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It Looks Like Ethereum Is Going to Fork Again
- creshal 10y agoTL;DR: Another API break to fix glaring protocol holes. Why are people entrusting money to this?
- jaredhansen 10y agoSame reason people invest in VC and other high-risk/high-reward asset classes: it may not work, but if it does, it will be immensely valuable.
- atom-morgan 10y agoCouldn't the same thing have been said about the Internet in the early days?
- wyager 10y agoNo. The Internet never claimed to be a bastion of immutable objective truth, unlike Ethereum. Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not. It's also poorly designed even though we know better, whereas at least the early internet was more or less as well designed as we knew how to do at the time.
- ndarilek 10y ago"Ethereum has always marketed itself as a complete working solution, which it is obviously not." Really? I recall them having 3-4 stages before they called it done, the first of which called itself "frontier" precisely to discourage folks from thinking it was ready. That said, I was somewhat horrified to see something as large as the DAO launch on an alpha platform, and not surprised to see it tank. Maybe Ethereum core developers in unofficial channels were more cavalier about its current state, but as a casual follower who read their blog for a while, I never got the impression presented in your comment.
- aminok 10y ago"Information Superhighway"?
- wmf 10y agoI guess the point is that the Internet was not nominally valued at $1B in the early days (depending on how you define that).
- atom-morgan 10y agoIt doesn't matter that the Internet wasn't valued at $1B. What matters is that it was just as crazy in the minds of some to trust your money on the Internet in the early days.
- brighton36 10y agoSure. It also could have been said about pets.com in the early days.
- acchow 10y agoBitcoin also had a fork due to a bug in 2013. It wasn't perfect in its early years either, and yet it's a useful platform/technology now.
- bradleybuda 10y agoWhat is bitcoin useful for now? Legitimate question; I still see it as a research project. I can't think of any day-to-day activity that is made better by bitcoin (yet).
- ryanlol 10y agoDrug trade?
- niftich 10y agoInternational money transfers between two parties who mutually trust each other.
- kbody 10y agoPersonally I'm paid in bitcoin from an asian company I work for and use them with a bitcoin pre-paid/debit card for a big part of my expenses. I used to be paid by wire transfers, but it's faster this way and less fees (especially the currency exchange ones). Some few companies also have rebates if you pay with bitcoins so that's a nice plus. But it really is refreshing and interesting how free you feel in a sense.
- BoorishBears 10y agoIs Bitcoin any more volatile than a "normal" currency in regards to value on the time scale of when work is done and work is paid? Usually when I hear the dollar is down its cents on the dollar over weeks but what I hear about Bitcoin sounds more like a stock market, with sudden crashes and rallies
- modeless 10y ago
- dahdum 10y agoIt's a non-contentious upgrade to reduce attack surface. The more of these they do the more reliable they become. Every popular blockchain will get attacked, simply because there is a strong economic benefit to do so. Bitcoin is trusted so much in no small part due to surviving so many attacks. Nobody gets it right the first time.
- kbody 10y agoThe more of these they do... the more obvious it will be that its design is fundamentally broken.
- InclinedPlane 10y agoYup. You'll see tons and tons of people excusing this behavior, those folks are zealots. The reality is that the system is broken. If Ethereum wanted to add a management and regulation process into the system they should have done so explicitly, from the start. Instead they've used these forks to massage the core problem: which is that relying utterly on code as a binding contract is unworkable. It's not going to stop.
- wodencafe 10y ago> The reality is that the system is broken. > If Ethereum wanted to add a management and regulation process into the system > they should have done so explicitly, from the start. From TFA: ".. hard forks are arguably part of ethereum's DNA, as many in its community view the action as a way to upgrade the software in a way that supports its larger goals. "The ethereum project always stated that it will hard fork often to progress the technology," Heiko Hees, a developer working on ethereum's Raiden Network, explained."
- empath75 10y agoIf people weren't speculating in the currency, it wouldn't be such a holy war every time.
- brighton36 10y agoBecause they're sure they can sell to a greater fool
- jbpetersen 10y agoNot nearly as exciting (read: politically contentious) as the last fork. This time around it's mainly repricing opcodes that were cheap enough to effectively spam the network with.
- 0x0 10y agoIt's nice to see companies building on Ethereum acting professionally in times like these: https://twitter.com/ambisafeco/status/786570218625572864 https://twitter.com/ambisafeco/status/786570218625572864
- sbierwagen 10y agoI like how their logo is just Chrome + Ubuntu
- joneholland 10y agoIt looks like three breasts.
- xg15 10y agoTo play devil's advocate, where does it say that Ethereum is still in beta? Or is that meant in a "perpetually beta" sense?