algorithms and so on.

aakilfernandes 11y ago
Its technically in the "frontier" stage, which means that its in "beta" of sorts. There are lots of developers working on Ethereum dapps and it is more than useable, however consumers should be aware there may be loss-causing bugs around.
- deleted 11y ago
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  - fsiefken 11y ago
    I think he means http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ Not sure if these are used for any serious use case yet.
    - deleted 11y ago
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  - delluminatus 11y ago
    Who would use a beta version of a crypto product in a production setting?
  - phpnode 11y ago
    > Bitcoin is used by millions of people a day now. Tangible example please. Bit Coin transaction volume is about 200k/day, so how are these millions of people using it?
  - crazydoggers 11y ago
    Why does there have to be large scale production use while it's in beta? Bitcoin's genesis block was mined in 2009, but it took years for it to come out of "beta" and see production adoption. Ethereum adoption actually is already outpacing Bitcoin's adoption. Ethereum has only been live since July of this year, and already has seen adoption by numerous corporations (even if it's largely development projects at this point). For example Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service runs Ethereum. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-blockchain-as-a-service-now-on-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-blockchain-a... And here's a large test run conducted with 11 Banks across the globe: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banks-distributed-ledger-using-ethereum-microsoft-azure-1539044 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banks-distributed-le...

roymurdock 11y ago

What are the costs like for building resource intensive apps on ethereum? Would be interested in comparing with centralized compute providers.

replies_to_all 11y ago
A lot more expensive. There will be no comparison in cost, or at least that is the wrong comparison to be making.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm reading ethereum right, but it sounds a lot like mesh computing, where a user can bid for unused cycles on a bunch of networked computers, or one "world computer" if you agree with the author's characterization. If that is correct, then ethereum and Amazon spot instances could be interchangeable - low availability, but potentially lower cost due to the bidding process if there is a lot of excess compute power on the network.
  - aakilfernandes 11y ago
    Sorry, thats not correct. The only person who gets compensated for performing computations are the miners. Everyone else performs computation so they can have an up-to-date blockchain, but are not compensated. Ethereum is the most expensive computational environment you can imagine. However, it is also the highest trust. Its not for computationally-limited (gaming/data analysis) its for trust-limited (financial applications/privacy) There is an effort to build a computation market on top of Ethereum, but the computation happens off the chain. https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market
    - roymurdock 11y ago
      For some reason I thought Ethereum was different than a flavored blockchain, but I guess it's just the branding/dev ecosystem that is different.

shanehoban 11y ago

I get spammed daily on Reddit from bots supporting Ethereum (currency) - so the name causes hatred for me already.

JimDabell 11y ago
Ethereum supporters hate it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/415kx8/if_you_are_coming_from_rbitcoin_because_of_a_spam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/415kx8/if_you_are...
aakilfernandes 11y ago
Side note: Ethereum is the technology, ether is the currency.
- deleted 11y ago
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DennisP 11y ago
I get those too. All the messages I've gotten have had similar-looking random names from new accounts, so I think it's one idiot with a bot. Ethereum devs have asked this person to stop, subreddit admins have asked people to use the spam report button, but only Reddit employees can actually do anything about it.
imglorp 11y ago
There are speculators on all the blockchains, even on the chains not designated as currencies. They irritate and demoralize the developers with their trolling and hostility over unsatisfactory chain exchange rates--the only thing they're invested in--while the developers are merely attempting to build distributed apps to benefit society. These are the same breed of asshole who have ruined wall street, college sports, and anything else they can bet on.

teraflop 11y ago

The article is pretty light on technical details. Does Ethereum suffer from the same design limitation as Bitcoin, where every operation must be verified by every node? If so, I have a really hard time believing it will scale. Look how much difficulty the Bitcoin network is having with just a couple of transactions per second.

empath75 11y ago
That's a political problem with the miners and developers. There's no technical reason they couldn't raise the block size.
- ufo 11y ago
  You shouldn't ignore political problems when it comes to distributed systems... Additionally, raising the block size cap is only a stopgap measure. Eventually you will reach hard bandwidth or disk storage limits and the only way will be to throw some transactions outside the blockchain.
  - nickik 11y ago
    Bishares is a blockchain that can do as many and more transaction as Visa. Their does not seem to be a fundamental problem as long as you accept that Worker(miners) are fast servers with good networks.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  Is this true? I believe there is a tradeoff but want a more in depth explsnation if possible
  - maxander 11y ago
    As I recall (and this may not be the whole of it), the "tradeoff" was that a larger block size would risk getting attention from China's great firewall, effectively splitting the network and rendering Chinese users' funds effectively worthless. And it turns out a set of Chinese users have a controlling interest in the network currently... so yes, its a political problem par excellence. It occurs to me as I write that Ethereum may have similar problems down the line, when platform updates turn out to be direly needed, but would disrupt the operation of well-established and lucrative apps.

srameshc 11y ago

What happened overnight ? Why am I seeing so much ethereum this morning ?

aakilfernandes 11y ago
I often notice HN topics come in groups. I think its because people read about a topic, get interested, do some research, and then start submitting articles they find.

powera 11y ago

I still don't understand how anyone can believe that paying ten to a hundred times as much for algorithmically provable trust or whatever will get any market traction ever.

SolarNet 11y ago
Because it's something that doesn't otherwise exist. It's actual innovation, where else in the world can you run trustless global peer-to-peer applications? It will be a while before it's commercially viable, sure, but it's something unique.
jnpn 11y ago
There are many services in this world which require a trusted intermediary between users. The fees these services charge are _not_ a function of compute cycles. They are, however, often a function of pricing power derived from competition (or lack thereof). Where decentralized computation is less expensive than the fees charged by incumbents in the trusted intermediary business, there is the opportunity for a new entrant to leverage the tech to profit on the spread.
srameshc 11y ago
I very much agree with you. Its hard to believe that this will rise to the bitcoin trust level. If anything I believe in sidechain.
fragsworth 11y ago
One tangible example is how there is significant legal and accounting overhead for banking contracts, particularly credit default swaps and other risk-mitigating things. Some of these can be automated in Ethereum.
fragsworth 11y ago
One tangible example is how there is significant legal and accounting overhead for banking contracts, particularly credit default swaps and other risk-mitigating things. Some of these can be automated in Ethereum.

tluyben2 11y ago

I built a PoC for a social benefits platform on this a while ago. It was not ideal; mostly tasks that needed to be guaranteed to run at certain times was a pain. Because of several of those issues the project was cancelled.

jbpetersen 11y ago
Were you using Ethereum Alarm Clock? If you were then I'd be curious to hear about issues with it and if not then taking a second shot at your PoC could be worthwhile.

na85 11y ago

Has it been six months since the last Ethereum post already? Is Ethereum still "engendering positive disruption"? I see they've updated their site to make it more approachable and read less like proecdurally-generated Venture Capitalist jargon. That's nice. I see they've added a javascript environment. Yuck.

mbilker 11y ago
They had the javascript environment for awhile now.

joshuakarjala 11y ago

Have built a demo app with Ethereum in November. The tooling was ok, but not amazing. IMO one of the main problems is that you need trusted inputs for most "interesting" or "valuable" computations.

pipermerriam 11y ago
Developing on the platform right now is akin to writing software to run on a VM that has no operating system. The services that are being written right now can be thought of as the operating system (foundation) that everything that will come next is built on. To do the really interesting stuff you have to first build all of the really low level tooling to support it. There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a few years away. Complex applications like those are going to require significant base infrastructure that just doesn't exist yet. The "Trusted" inputs problem is complex and I don't believe there will be a single solution. Some applications will be fine using trusted oracles. Others will need a more trustless model which is going to require on-chain reputation systems which in-turn is going to require some level of identity/anti-sybil system.
- repomies69 11y ago
  > There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a few years away. At least a few years? LOL. I would give it 20 years.

Uptrenda 11y ago

Crypto has come a long way since Ethereum was first conceived and what was impossible only a few months ago is now 100% practical. Today there are A LOT of new techniques that allow us to largely implement decentralized autonomous applications on any blockchain (no matter how limited) - a fact I feel often gets missed out in all of the Ethereum hype. If you have a lot a techniques like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic computations, multi-party computation, indistinishability (sic) obfuscation (not quite practical yet), and various threshold schemes - you will quickly realize we could basically already do everything that Ethereum was designed for from the start. In fact - a lot of the new crypto techniques make it possible to scale DAC applications even better than what blockchains would allow since you can implement a lot of crypto-application protocols outside of the blockchain and keep only the hash-locked payments on the chain (which I honestly think is preferable.) It just seems to me like Vitalik largely invented Ethereum because he didn't want to bother messing around with all the crypto-hacking that's required to implement self-enforcing, autonomous contracts (which is half the fun.) My biggest problem with this is people act like this isn't possible with Bitcoin when we had working smart contracts (and special coins for smart contracts) before Ethereum even existed. Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment which means if you structure your crypto-protocol right you can essentially implement any self-paying, and self-running corporation as a never-ending complex chain of future problems. (I would speculate that it's even possible to build a universal turning machine on top of any bitcoin-style blockchain that can compute any problem off-chain and allow these computations to be proven and self-enforcing but that is a topic for future research.)

cdetrio 11y ago
> Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment Sure, bitcoin script can in theory compute any computable problem (as can any turing machine). But it doesn't have native access to the data it needs, so pretty much any input you'd want to use needs to be put there by a trusted "oracle" (through a clever encoding into UTXO logic). For example, bitcoin script can't compare the amount of coins sent to two different bitcoin addresses, so you'd need to use oracles to do that [1]. In ethereum script it is trivial to do it on-chain (no oracles needed), since it was designed from the ground up for such use-cases (i.e. "smart contracts"). 1. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36229/bitcoin-script-for-a-competitive-crowdfunding-like-contract http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36229/bitcoin-scr...

kang 11y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142 Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is it advantageous if a DSL is turing complete? It is not that bitcoin 'cannot have' a turing complete script but that it is unsafe & there is no need to do so. Turing completeness can be applied on an upper abstraction. There is nothing that ethereum can do that bitcoin cannot! The proof of it is RootStock which is ethereum implementation using bitcoin. Ethereum is full of buzzwords and the key one of them is DApps. Here [0] is how to build a dapp using bitcoin. Basically you can tell me any application of ethereum and I'll tell you how you can do it with bitcoin. Skynet type input requiring applications can't be done inherently by either ether or bitcoin but can be done by both using third-party oracles. Then are bitcoin & ethereum equivalent. No, they key is origin of money. Bitcoin is mined, ether was sold. The recent rise in price has attracted all kinds of attention but talk to any of the core-devs and they'll tell you that Vitalik used to come up with complicated explanations which they spent time studying and responding & then he'd come back with something even more complicated until they stopped caring. [0] http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowdfunding/ http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowd...

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
> Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. Is this your opinion because you truly believe it or because you have a horse in the bitcoin race? I'm not saying that Ethereum is superior to bitcoin but at least from a brief look over it, it seems to make quite a bit of sense. Whereas my experience with bitcoin is that it's an incredibly hacky and questionable system that primarily survives because of the collective investment into it, not on its technical merit.
- jarsin 11y ago
  Yep ethereum has been out for what 6 months and look at all of development on top of it already. BTC has tons of VC money and I see nothing interesting beyond a few regulated exchanges. But oh ya we are all suppose to believe BTC can do all of this but apparently nobody really knows how. It's really just a bunch of people that think BTC is special because it was first, but it lost it's first mover advantage. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/43fm3w/the_core_value_proposition_of_ethereum_is_synergy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/43fm3w/the_core_... http://dapps.ethercasts.com/ http://dapps.ethercasts.com/

LAMike 11y ago

Is there a "Hello World" version of a DAC? What is the simplest contract I can make? And do I need a 3rd party oracle to confirm anything?

drcode 11y ago
It would look something like: contract Hello { string greeting; function setName(string name) { greeting="Hello "+name; } } The solidity compiler will automatically produce a "getter" function to retrieve the greeting.
- csarva 11y ago
  It will only be exposed automatically if you mark it public, i.e., 'string public greeting'
pre 11y ago
Yep. Running it is about as far as I got with my investigations. https://www.ethereum.org/greeter https://www.ethereum.org/greeter
- CephalopodMD 11y ago
  What is wrong with this website? It is glitchy looking as hell.
splintercell 11y ago
SimpleStorage is one of the 'HelloWorld' equivalents of DAPPs. http://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/introduction-to-smart-contracts.html http://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/introduction-to-sm... Third party oracle services are provided by Oraclize.it
fudged71 11y ago
I think the most logical DAC should be a distributed network of lemonade stand franchises :)

kefka 11y ago

Unfortunately, I'm trying to obtain a small amount of ethereum currency to experiment with this.. And I just killed my thread doing 1M hashes a sec, because I found out that 6MHash/sec = 5 Eth/month on average. I'll spend my time learning other things, mainly because this is inaccessible to me.

jarsin 11y ago
Just download the mist wallet and mine on the test network which is what you should be doing if you are playing with it anyway. https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
cjm 11y ago
You can buy the Ether on an exchange.
- kefka 11y ago
  I was hoping for a roughly low barrier of entry, rather than try to figure out who will trade USB for ETH, as I have no BTC. In all honesty, I'm looking at distributed applications as well, which from what I read Ethereum says it does and doesn't do. It's a bit fast and loose from what I read about, about Ethereum's capabilities. I'll go back to my experimenting with TOR and how it might be possible to make your own distributed applications within the Hidden Services. That's free to use, and as low bar as I can think of. (Add machine, shows up as HS.)
  - xavieryvez 11y ago
    While developing, you would do it either on the dev (local, not connected) or testnet. Both these are easily mineable (I have 10k's on both), so there is nothing stopping you to actually playing around and putting together a dapp without having real ETH in your pocket. No expenses and you can play around all you like. When you want to go live, there is typically only a very small deployment cost.
  - crazydoggers 11y ago

jcfrei 11y ago

I've dabbled with the dev tools ethereum provided for a while and I can't imagine that the computations ethereum does will ever be fast enough for a general purpose, distributed computation platform. If I had to wager on yet another cryptocurrency™ I'd bet on Zcash (https://github.com/zcash/zcash https://github.com/zcash/zcash). They promise a real differentiator for cryptocurrencies with their zero-knowledge proofs.

pipermerriam 11y ago
Have you read up on the proposals and information on plans for Proof-of-Stake (Casper) and Scaling/Concurrency via sharding? Both of those are directed at fixing the "fast enough" problem.
7373737373 11y ago
There is http://golemproject.net/ http://golemproject.net/, which builds on top of Ethereum and uses it for administrative purposes (e.g. payments).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rodrigo-mx 11y ago

Let's everybody use our home electricity so that big companies save big money managing their big data!

rodrigo-mx 11y ago

Let's everybody use our home electricity so that big companies save big money managing their big data!

repomies69 11y ago

Are there examples of in/use DAPPS?

httpagent 11y ago
Augur, a decentralized prediction market, is the biggest anticipated release on the horizon.

repomies69 11y ago

"The Ethereum network is a distributed economy like Bitcoin, except it is much, much more powerful. The essential difference is that Ethereum is programmable. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to program a whole new currency like Bitcoin." AFAIK it takes 5 minutes to fork Bitcoin and create a new altcoin. Why would I use ethereum for my altcoin instead of doing a new altcoin?

eco 11y ago
They don't mean fork ethereum and create a new currency. They mean create a new currency running on the ethereum platform. A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it. Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has. Here is the tutorial about creating your own coin on ethereum. It's pretty short and interesting: https://www.ethereum.org/token https://www.ethereum.org/token People like to think of ether as another cryptocurrency like bitcoin but the ethereum currency is intended to be more like a commodity that is used to fuel the platform that runs all sorts of stuff (including currencies).
- repomies69 11y ago
  I know what they mean. > A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it. Of course, you need miners. However the mining is the easy part, otherwise you need marketing, use cases, etc, for the currency to get any traction. I think an altcoin working on top of the ethereum blockchain would not be as convincing as invidual altcoin. However of course if we are speaking about some other kind of asset, it might make sense to do it on ethereum. > Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has. No. Maybe mining security or something, but trust? Why would anyone use these crappy in-ethereum tokens, when you can just use ether itself. Or bitcoin. You can make tokens as well inside bitcoin via colored coins and similar methods. They haven't gained much traction, I doubt that they will inside ethereum.
  - eterpstra 11y ago

Animats 11y ago

This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the typical football fan. Possible YC startup.

repomies69 11y ago
If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? I would bet my ass off that the end-users (gamblers) don't give a crap whether it is on blockchain or not, they just want it to be easy, quick and possibly cheap. And of course trustable. And by latter I don't mean "mathematical proof" trustable, they want brand that they know to trust.
- jarsin 11y ago
  > they want brand that they know to trust. like fulltilt or leehman brothers!
  - repomies69 11y ago
    You have to take in account that for every failed banks there is something like 20 banks that have worked good enough. For full tilt, there has been many gambling services that haven't failed yet. When using banking services, you have a risk of a bank run. How big that risk is? How much work are you willing to do, or how much money are you willing to spend to migitate that risk?
- aianus 11y ago
  > If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? Because it's not legal (in the US), obviously. But the feds won't be able to shut it down if it's on the blockchain. Look at bittorrent, still perfectly alive and well after so many years.
11y ago

ck2 11y ago

Heated my apartment two winters ago with litecoin and dogecoin mining. Too late for ether.

iamthepieman 11y ago

i see a browser plugin/app like "Cloud to Butt"[0] that detects phrases like "I would bet my ass off" or "I bet you that" or "I wager" and converts them to a prediction market link - creating the market if it doesn't exist or just linking to it if it does. [0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...

nikkwong 11y ago

I'm still not getting this. Let's say I have a node server that can serve up some sort of front end application. How would something like that run on etherium? Are a number of computers in the network going to get a copy of my source code copied onto them so they can 'distribute' it effectively? That doesn't seem very practical to me.

drcode 11y ago
> That doesn't seem very practical to me. Ethereum has the highest uptime of any computing platform ever developed. It's probably something like 99.99999% uptime (assuming a 0.00001% yearly chance that the earth is destroyed in a given year from a giant asteroid impact) What would be a "practical" way of getting the same results with your node server?

vamur 11y ago

One issue with Ethereum is that smart contracts are expensive and must run on every node. These days a VPS with 2GB RAM costs $4 so Ethereum would not be competitive even in short term. Another issue is the blockchain size which is already 8GB and growing faster than the Bitcoin blockchain.

drcode 11y ago
Ethereum smart contracts have abilities far beyond a VPS, particularly around security, reliability, and trustlessness guarantees- Whether you think those abilities have value and justify a new platform is a separate question, but the argument that "this is like a VPS" is a misunderstanding of what ethereum is offering with its technology. The large blockchain size, on the other hand, is a legitimate problem with ethereum (as with all blockchain systems.) Hopefully the devs will be able to solve this problem- They are hard at work on a potential solution as we speak.
- vamur 11y ago
  Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps. This would mean that for most applications trustlessness is not very useful. And for those apps where it would be generally useful, such as exchanges, betting. etc, the expensive nature of gas would mean that operating on Ethereum would be cost prohibitive and they would lose to their centralized competitors. And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS?
  - drcode 11y ago
    > Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no useful or popular dapps. I think that's a valid criticism- I, too, am a bit disappointed that there are few contracts yet with obvious utility. However, as someone deep in the community and talking to lots of people, it seems there's going to be tons of interesting dapps deployed in the next 6 months. Hopefully there will be a "killer dapp" among them. > And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS? If I store money on your VPS-based app, how can I be assured you can't steal it from me? If I use a feature on your VPS, how can I be sure you won't disable it tomorrow? Ethereum can provide these sorts of guarantees.

camelNotation 11y ago

Actually, you can turn it off in every way that counts as long as you turn off the Internet, which is entirely possible.

dudeonthenet 11y ago

I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question: When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the network (or other blockchain technologies) can perform. If we think of regular computers, then no matter in which language an application ( i dislike the word 'app' :) is written in, eventually we end up talking about the x86 instruction set, the microcode that makes up each instruction, and, finally, the actual transistors logic that run them. I somehow feel this is important to ask because we have to take into account the energy efficiency of computation. For example, if we think about the x86 ADD instruction, there is an approximately fixed amount of energy it dissipates when it is performed. ( This is a pretty interesting subject in intself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle ) What would be an equivalent ADD instruction or other basic unit of computation on the Ethereum computer and how expensive would it be? If it involves one or several distributed blockchain operations, then it seems to me that this model would be neither energy efficient, nor performant, especially if we take into account the distributed factor, which means that such an operation would be very costly since getting one bit of information from one end to the other requires an arbitrary number of routers along its path, and those consume energy to operate. So I guess what I'm trying to ask is if this is practical in any useful way.

jarsin 11y ago
opcodes cost gas. More in depth [1] and in the yellow paper linked in the stack exchange question. [1] http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-were-gas-costs-chosen-for-the-ethereum-virtual-machine-instructions/132 http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/52/how-were-gas-...
alexfisher 11y ago
Check-out the Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction set by reviewing Gavin's Yellow Paper. It start on page 22: http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

ilaksh 11y ago

We need something like Ethereum or Bitcoin but built on a common platform such as web assembly which is an AST supporting multiple programming languages, with semantic versioning and an npm-like registry. This way it can evolve easily.

jbpetersen 11y ago
We're only one transpiler away from that.

bshanks 11y ago

The way i think about Ethereum is that it's a cloud computing platform upon which the whole world can see which program the server is running. The usefulness of this is that if you want to run a computing service that administers something of great value to others (such as a vote-counting service or a property registry), other people might be suspicious that you will use your administrative access to the server to corrupt the system. With Ethereum, the service provider doesn't have any admin access (and neither do the people upon whose hardware the program is ultimately running on); the cloud computer just runs the program you upload, and everyone can see what program that is. In addition, it runs your service robustly, and preserves the entire history of the computation forever. The downside is that these transparency and robustness features make the service a lot more expensive than ordinary cloud computing, as well as more difficult to program on. It doesn't really have much to do with Bitcoin or currency (except that (a) like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses blockchain technology to achieve these things; but that's an implementation detail (b) a Bitcoin clone is one of the many things you could build as an Ethereum application (c) for technical reasons you buy Ethereum server time via purchasing server-time-credits called "Ether"). As a project, Ethereum is very technically ambitious (they are not just working on a cloud computing platform, but also trying to advance blockchain technology in general, eg developing a new proof-of-stake algorithm, and eg developing a way to not have to replicate computations on every node on the network). They are trying to do a lot of new things at once, which is risky (but awesome).

happywolf 11y ago

Need somebody to shed lights on this: my understanding is Ethereum started with pre-farmed ethers and opened for sale in bitcoins. My two questions: 1) Any info on how many ethers the founders/founding company had farmed and holding in vault? 2) If Ethereum takes off (financially), and these early members start to dump the ethers for cash, will it crash the Ethereum economy? Bitcoin could have exactly the same issue, but I feel the difference is most people then wasn't sure if crypto currency would fly, and it is fair to reward on the risk for those who trusted and held bitcoins. Ethereum sounds like a more refined and polished business endeavour, and I feel it gets too much hype lately.

contingencies 11y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the missing piece for the crypto-anarchist spiritual lineage of fintech to take off is a business-level transaction protocol (and associated open source server) that is generic enough to embrace all of the different settlement mechanisms and transaction types out there, as well as incorporating an adequately comprehensible means of markup for risk models. Not "send <amount_of_bitcoin_portions> to <bitcoin address>", but rather "invoice X for service Y settle by datetime Z, available modes of settlement ABC, after which service Y (or good G) will be rendered. policies for various types of transaction failures are DEF. proposing node's risk model: R.". The idea is not to supplant Bitcoin/Ethereum but in fact to give them more market share by enabling them to be considered on a properly equal, pragmatic basis with conventional financial services or assets. This would encourage their selection (automatically or otherwise) versus some defined risk model (temporal, legal, etc.), over conventional financial services or assets. Things that come for free or almost for free when you adopt dynamic financial routing include settlement path redundancy, multi-path settlement, RFQs/bids, multi-hop routing, financial system reliability, etc. Something like real world aware IPv4, for money. I've already suggested an endpoint identification scheme - https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposals/iiban https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposa... - which is the native account identifier at Kraken. If anyone would be keen to work in this direction, I started https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposals/ifex https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-proposa... years ago, but had to give it up due to competing concerns. I'm ready to jump in again but don't want to go solo.

l_beka_l 11y ago

Awesome Ethereum https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-ethereum https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-ethereum