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This type of mentality is very pervasive in ethereum culture. They built their scripting language with this mentality. They chose to have multiple clients with

by tfha 9y ago

This type of mentality is very pervasive in ethereum culture. They built their scripting language with this mentality. They chose to have multiple clients with this mentality. They designed their 12 second blocks with this mentality. That's why a lot of the more technical people really dislike ethereum. It's not one or two problems. The entire system all the way through want made with the mentality of compromising stability in favor of getting features sooner.

usrusr 9y ago
It does keep etherium in the news though. Maybe the most important feature for crypto success is to be exciting.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  If you're in it to pump up the value of your coin holdings and then dump them, this is absolutely true.
- tfha 9y ago
  This happened for waltonchain. They got caught red handed faking a community giveaway, and that was a big enough story to bring them into the spotlight and push them into the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap for a bit.
  - asenna 9y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you implying they got into the top 30 when that Twitter debacle happened? Didn't their prices plungem
- heurist 9y ago
  The general public shouldn't be excited about blockchain. It should be hidden by abstraction to them, like multithreading and device drivers. Products intended for non-technical users that tout their blockchain technology are either really missing the mark on marketing or trying to pull the wool over consumers' eyes with buzzwords. Tech folk should be excited about blockchain but the hysteria over exchanges right now is off-putting once you understand how deeply rigged the markets are. My next venture will be blockchain-based but I have a few years before I'm free to pursue that. I'd rather see the fundamentals of the tech improved in the meantime rather than have it prematurely hyped and have the bubble pop as I seek to raise funding... I imagine there are many others who are in the position of wanting to build apps based on blockchain tech but who are not yet able. For us, slow and steady wins the race.
  - Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
    It sounds like you're trying to tell the market what it should and should not buy. That's not how it works. The market tells you what it has chosen, then you can choose your reaction to it. Your reaction seems to be "disapproval"? Well that's mildly interesting I guess. Saying "they're missing the mark on marketing" about the second-largest crypto by market-cap, and surely top-5 in terms of ongoing development is at the very least a bit ironic. They exactly did NOT miss the mark on marketing. There are other technically superior products that don't get nearly as much funding, public attention, development resources etc.
    - simonh 9y ago
      ‘The market’ bought investment funds from Bernie Maddoff, and more recently Martin Shkreli. In February it thought the Dow was worth 24,515 one day and 1,600 points less the next. Sometimes the market is wrong, whatever free market fundies will tell you.
      - derefr 9y ago
        From an investor's perspective, sure, the market can be "wrong"; and avoiding its incorrect beliefs and hype-trains is how you make gains while avoiding losses. As an entrepreneur, though, the market makes the final decision on whether you make money, whether it's "right" or "wrong." If you're "right" when the market is "wrong" as an entrepreneur, you lose—you're "ahead of your time" or some other pleasantry meaning "you weren't giving the market what it wanted." If you want to sell something to the market, then if the market is irrationally exuberant, you have to be irrationally exuberant too.
        simonh 9y ago
        You don’t have to be irrationally exuberant to succeed in the market, even if it’s irrationally exuberant. Is every single company on earth leaping and dancing to the latest fad of the minute in order to succeed? Is the secret of Warren Buffets’s success piling in on on all the latest trends? No, yet somehow our economy seems to bubble along ok. So I categorically reject the idea that this is the only way success is gauged, that’s self evidently not true. Secondly, if the market is wrong and you dance to that tune, eventually when reality catches up the market will realise it’s mistake. Trust me, the market can sell out of your company faster than you can pivot your entire business model. But sure, it is possible to make money following trends. But it’s not the only way. It’s not an immutable law of capitalism, and there’s plenty of money to be made providing actual, sustainable value.
bringtheaction 9y ago
The downsides of Ethereum is discouraging me a bit from developing on their platform. Then again they are the biggest smart contract crypto currency, but maybe it could be worth to build things with another one even so. Could you recommend some with good technical foundations that are ready for use today and with enough documentation that it’s possible to understand? I know Ark plan to but as far as I am aware they have not yet implemented smart contracts. NEO on the other hand I know supports smart contracts today and some different languages. Don’t know what actually building something with NEO is like though. Any one have experience with NEO? Any other crypto currencies with smart contracts?
- Taek 9y ago
  People don't like to hear this, but blockchain tech isn't ready for a general app platform. Bitcoin could easily be extended to have an EVM if it was a good idea, but there are lots of unsolved problems, gotchas, and overheads that make it a poor choice. I don't think that's the perpetual state of things, but I do think that every 'dapp' platform out there today is bad foundation, and largely that's because it's too early to be making general platforms. The approach that a couple of currencies have taken (including the one I lead) is to make a separate blockchain entirely dedicated to their app. And I think that's a far better choice than anything out there, though it comes with the glaring downside of needing to build and run your own blockchain, which is a very difficult thing to do. Most of the apps we are seeing today don't make any sense anyway. Very much smacks of the dotcom bubble, where people who suspected that the Internet would change the world were absolutely correct, but then the companies and ideas they put their money behind were missing the mark by miles. We've got the same issue today. Most successful ICOs are going to fail very hard, due to known impossibilities, known poor uses of the technology, etc. It's just a general fever that has a lot of new entrants in the space innovating in the wrong direction. It will get better. Dapp platforms will appear that make sense, have good foundations, and are easy to setup and use. But it's not around the corner, it's probably 3-5 years away.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    > People don't like to hear this, but blockchain tech isn't ready for a general app platform. This cannot be stressed enough. But, I disagree that building your own blockchain is the answer in comparison to using EVM. The amount of blockchains and services people might end up needing will be huge. So, it seems the correct usage for blockchain is still far out.

by tfha 9y ago

usrusr 9y ago

It does keep etherium in the news though. Maybe the most important feature for crypto success is to be exciting.

monochromatic 9y ago
If you're in it to pump up the value of your coin holdings and then dump them, this is absolutely true.
tfha 9y ago
This happened for waltonchain. They got caught red handed faking a community giveaway, and that was a big enough story to bring them into the spotlight and push them into the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap for a bit.
- asenna 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you implying they got into the top 30 when that Twitter debacle happened? Didn't their prices plungem
heurist 9y ago
The general public shouldn't be excited about blockchain. It should be hidden by abstraction to them, like multithreading and device drivers. Products intended for non-technical users that tout their blockchain technology are either really missing the mark on marketing or trying to pull the wool over consumers' eyes with buzzwords. Tech folk should be excited about blockchain but the hysteria over exchanges right now is off-putting once you understand how deeply rigged the markets are. My next venture will be blockchain-based but I have a few years before I'm free to pursue that. I'd rather see the fundamentals of the tech improved in the meantime rather than have it prematurely hyped and have the bubble pop as I seek to raise funding... I imagine there are many others who are in the position of wanting to build apps based on blockchain tech but who are not yet able. For us, slow and steady wins the race.
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  It sounds like you're trying to tell the market what it should and should not buy. That's not how it works. The market tells you what it has chosen, then you can choose your reaction to it. Your reaction seems to be "disapproval"? Well that's mildly interesting I guess. Saying "they're missing the mark on marketing" about the second-largest crypto by market-cap, and surely top-5 in terms of ongoing development is at the very least a bit ironic. They exactly did NOT miss the mark on marketing. There are other technically superior products that don't get nearly as much funding, public attention, development resources etc.
  - simonh 9y ago
    ‘The market’ bought investment funds from Bernie Maddoff, and more recently Martin Shkreli. In February it thought the Dow was worth 24,515 one day and 1,600 points less the next. Sometimes the market is wrong, whatever free market fundies will tell you.
    - derefr 9y ago
      From an investor's perspective, sure, the market can be "wrong"; and avoiding its incorrect beliefs and hype-trains is how you make gains while avoiding losses. As an entrepreneur, though, the market makes the final decision on whether you make money, whether it's "right" or "wrong." If you're "right" when the market is "wrong" as an entrepreneur, you lose—you're "ahead of your time" or some other pleasantry meaning "you weren't giving the market what it wanted." If you want to sell something to the market, then if the market is irrationally exuberant, you have to be irrationally exuberant too.
      - simonh 9y ago
        You don’t have to be irrationally exuberant to succeed in the market, even if it’s irrationally exuberant. Is every single company on earth leaping and dancing to the latest fad of the minute in order to succeed? Is the secret of Warren Buffets’s success piling in on on all the latest trends? No, yet somehow our economy seems to bubble along ok. So I categorically reject the idea that this is the only way success is gauged, that’s self evidently not true. Secondly, if the market is wrong and you dance to that tune, eventually when reality catches up the market will realise it’s mistake. Trust me, the market can sell out of your company faster than you can pivot your entire business model. But sure, it is possible to make money following trends. But it’s not the only way. It’s not an immutable law of capitalism, and there’s plenty of money to be made providing actual, sustainable value.

bringtheaction 9y ago

The downsides of Ethereum is discouraging me a bit from developing on their platform. Then again they are the biggest smart contract crypto currency, but maybe it could be worth to build things with another one even so. Could you recommend some with good technical foundations that are ready for use today and with enough documentation that it’s possible to understand? I know Ark plan to but as far as I am aware they have not yet implemented smart contracts. NEO on the other hand I know supports smart contracts today and some different languages. Don’t know what actually building something with NEO is like though. Any one have experience with NEO? Any other crypto currencies with smart contracts?

Taek 9y ago
People don't like to hear this, but blockchain tech isn't ready for a general app platform. Bitcoin could easily be extended to have an EVM if it was a good idea, but there are lots of unsolved problems, gotchas, and overheads that make it a poor choice. I don't think that's the perpetual state of things, but I do think that every 'dapp' platform out there today is bad foundation, and largely that's because it's too early to be making general platforms. The approach that a couple of currencies have taken (including the one I lead) is to make a separate blockchain entirely dedicated to their app. And I think that's a far better choice than anything out there, though it comes with the glaring downside of needing to build and run your own blockchain, which is a very difficult thing to do. Most of the apps we are seeing today don't make any sense anyway. Very much smacks of the dotcom bubble, where people who suspected that the Internet would change the world were absolutely correct, but then the companies and ideas they put their money behind were missing the mark by miles. We've got the same issue today. Most successful ICOs are going to fail very hard, due to known impossibilities, known poor uses of the technology, etc. It's just a general fever that has a lot of new entrants in the space innovating in the wrong direction. It will get better. Dapp platforms will appear that make sense, have good foundations, and are easy to setup and use. But it's not around the corner, it's probably 3-5 years away.
- thisisit 9y ago
  > People don't like to hear this, but blockchain tech isn't ready for a general app platform. This cannot be stressed enough. But, I disagree that building your own blockchain is the answer in comparison to using EVM. The amount of blockchains and services people might end up needing will be huge. So, it seems the correct usage for blockchain is still far out.