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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 system

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.
  - tamana 10y ago
    So instead of hiring a juris doctor lawyer to review my contracts, I'll hire a PhD computer scientist ;)
    - dkarapetyan 10y ago
      Correct. Programmatic contracts should have democratized the entire business but instead this new scheme creates a new class of "lawyer".
      - wolfgke 10y ago
        I strongly prefer "laws" that are based on mathematics/computability theory than on social conventions.
        crispyambulance 10y ago
        I think this is the core flaw in the mindset of Ethereum adherents: the very idea that it is even possible to have "Laws" which are completely objective to the point of mathematical logic and that these could/should be enforced, literally, by a computer running a program. We are thankfully very very far from a system of Laws which are anything like that. Such a system might be great in certain "sandbox" environments for manipulating resources that have carefully controlled interactions with the outside. But to have arbitrarily complex "smart contracts" running in the affairs of the real world? no thanks!
        dkarapetyan 10y ago
        We are in agreement. It's unfortunate that the initial implementation was a blunder.
    - wila 10y ago
      .and that PhD computer scientist will have a contract that he/she cannot be held responsible for anything bad that happens with the code he/she writes. Written by a juris doctor lawyer. :)
  - 10y ago

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.
- tamana 10y ago
  So instead of hiring a juris doctor lawyer to review my contracts, I'll hire a PhD computer scientist ;)
  - dkarapetyan 10y ago
    Correct. Programmatic contracts should have democratized the entire business but instead this new scheme creates a new class of "lawyer".
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      I strongly prefer "laws" that are based on mathematics/computability theory than on social conventions.
      - crispyambulance 10y ago
        I think this is the core flaw in the mindset of Ethereum adherents: the very idea that it is even possible to have "Laws" which are completely objective to the point of mathematical logic and that these could/should be enforced, literally, by a computer running a program. We are thankfully very very far from a system of Laws which are anything like that. Such a system might be great in certain "sandbox" environments for manipulating resources that have carefully controlled interactions with the outside. But to have arbitrarily complex "smart contracts" running in the affairs of the real world? no thanks!
      - dkarapetyan 10y ago
        We are in agreement. It's unfortunate that the initial implementation was a blunder.
  - wila 10y ago
    .and that PhD computer scientist will have a contract that he/she cannot be held responsible for anything bad that happens with the code he/she writes. Written by a juris doctor lawyer. :)
- 10y ago