6 ms·

Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and to

by antocv 10y ago

Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and too expensive. Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand. Declarative smart contracts, over at https://byteball.org/ https://byteball.org/

schmichael 10y ago
Using bytes as the unit of currency is awful. That's like releasing a car whose dashboard displays speed in liters.
- Y_Y 10y ago
  Incidentally, the SI unit of fuel efficiency is 1/m^2, the "per-square-metre", not this miles per gallon crap.
  - K0SM0S 10y ago
    Miles is a unit of measure, ultimately meters in the SI. A gallon is a volume, liters in the SI, or more fundamentally a fraction of cube-meters (m^3). m / m^3 = 1/m^2 Which is the unit for fuel efficiency. It's expressed in imperial units but it's physically sound, not 'crap'. ;) In other parts of the world you'll see this expressed as "liters per 100km" usually.
    - Y_Y 10y ago
      Maybe my tongue-in-cheekness wasn't clear, sorry. MPG is more pervasive than you might think. Even in metric, European Ireland it's the typical unit, despite speeds being in km/h and fuel being sold by the litre. Since you seem to be interested, let me also add that litres are only accepted by, not part of, the SI. Also the SI spellings are "metre" and "litre".
      - K0SM0S 10y ago
        Ha sorry I indeed failed to catch your irony... My bad too, then. I'm actually quite interested in the fact that any equation can be "sanity checked" by solving it for units only (without values). It's always handy to make sure I didn't forget some exponent here or there. And knowing extended units as a composition of fundamentals (some variation of mksa) is kind of entertaining intellectually.(e.g. Newton = m.kg/s^2, which really makes sense when you think about it). Going down to Planck units and their significance in this universe (discrete spacetime manifold? Is reality ultimately non-continuous?), and here I am wishing our conventional units (of time, distance, all) were integer multiples (e.g. Decimal exponents) of Planck units. But I'm digressing, aren't I. As far as fuel and efficiency goes, I'm not much of a car person. I didn't know that mpg was used outside the US, that's an interesting historical artefact.
- antocv 10y ago
  It is like calling British currency pound sterling because it was once based on the wight of sterling silver. What you pay in transaction fees is the amount of bytes used to represent your data. Byteball can then also store immutable data of various lengths, if you are willing to pay for it in the price of bytes for the storage of bytes you like to store. Makes sense.
TD-Linux 10y ago
You don't even have to invent a new cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has had a non-turing-complete script from day 1. And if you want to run something more complicated, you can use zk-SNARKs combined with a tiny HTLC script on-chain.
- Everhusk 10y ago
  Yes and you could also send an email by buying raw materials, manufacturing a computer, writing an OS and an email client... doesn't mean you should.
  - hudon 10y ago
    Actually there are ways to run "smart contracts" without running every single computation on every single node like Ethereum does. Blockstack [1] (not affiliated, I just think it's cool) for instance runs most of the decentralized application off of the blockchain, but uses the blockchain for storage, identity, key management, etc. That means you can have a decentralized application and also have the security of the bitcoin network, for example. [1] https://blockstack.org/ https://blockstack.org/
DennisP 10y ago
Byteball and IOTA appear to be the same thing. How are they related?
- antocv 10y ago
  They arent related, at all. Byteball is live right now, Iota is still in closed/private beta testing with less features.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    With a little googling, that doesn't seem quite accurate. They both use the same underlying technology, which was originally proposed by IOTA, with some differences in design goals. Both have working production networks, but IOTA's was launched first. http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/01/03/byteball-vs-iota-token/ http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/01/03/byteball-vs-iota-token/ http://www.the-blockchain.com/2016/12/11/happy-holidays-byteball-give-away-new-cryptocurrency-free-bitcoin-holders-christmas-day/ http://www.the-blockchain.com/2016/12/11/happy-holidays-byte... They both seem like interesting projects.
    - antocv 10y ago
      DAGcoin was proposed in bitcointalk thread in 2014, long before Iota was conceived and IoT fairly well known. They dont even use the same underlying technology, unless you consider DAG to be a technology rather than a data-structure. Iota nodes are written in Java, Byteball is all in Node.js As is usual in cryptocurrency world, if you want news and technical documentation on Byteball, you ask the Byteball people, do not ask Iota, and vice versa.
      - DennisP 10y ago
        Yep I was referring to the data structure and consensus algorithm, not particular implementation code. The two projects clearly have more differences than I initially realized.
        10y ago

by antocv 10y ago

schmichael 10y ago

Using bytes as the unit of currency is awful. That's like releasing a car whose dashboard displays speed in liters.

Y_Y 10y ago
Incidentally, the SI unit of fuel efficiency is 1/m^2, the "per-square-metre", not this miles per gallon crap.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  Miles is a unit of measure, ultimately meters in the SI. A gallon is a volume, liters in the SI, or more fundamentally a fraction of cube-meters (m^3). m / m^3 = 1/m^2 Which is the unit for fuel efficiency. It's expressed in imperial units but it's physically sound, not 'crap'. ;) In other parts of the world you'll see this expressed as "liters per 100km" usually.
  - Y_Y 10y ago
    Maybe my tongue-in-cheekness wasn't clear, sorry. MPG is more pervasive than you might think. Even in metric, European Ireland it's the typical unit, despite speeds being in km/h and fuel being sold by the litre. Since you seem to be interested, let me also add that litres are only accepted by, not part of, the SI. Also the SI spellings are "metre" and "litre".
    - K0SM0S 10y ago
      Ha sorry I indeed failed to catch your irony... My bad too, then. I'm actually quite interested in the fact that any equation can be "sanity checked" by solving it for units only (without values). It's always handy to make sure I didn't forget some exponent here or there. And knowing extended units as a composition of fundamentals (some variation of mksa) is kind of entertaining intellectually.(e.g. Newton = m.kg/s^2, which really makes sense when you think about it). Going down to Planck units and their significance in this universe (discrete spacetime manifold? Is reality ultimately non-continuous?), and here I am wishing our conventional units (of time, distance, all) were integer multiples (e.g. Decimal exponents) of Planck units. But I'm digressing, aren't I. As far as fuel and efficiency goes, I'm not much of a car person. I didn't know that mpg was used outside the US, that's an interesting historical artefact.
antocv 10y ago
It is like calling British currency pound sterling because it was once based on the wight of sterling silver. What you pay in transaction fees is the amount of bytes used to represent your data. Byteball can then also store immutable data of various lengths, if you are willing to pay for it in the price of bytes for the storage of bytes you like to store. Makes sense.

TD-Linux 10y ago

You don't even have to invent a new cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has had a non-turing-complete script from day 1. And if you want to run something more complicated, you can use zk-SNARKs combined with a tiny HTLC script on-chain.

Everhusk 10y ago
Yes and you could also send an email by buying raw materials, manufacturing a computer, writing an OS and an email client... doesn't mean you should.
- hudon 10y ago
  Actually there are ways to run "smart contracts" without running every single computation on every single node like Ethereum does. Blockstack [1] (not affiliated, I just think it's cool) for instance runs most of the decentralized application off of the blockchain, but uses the blockchain for storage, identity, key management, etc. That means you can have a decentralized application and also have the security of the bitcoin network, for example. [1] https://blockstack.org/ https://blockstack.org/

DennisP 10y ago

Byteball and IOTA appear to be the same thing. How are they related?

antocv 10y ago
They arent related, at all. Byteball is live right now, Iota is still in closed/private beta testing with less features.
- DennisP 10y ago
  With a little googling, that doesn't seem quite accurate. They both use the same underlying technology, which was originally proposed by IOTA, with some differences in design goals. Both have working production networks, but IOTA's was launched first. http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/01/03/byteball-vs-iota-token/ http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/01/03/byteball-vs-iota-token/ http://www.the-blockchain.com/2016/12/11/happy-holidays-byteball-give-away-new-cryptocurrency-free-bitcoin-holders-christmas-day/ http://www.the-blockchain.com/2016/12/11/happy-holidays-byte... They both seem like interesting projects.
  - antocv 10y ago
    DAGcoin was proposed in bitcointalk thread in 2014, long before Iota was conceived and IoT fairly well known. They dont even use the same underlying technology, unless you consider DAG to be a technology rather than a data-structure. Iota nodes are written in Java, Byteball is all in Node.js As is usual in cryptocurrency world, if you want news and technical documentation on Byteball, you ask the Byteball people, do not ask Iota, and vice versa.
    - DennisP 10y ago
      Yep I was referring to the data structure and consensus algorithm, not particular implementation code. The two projects clearly have more differences than I initially realized.
      - 10y ago