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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

• 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/
    • kang 11y ago
      Please give me an ethereum use case & I'll try to tell you how you can do it with bitcoin. I have previously answered a few use cases here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846788]
      • drcode 11y ago
        Sending money to someone and having 99.9% certainty after a minute that the transaction is mined and will be in the chain long term. Even though ethereum's 15 sec blocks are nowhere near as secure as Bitcoins 10 minute blocks, the fact that you can 4 blocks after a minute already gives pretty decent doublespend security, from a statistical standpoint.
      • woah 11y ago
        Easy scripting language. And don't tell me about rootstock, it's not on top of Bitcoin.
        • httpagent 11y ago
          Can you elaborate on rootstock not being on top of bitcoin? That was my understanding...
      • jarsin 11y ago
        the bitshares, nxt, insert any blockchain project all say the same thing yet none of them comes even close to the amount of dev taking place on ethereum. hmm why is that....
        • kang 11y ago
          Vitalik became famous cause of his journalism. Then the sale gave ether founders loads of money. Now it is being used to market cleverly. One example around me here in India is BlockchainU. Blockchain university has taught in almost all prime Indian IT companies pumping ethereum & thus atleast most, if not all, corporate devs are working on ethereum here, whereas there is no central advertising foundation for bitcoin.
  • kang 11y ago
    I have both bitcoin & ether apart from hundred other coins; earning profit is different from technical merit. I spent a long time studying ethereum as a promise for something incredible but in the end I realized its just the power of blockchains & can be done using bitcoin too. What I do not like in ethereum is the nature of origin of ether which makes it just an IPO coin.
    • pipermerriam 11y ago
      > Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. I'm failing to see your point. Does the fact that things are possible with bitcoin make the technical merits of Ethereum less in some way? > What I do not like in ethereum is the nature of origin of ether which makes it just an IPO coin. The "makes it just an IPO coin" statement also seems to discount any of the technical merits of the platform due to your dislike of how the initial coin distribution occurred. Disclaimer: I stand to benefit financially if the platform succeeds.
      • waterlesscloud 11y ago
        This is the sort of discussion I have zero interest in taking part in personally. Facts on the ground are already overtaking misinformed opinions, so why bother arguing?
      • kang 11y ago
        Did not mean to say that ethereum is 'less' than bitcoin in capability, just that ethereum is being sold that way. Yes I dislike it for political reasons & yet I own it because profit. >to discount any of the technical merits of the platform due to your dislike That is what I wanted to argue about, there are no additional merits to ethereum over bitcoin as people seem to believe
• xavieryvez 11y ago
  I agree in some respects, i.e. RootStock basically plugs onto Bitcoin what the Ethereum decentralized execution model does. You can actually run your Ethereum-developed apps on top of it, they mention it is fully compatible. SatoshiDice is not quite the same as a Ethereum app, the former requires the central website to be online and operating whereas the latter would work even when the site is down since the execution is not centralised. Add Rootstock however and the same applies. Source: Just finished building a couple of "games" on the Ethereum platform, http://the.looney.farm http://the.looney.farm - one is SatoshiDice-like but not one of them needs the website to be up to operate. Where you are 100% right - there are multiple ways to solve a problem, so to a user there should be no difference between gaming on something like SatoshiDice or something like mine. Central or de-central, the user probably won't care in the longer term. If you transfer value, you can do it on any crypto, however there may just be with a different way of implementing it or going about your business getting it up.
  • linagee 11y ago
    > they mention it is fully compatible. As far as I know, Rootstock is still just a whitepaper. So this is just a promise to be compatible. Nothing exists yet, it's vaporware at this point.
• cdetrio 11y ago
  > SatoshiDice is a dapp that was built using bitcoin. But SatoshiDice was not trustless; it was only provably-fair. By sending your dice bet to satoshidice, you were trusting them to actually pay you if you won instead of just keeping your money (though you didn't have to trust that they were using a fair die). An on-chain dice contract is completely different, because there's no central operator that you have to trust to pay out the winnings.
  • kang 11y ago
    You are right my example was wrong. Yet dapps can be done using bitcoin nevertheless.
• crazydoggers 11y ago
  > Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin That's like saying give me any HTTP use-case, and I'll tell you how to do it with Gopher. To me Rootstock is like putting the WWW on top of Gopher. You can do it, but why? "We don't need GUIs, command lines can do everything!" "We don't need Java/Python/Ruby, you can do it all in C!" "We don't need C, you can do it all Assembly!" Ease of development and implementation really matter. If I can accomplish creating my block chain app on Ethereum in a fraction of the time and complexity of the same thing on Bitcoin, I'd have to have an extremely compelling reason to choose Bitcoin instead.
  • kang 11y ago
    You are right, ease of use matters but it is so because ether was sold and got a lot of money whereas no such body exists in bitcoin. With that money ethereum could fund coding. That is a good thing unless the whole point of the system is decentralization. This is similar to Amazon selling AWScoin and launching a SETI-like software so anyone can run their system as an AWS server & earn AWScoins.
    • crazydoggers 11y ago
      I'm not sure what you're arguing? Ethereum is fully decentralized and open source. There happens to be a well funded non-profit that the community funded in order to speed up development (EthDEV). Ethereum and EthDEV are not one in the same thing. If EthDEV disappeared, ethereum would continue. That's a little different than some Amazon owned and operated "AWScoin". Bitcoin also has the "Bitcoin Foundation" which employs lead developer Gavin Andresen, so it's very similar.
      • Anonobread 11y ago
        Gavin is no longer lead developer and hasn't been for years now.
        • crazydoggers 11y ago
          Yes, he is no longer "the lead" developer, but he's still a core contributor, and is Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, so the point stands.
• desdiv 11y ago
  >Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. How do you implement a trustless SatoshiDice with bitcoin?
  • kang 11y ago
    You can do it using the appcoin concept [http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowdfunding/ http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowd...]
• simondlr 11y ago
  > Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. A dapp reaching into the state of another dapp.
  • kang 11y ago
    Using atomic-swap protocol
    • simondlr 11y ago
      I don't understand that. Can you elaborate?
• _superposition_ 11y ago
  Bias detection: How many BTC do you own?
  • kang 11y ago
    Since I cannot prove anything and you'll have to take my word for it, I'll gain more from the ether I hold than bitcoin I hold for same percentage rise. This is because I believe in ethereum's marketing more than bitcoin's. But this is HN & my point was that ethereum's USP is not U.
• jude- 11y ago
  > Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin. I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log (where inimitability is provided by PoW in these two cases). Once you have that, nodes in a decentralized application use it it to record their externally-visible state transitions, thereby giving each node a global, total ordering of all of the application's prior states. Then, the usefulness of one blockchain versus another is simply a function of how secure it is (i.e. how inimitable it is), how much bandwidth it offers (i.e. how much state can be recorded in a block), and how fast it can add new blocks. This is the approach Blockstack DNS uses, for example (full disclosure: I'm its lead engineer). It's designed to be portable across blockchains, so we can migrate it to a more secure one if the one it's currently using proves insufficient.
  • Anonobread 11y ago
    > I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log You're coming at this backwards. Once you have the most valuable cryptocurrency unit of account, you have the most security and the highest availability log in the world. On that basis, you can do just about anything, e.g. sidechains or payment channels. A "highly replicated log" is a prerequisite of that, and Bitcoin is currently winning that battle due to first mover advantage. Hence, anything can be built on top of that basis. If you have small competitor to Bitcoin that aims to do more, it's more valuable for the majority to snipe the features from the small competitor and make those features available denominated in the majority owned asset.
    • brathouz 11y ago
      Ethereum and Bitcoin can, and should, coexist. Both have something to offer to one another. For example, check out btcrelay.org. While you're waiting for Bitcoin to "snipe the features from the small competitor", that small competitor can lend a helping hand to Bitcoin.
      • Anonobread 11y ago
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  • kang 11y ago
    lightning network or sidechains
    • deleted 11y ago
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• andrewla 11y ago
  I'm of the minority opinion that the Turing-complete nature of Ethereum is an anti-feature. [1] The features that matter in my mind are things that make Ethereum superior to Bitcoin: 1. Shorter block times without compromising security -- GHOST was proposed for Bitcoin, but it's a long way from happening. 2. Every block contains the Merkle root of the balance tree, so proving account balance becomes a one-node + proof problem instead of an "entire blockchain" problem -- the only way that I can verify that a UTXO is valid is to have the entire blockchain forward from the UTXO block. In ethereum, I just need the root plus a proof at the top of the chain. 3. No reward halving. The fee schedule is constant, which means that the marginal rate of growth is diminishing, but the logic across the board for utility calculations is incredibly simple. 4. Easy offline transaction creation -- the properties in #2 means that all you need to generate a transaction is the nonce(s). 5. (possibly) ASIC-resistant proof-of-work. I'm not completely sold on this one; all it really means in my mind is that the cost of such ASICs is higher on a per unit basis, which means that the power is more likely to be consolidated than the double-SHA256. [1] Why do I think the whole Turing-complete thing and smart contracts are useless? Because fully-funded contracts are economically uninteresting. Basically, only zero-sum contracts can be encoded. If I borrow money from you at a given interest rate, I can do economically productive activity to make more money, and both pay you back and come out ahead. If I am instead forced to keep the total payback amount in escrow, then I have no capital to use, and the transaction is meaningless. Things like cryptographic ownership tokens (colored coins, etc.) have some limited utility, but as you say, those are easily done on the Bitcoin blockchain.
  • wocram 11y ago
    You can definitely enforce non-zero sum contracts, the problem being whether they are actually useful. If you're handing out loans, nothing stops the borrower from vanishing and creating a new identity or otherwise resetting their 'credit score'. It seems like a solvable problem though, you could then depend on some identity or credit oracle, and that could be built on trust (eg. in a government or facebook id), or some meaningful reputation scheme. I guess the trick here is whether you consider "losing credit score if you don't re-pay" enforcing the contract or not. Doing anything stricter, like programmatically garnishing wages or handling bankruptcy, seems like it would require a hard 1:1 mapping between a person and their ethereum presence, which is much more than trusting an oracle to provide a unique ID or reputation based credit score.
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