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This is what I mean by Ethereum is a solution looking for a problem. What possible use case here that should be adopted by the gaming industry? So the top score

This is what I mean by Ethereum is a solution looking for a problem. What possible use case here that should be adopted by the gaming industry? So the top score is immutable and verified by multiple 3rd party miners? Help me understand because I never get a good answer.

heliumcraft 10y ago
Ethereum, MaidSafe, etc.. are trying to be a solution to a specific problem: how to create a trustless decentralized internet (and perhaps even society), one that does not require centralized structures like it does now. It's not quite there yet, and there is a long way to go, but at least there is some progress.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  > how to create a trustless decentralized internet what evidence of demand is there? what compelling need is there for existing infrastructures to uproot their investments for some elusive buzzword?
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    Remember what happened to wikileaks.org ? A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. How do you create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible. You might not care but this is a problem that a lot of ppl do care about. By the end of this year with the release of swarm and ethereum naming system it will be possible to run a completly decentralized (no servers), uncensorable, 100% uptime website.
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      that's not a widespread problem held by many nor evidence of consumers demand. Like you said, it's a problem considered by a few but outside of that there's very little reason to use ethereum. go ahead and downvote my critical views on Ethereum, I'm already used to it from /r/ethereum pumpers. But I'm taking away that there's no good rationale for adopting Ethereum or blockchain technology other than very micro and esoteric niches.
      - heliumcraft 10y ago
        You are entitled to your opinion and naturally not everyone cares about the same problems. If you don't see an use for Ethereum (at least not yet) then just don't use it. Btw, you used the word 'pumpers', I really couldn't care less about the price. I hate the whole market thing. Bitcoin/Ether could be $10K or $1 for all I care. Also, I actually agree 100% that there is no good rationale for adopting Ethereum & blockcahin technology as it is right now as there is so much more to do until it's actually practical.
- SanFranManDan 10y ago
  > trustless decentralized internet That is the solution. What is the problem? I understand the problem they want to solve but I don't think that is truly the problem. I drank the kool-aid for over a year before I realized that the theoretical and practical realities are incompatible. A truly trustless decentralized ledger is for the most part useless since as soon as you need to interact outside of the system (like change real world goods). Registering ownership on Ethereum and being trustless cannot coincide as ownership is a societal construct backed by governments and consensus. If I register stock on ethereum, I still need trust in the societal agreement outside of ethereum. Only transactions are trustlessm, but it is still very very far from clear that trustless transactions actually mean something without trustless assets that can be run on a truly trustless network. I think this is evidenced by the fact that there are no compelling real world use cases for ethereum. There has been a huge downturn in turnouts at ethereum events and mindshare coinciding with the DAO attack after they shot themselves in the foot by doing the manual rollback which showed you still need trust in the network that runs the "trustless" system thus there is no such thing as a trustless system. Yes it is still young, but I don't believe the theoretical case of having a trustless system (ethereum) interact with a trustful system (human society) while still being trustless is solved or even possible. As soon as trust enters into the equation at any level the entire premise of ethereum is worthless moot. Could there be a narrow domain of applications that can use a "minimal trust network"? Yes. But that is different from being truly trustless. Trust is a feature not a bug. Are there situations where you want less trust? Absolutely. But you are shifting the trust to another agent, not getting rid of it completely. Ethereum can exist, but it won't transform society and replace governements like everyone was hoping to ~9 months ago.
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    Well.. for starters there is certaintly value in a decentralized infrastructure (just ask wikileaks or someone living in a dictatorship) as well as other interesting projects such as makerdao, golem, etc.. I'm not sure what downturn you've seen since ethereums devcon this year had over 700 participants attending despite being in China, and there is another conference next month this time in europe, so if anything it keeps growing. The DAO was too much, too soon. you say "they" which I'm not sure who you mean, but please note that ppl behind the DAO are not the same as the Ethereum foundation, consensys, reuters, deloitte, santander, etc.. let's not conflate one group and their mistakes with the entire Ethereum comunity. As for oracles, they are an interesting problem to solve. Note that not every project would necessary require outside interaction (such as a decentralized DNS), sometimes there are creative solutiosn to do certain things externally (http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/ http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/), and there are ways to verify the validity of the data a oracle is providing, as an example you can watch this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pDUobV8geI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pDUobV8geI
EnFinlay 10y ago
From what I can tell the Ethereum component is confined to the entry fee and payout currency. This helps solve one of the biggest issues with skill based cash gaming, since there is much less friction when it comes to spending a cryptocurrency vs cash dollars, and people view it as more disposable/ephemeral. I doubt the game involves miner verification. Edit: Read the linked blog post. "Provably Fair" since there's a verifier that takes the seed and user inputs and replays the game to find the score. Depending how it's implemented this could introduce new issues and holes. Most importantly it makes the verifier a rate limiting step and puts an upper limit on the complexity of games. Interesting stuff.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  "Provably fair" gambling with that sort of guarantee has been standard in the Bitcoin world for a few years now. Of course, the ethically-challenged are endlessly creative, so there are cons you can do with that too - e.g., biasing any numbers the player didn't grab the hash for: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=948965.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=948965.0
  - EnFinlay 10y ago
    In my experience (I could be wrong) most provably fair bitcoin gambling games don't require user interaction. It's just a seed that has a deterministic output. This type of provably fair is a different beast, as far as I can see.
aminok 10y ago
There is a huge, glaring problem in the internet right now: it is very hard to accept and make payments. If your site wants to monetarily interact with users, it requires going through the arduous process of hooking up to the banking system, which is least painfully done by becoming dependent on a single large payment processor (who could always cut you off, freeze your funds, charge exorbitant fees, etc). It can involve storing customer bank details, or requiring customers to register with your third party payment processor. Totally byzantine and frictionful for the age of the internet.

heliumcraft 10y ago

Ethereum, MaidSafe, etc.. are trying to be a solution to a specific problem: how to create a trustless decentralized internet (and perhaps even society), one that does not require centralized structures like it does now. It's not quite there yet, and there is a long way to go, but at least there is some progress.

brilliantcode 10y ago
> how to create a trustless decentralized internet what evidence of demand is there? what compelling need is there for existing infrastructures to uproot their investments for some elusive buzzword?
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  Remember what happened to wikileaks.org ? A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. How do you create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible. You might not care but this is a problem that a lot of ppl do care about. By the end of this year with the release of swarm and ethereum naming system it will be possible to run a completly decentralized (no servers), uncensorable, 100% uptime website.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    that's not a widespread problem held by many nor evidence of consumers demand. Like you said, it's a problem considered by a few but outside of that there's very little reason to use ethereum. go ahead and downvote my critical views on Ethereum, I'm already used to it from /r/ethereum pumpers. But I'm taking away that there's no good rationale for adopting Ethereum or blockchain technology other than very micro and esoteric niches.
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      You are entitled to your opinion and naturally not everyone cares about the same problems. If you don't see an use for Ethereum (at least not yet) then just don't use it. Btw, you used the word 'pumpers', I really couldn't care less about the price. I hate the whole market thing. Bitcoin/Ether could be $10K or $1 for all I care. Also, I actually agree 100% that there is no good rationale for adopting Ethereum & blockcahin technology as it is right now as there is so much more to do until it's actually practical.
SanFranManDan 10y ago
> trustless decentralized internet That is the solution. What is the problem? I understand the problem they want to solve but I don't think that is truly the problem. I drank the kool-aid for over a year before I realized that the theoretical and practical realities are incompatible. A truly trustless decentralized ledger is for the most part useless since as soon as you need to interact outside of the system (like change real world goods). Registering ownership on Ethereum and being trustless cannot coincide as ownership is a societal construct backed by governments and consensus. If I register stock on ethereum, I still need trust in the societal agreement outside of ethereum. Only transactions are trustlessm, but it is still very very far from clear that trustless transactions actually mean something without trustless assets that can be run on a truly trustless network. I think this is evidenced by the fact that there are no compelling real world use cases for ethereum. There has been a huge downturn in turnouts at ethereum events and mindshare coinciding with the DAO attack after they shot themselves in the foot by doing the manual rollback which showed you still need trust in the network that runs the "trustless" system thus there is no such thing as a trustless system. Yes it is still young, but I don't believe the theoretical case of having a trustless system (ethereum) interact with a trustful system (human society) while still being trustless is solved or even possible. As soon as trust enters into the equation at any level the entire premise of ethereum is worthless moot. Could there be a narrow domain of applications that can use a "minimal trust network"? Yes. But that is different from being truly trustless. Trust is a feature not a bug. Are there situations where you want less trust? Absolutely. But you are shifting the trust to another agent, not getting rid of it completely. Ethereum can exist, but it won't transform society and replace governements like everyone was hoping to ~9 months ago.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  Well.. for starters there is certaintly value in a decentralized infrastructure (just ask wikileaks or someone living in a dictatorship) as well as other interesting projects such as makerdao, golem, etc.. I'm not sure what downturn you've seen since ethereums devcon this year had over 700 participants attending despite being in China, and there is another conference next month this time in europe, so if anything it keeps growing. The DAO was too much, too soon. you say "they" which I'm not sure who you mean, but please note that ppl behind the DAO are not the same as the Ethereum foundation, consensys, reuters, deloitte, santander, etc.. let's not conflate one group and their mistakes with the entire Ethereum comunity. As for oracles, they are an interesting problem to solve. Note that not every project would necessary require outside interaction (such as a decentralized DNS), sometimes there are creative solutiosn to do certain things externally (http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/ http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/), and there are ways to verify the validity of the data a oracle is providing, as an example you can watch this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pDUobV8geI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pDUobV8geI

EnFinlay 10y ago

From what I can tell the Ethereum component is confined to the entry fee and payout currency. This helps solve one of the biggest issues with skill based cash gaming, since there is much less friction when it comes to spending a cryptocurrency vs cash dollars, and people view it as more disposable/ephemeral. I doubt the game involves miner verification. Edit: Read the linked blog post. "Provably Fair" since there's a verifier that takes the seed and user inputs and replays the game to find the score. Depending how it's implemented this could introduce new issues and holes. Most importantly it makes the verifier a rate limiting step and puts an upper limit on the complexity of games. Interesting stuff.

davidgerard 10y ago
"Provably fair" gambling with that sort of guarantee has been standard in the Bitcoin world for a few years now. Of course, the ethically-challenged are endlessly creative, so there are cons you can do with that too - e.g., biasing any numbers the player didn't grab the hash for: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=948965.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=948965.0
- EnFinlay 10y ago
  In my experience (I could be wrong) most provably fair bitcoin gambling games don't require user interaction. It's just a seed that has a deterministic output. This type of provably fair is a different beast, as far as I can see.

aminok 10y ago

There is a huge, glaring problem in the internet right now: it is very hard to accept and make payments. If your site wants to monetarily interact with users, it requires going through the arduous process of hooking up to the banking system, which is least painfully done by becoming dependent on a single large payment processor (who could always cut you off, freeze your funds, charge exorbitant fees, etc). It can involve storing customer bank details, or requiring customers to register with your third party payment processor. Totally byzantine and frictionful for the age of the internet.