7 ms·

Ethereum isn't doomed. I don't think it will ever have as much backing as Bitcoin because of institutional buy-in; but the world needs programmable smart contra

Ethereum isn't doomed. I don't think it will ever have as much backing as Bitcoin because of institutional buy-in; but the world needs programmable smart contracts. Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Bitcoin in terms of international payments and store-of-value; and Ethereum in terms of contracts and computing.

JorgeGT 10y ago
> Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. But apparently it only takes a fork to freeze/reverse their contracts. I would take my chances with a traditional foundation, Alfred Nobel's is still running smoothly since +110 years ago, yearly executing its "code".
altoz 10y ago
RTFA. The idea of smart contracts isn't dead, but Ethereum looks like a terrible platform for it, given that it's very hard to audit the smart contracts on it.
- whiddershins 10y ago
  I agree with your sentiment but downvoting because the guidelines specifically ask that you not say things that imply a commenter hasn't read the article.
jerf 10y ago
A contract-based blockchain seems very likely to me. But there's no reason that has to be Ethereum. Having had the chance to sort of ponder this over the last couple of days, I can't help but come to the conclusion that Ethereum is indeed fundamentally flawed and probably entirely unsalvageable, for all the reasons given in that blog post and more. The eventual contract-based blockchain that succeeds is going to look a lot more, well, engineered, for lack of a better word. Probably a lot more proofs of various things. Fewer features that are all individually much stronger. In fact, there's little reason to believe that something this complicated would be done correctly the first time. Remember... Bitcoin is not the first digital currency either!
timmytokyo 10y ago
Ethereum is doomed, and not just because it's based on a poor design. It's doomed because it just shot its credibility to shreds by protecting a single, uniquely privileged contract. Forking proves that the ethereum network cannot be trusted as the neutral contract arbitrator it was designed to be. The idea of smart contracts is an interesting one, and perhaps another project will come along and do it better. But Ethereum won't be that project.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  Based on a poor design? according to who? It's the most advanced blockchain out there by far and wide! This was a single contract with a flaw, it's like saying the whole internet is doomed because some website got a SQL injection.
  - dkarapetyan 10y ago
    I don't think "most advanced blockchain out there" is actual praise. Systems, especially systems that are meant to serve as a substrate for more advanced systems must be simple to understand and reason about. Making the foundation turing complete is indeed poor design.
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      If your goal is a calculator, then a computer is a poor design indeed. Ethereum is meant to be a platform and goes far beyond what Bitcoin can do.
    - Retra 10y ago
      Turing completeness is not an implication of poor anything. All it does is remove certain kinds of generality from your proofs. You can still prove things, you just have to be careful stating what the assumptions are.
      - dkarapetyan 10y ago
        So you mean to tell me that taking away the ability to write generic programs to validate contracts is good design? See Rice's Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem). Once you have turing completeness verifying any non-trivial program property starts requiring grad school experience and real proficiency with writing and verifying proofs. Most people, including programmers, do not have the training nor the discipline to actually do what you suggested. In practice the assumptions you mention turn out to be assumptions about totality and termination of certain building blocks and so you are back to a restricted subset of the language which should have been the original language to begin with but instead of automatic verification you have turned the problem into manual labor. Thinking about this more I agree with the naysayers. Etherium was a good experiment to show people what they should not put into a smart contract system.
viraptor 10y ago
I think you're thinking of use cases that would definitely be stopped outside of ethereum world: > Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. You can do things like this, but the law either already covers this, or will adjust. If you gain money, you're expected to pay the usual tax on that gain. First few may get away with it, but once it becomes popular, audits will start. > Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Same as above - inheritance tax. Essentially it's this xkcd situation: https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/ Just with wealth gain and tax office instead.
- Tinyyy 10y ago
  The point of Ethereum is to provide something that is different from the real world. If not, it is simply fiat, except that it is 1000 times more inefficient and burns up loads of electricity.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    It has to affect the real world at some point. If it doesn't, what's the point?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bendbro 10y ago
  As long as you never convert into traditional currency, how will they know you participated in a transaction?
  - viraptor 10y ago
    As long as you never convert, what use is it? (and that's assuming your country doesn't require you to declare cryptocurrency gains)
jacques_chester 10y ago
> Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Billionaires still have nexuses with the physical world. The machines which execute their code, for example, can absolutely be affected by court orders. So too can their homes, their cars, their planes, their drones and of course their person. There's a brand of techno-utopianism that assumes that if it's virtual, it's magically immune from the whole mechanism of law. This has never been true. The law asserts itself to be omnipresent in all human affairs and -- unlike a computer program -- the law's power is accepted at face value by billions of people and underlined by men with guns and dogs.
- lsc 10y ago
  >the law's power is accepted at face value by billions of people and underlined by men with guns and dogs. emphasis mine. I find that last bit, though, to be super interesting; "enforced by men with guns" has always been a big part of the rhetoric of any discussion of law, anarchist, or libertarian thought. But... I'm not sure I've ever seen dogs mentioned in that context.
kalleboo 10y ago
> want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them Except we're just about to prove that an institution can decide to nullify a Ethereum contract with the soft/hard forks. In the very best case that will a cabal of miners with unknown intentions (and clearly they're not too invested in the Libertarian "code is contract" angle of the network) instead of a democratically constructed judicial system.
peterbonney 10y ago
"without worrying about a judge taking that away from them" Unfortunately the ultimate arbiter of the courts' authority is not a piece of code or a piece of paper, but the courts themselves. If someone disputes the authority of a contract (smart or otherwise) that dispute will ultimately be settled in court. Even if the contract contains language claiming that it is not open to interpretation by a certain court or set of courts, the validity of THAT language will ultimately be interpreted by... a court. There is no degree of technical cleverness that can supersede the authority of a sovereign entity. You can hide things from a sovereign, move things out of the reach of a sovereign, but you can never overrule a sovereign's authority within its own borders.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  In which border does the Etherium contract reside and who should the court order name?
  - naasking 10y ago
    Which ever border the "victim" files, and if the judge rules against you, your assets in that region can be seized.

JorgeGT 10y ago

> Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. But apparently it only takes a fork to freeze/reverse their contracts. I would take my chances with a traditional foundation, Alfred Nobel's is still running smoothly since +110 years ago, yearly executing its "code".

altoz 10y ago

RTFA. The idea of smart contracts isn't dead, but Ethereum looks like a terrible platform for it, given that it's very hard to audit the smart contracts on it.

whiddershins 10y ago
I agree with your sentiment but downvoting because the guidelines specifically ask that you not say things that imply a commenter hasn't read the article.

jerf 10y ago

A contract-based blockchain seems very likely to me. But there's no reason that has to be Ethereum. Having had the chance to sort of ponder this over the last couple of days, I can't help but come to the conclusion that Ethereum is indeed fundamentally flawed and probably entirely unsalvageable, for all the reasons given in that blog post and more. The eventual contract-based blockchain that succeeds is going to look a lot more, well, engineered, for lack of a better word. Probably a lot more proofs of various things. Fewer features that are all individually much stronger. In fact, there's little reason to believe that something this complicated would be done correctly the first time. Remember... Bitcoin is not the first digital currency either!

timmytokyo 10y ago

Ethereum is doomed, and not just because it's based on a poor design. It's doomed because it just shot its credibility to shreds by protecting a single, uniquely privileged contract. Forking proves that the ethereum network cannot be trusted as the neutral contract arbitrator it was designed to be. The idea of smart contracts is an interesting one, and perhaps another project will come along and do it better. But Ethereum won't be that project.

heliumcraft 10y ago
Based on a poor design? according to who? It's the most advanced blockchain out there by far and wide! This was a single contract with a flaw, it's like saying the whole internet is doomed because some website got a SQL injection.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  I don't think "most advanced blockchain out there" is actual praise. Systems, especially systems that are meant to serve as a substrate for more advanced systems must be simple to understand and reason about. Making the foundation turing complete is indeed poor design.
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    If your goal is a calculator, then a computer is a poor design indeed. Ethereum is meant to be a platform and goes far beyond what Bitcoin can do.
  - Retra 10y ago
    Turing completeness is not an implication of poor anything. All it does is remove certain kinds of generality from your proofs. You can still prove things, you just have to be careful stating what the assumptions are.
    - dkarapetyan 10y ago
      So you mean to tell me that taking away the ability to write generic programs to validate contracts is good design? See Rice's Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem). Once you have turing completeness verifying any non-trivial program property starts requiring grad school experience and real proficiency with writing and verifying proofs. Most people, including programmers, do not have the training nor the discipline to actually do what you suggested. In practice the assumptions you mention turn out to be assumptions about totality and termination of certain building blocks and so you are back to a restricted subset of the language which should have been the original language to begin with but instead of automatic verification you have turned the problem into manual labor. Thinking about this more I agree with the naysayers. Etherium was a good experiment to show people what they should not put into a smart contract system.

viraptor 10y ago

I think you're thinking of use cases that would definitely be stopped outside of ethereum world: > Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. You can do things like this, but the law either already covers this, or will adjust. If you gain money, you're expected to pay the usual tax on that gain. First few may get away with it, but once it becomes popular, audits will start. > Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Same as above - inheritance tax. Essentially it's this xkcd situation: https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/ Just with wealth gain and tax office instead.

Tinyyy 10y ago
The point of Ethereum is to provide something that is different from the real world. If not, it is simply fiat, except that it is 1000 times more inefficient and burns up loads of electricity.
- viraptor 10y ago
  It has to affect the real world at some point. If it doesn't, what's the point?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bendbro 10y ago
As long as you never convert into traditional currency, how will they know you participated in a transaction?
- viraptor 10y ago
  As long as you never convert, what use is it? (and that's assuming your country doesn't require you to declare cryptocurrency gains)

jacques_chester 10y ago

> Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Billionaires still have nexuses with the physical world. The machines which execute their code, for example, can absolutely be affected by court orders. So too can their homes, their cars, their planes, their drones and of course their person. There's a brand of techno-utopianism that assumes that if it's virtual, it's magically immune from the whole mechanism of law. This has never been true. The law asserts itself to be omnipresent in all human affairs and -- unlike a computer program -- the law's power is accepted at face value by billions of people and underlined by men with guns and dogs.

lsc 10y ago
>the law's power is accepted at face value by billions of people and underlined by men with guns and dogs. emphasis mine. I find that last bit, though, to be super interesting; "enforced by men with guns" has always been a big part of the rhetoric of any discussion of law, anarchist, or libertarian thought. But... I'm not sure I've ever seen dogs mentioned in that context.

kalleboo 10y ago

> want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them Except we're just about to prove that an institution can decide to nullify a Ethereum contract with the soft/hard forks. In the very best case that will a cabal of miners with unknown intentions (and clearly they're not too invested in the Libertarian "code is contract" angle of the network) instead of a democratically constructed judicial system.

peterbonney 10y ago

"without worrying about a judge taking that away from them" Unfortunately the ultimate arbiter of the courts' authority is not a piece of code or a piece of paper, but the courts themselves. If someone disputes the authority of a contract (smart or otherwise) that dispute will ultimately be settled in court. Even if the contract contains language claiming that it is not open to interpretation by a certain court or set of courts, the validity of THAT language will ultimately be interpreted by... a court. There is no degree of technical cleverness that can supersede the authority of a sovereign entity. You can hide things from a sovereign, move things out of the reach of a sovereign, but you can never overrule a sovereign's authority within its own borders.

3pt14159 10y ago
In which border does the Etherium contract reside and who should the court order name?
- naasking 10y ago
  Which ever border the "victim" files, and if the judge rules against you, your assets in that region can be seized.