4 ms·

I don't trust Ethereum. Who's behind it? Are there any backdoors? Why not Bitcoin?

DennisP 9y ago
It has the second-biggest market cap at $6 billion, it's been in production for a couple years, it has multiple open source implementations, its inventors and other developers are known to the public, it has much more powerful smart contract capabilities than Bitcoin, and it doesn't have high fees and backlogs.
- RichardHeart 9y ago
  The multiple implementations exponentially increase the breakdown of consensus. The network is literally unusable often. Their consensus is so bad, that the last breakdown of consensus created the nunber 6 crypto marketcap "currency" "etherum classic" which has "value" of $485 million as this is written. It has no high fees, for there is no demand for what it does, and if there was demand, no limit to the supply to fill it. Have they decided how much "gas" it takes to run things yet, or are they still manually humanly moving that number around, you know, the only number that would give an ETH any scarcity and thus upward price potential? NASA knows how to build software that is unlikely to fail, and saves or costs human lives. Little to none of the lessons NASA has learned regarding mission critical software development is used by Ethereum. Being turning complete is the enemy of consensus. The halting problem pretty much makes writing smart contracts that do what you want and nothing else in a turing complete language extremely difficult to the point of near impossiblity. Thus, ETH may some day be useful for something, but making ETH tokens valuable isn't one of those things.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    It's also worth noting the quality of the thinkers at work on it: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/
- cashmonkey85 9y ago
  ...and it's a vaperware scam. Their technology just doesn't add up. No way it does what is claims.
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Then I make my living on vaporware. My full-time job is writing smart contracts for Ethereum.
    - cashmonkey85 9y ago
      I'm curious where? Someone actually pays you to do this?
      - DennisP 9y ago
        There's a thriving ecosystem of startups, a fair amount of corporate interest, and a shortage of people good at writing smart contracts. I work for a company that provides dev and security auditing, mostly for startups, and business is good.
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      VCs fund vaporware all the time - the track record of blockchain investments is about $1.5 billion in, $0 out, per http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ - so this is hardly an implausible statement.
      - DennisP 9y ago
        I'm not getting funded to build Ethereum, I'm using Ethereum as a working technology stack. People pay me to build and deploy other projects on top of it, and some of the projects I've built are also in production.
y2gray 9y ago
i think its worth pointing out that the same company is behind this charging station project -- slock.it -- was also behind the dao disaster, they coded the smart contract that had the bug that was exploited and led to the hack of tens of millions of invested dollars and the biggest controversy in the history of ethereum. which sadly led to this guy Stephan Tual (ursium) --who is commenting on this thread about how excited he is for his revolutionary project -- basically resorting to conspiracy theory to deflect responsibility for his company's lack of due diligence and false claims such as code audits for the contract. ethereum is a very interesting project but this guy is a snake.
- DennisP 9y ago
  They did code that project, but it's also worth pointing out that the exploit in question wasn't widely known in the community until a week prior to the hack, when TheDAO was already live. Even some of the official tutorial material on the ethereum.org website had similar vulnerabilities.

It has the second-biggest market cap at $6 billion, it's been in production for a couple years, it has multiple open source implementations, its inventors and other developers are known to the public, it has much more powerful smart contract capabilities than Bitcoin, and it doesn't have high fees and backlogs.

RichardHeart 9y ago
The multiple implementations exponentially increase the breakdown of consensus. The network is literally unusable often. Their consensus is so bad, that the last breakdown of consensus created the nunber 6 crypto marketcap "currency" "etherum classic" which has "value" of $485 million as this is written. It has no high fees, for there is no demand for what it does, and if there was demand, no limit to the supply to fill it. Have they decided how much "gas" it takes to run things yet, or are they still manually humanly moving that number around, you know, the only number that would give an ETH any scarcity and thus upward price potential? NASA knows how to build software that is unlikely to fail, and saves or costs human lives. Little to none of the lessons NASA has learned regarding mission critical software development is used by Ethereum. Being turning complete is the enemy of consensus. The halting problem pretty much makes writing smart contracts that do what you want and nothing else in a turing complete language extremely difficult to the point of near impossiblity. Thus, ETH may some day be useful for something, but making ETH tokens valuable isn't one of those things.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  It's also worth noting the quality of the thinkers at work on it: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/
cashmonkey85 9y ago
...and it's a vaperware scam. Their technology just doesn't add up. No way it does what is claims.
- DennisP 9y ago
  Then I make my living on vaporware. My full-time job is writing smart contracts for Ethereum.
  - cashmonkey85 9y ago
    I'm curious where? Someone actually pays you to do this?
    - DennisP 9y ago
      There's a thriving ecosystem of startups, a fair amount of corporate interest, and a shortage of people good at writing smart contracts. I work for a company that provides dev and security auditing, mostly for startups, and business is good.
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    VCs fund vaporware all the time - the track record of blockchain investments is about $1.5 billion in, $0 out, per http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/ - so this is hardly an implausible statement.
    - DennisP 9y ago
      I'm not getting funded to build Ethereum, I'm using Ethereum as a working technology stack. People pay me to build and deploy other projects on top of it, and some of the projects I've built are also in production.

y2gray 9y ago

i think its worth pointing out that the same company is behind this charging station project -- slock.it -- was also behind the dao disaster, they coded the smart contract that had the bug that was exploited and led to the hack of tens of millions of invested dollars and the biggest controversy in the history of ethereum. which sadly led to this guy Stephan Tual (ursium) --who is commenting on this thread about how excited he is for his revolutionary project -- basically resorting to conspiracy theory to deflect responsibility for his company's lack of due diligence and false claims such as code audits for the contract. ethereum is a very interesting project but this guy is a snake.

DennisP 9y ago
They did code that project, but it's also worth pointing out that the exploit in question wasn't widely known in the community until a week prior to the hack, when TheDAO was already live. Even some of the official tutorial material on the ethereum.org website had similar vulnerabilities.