3 ms·
As someone deeply involved in this community, I sort of agree about the "Rube Goldberg" feel of his ideas, but Vitalik et al have delivered pretty reliably: I t
by drcode 9y ago
As someone deeply involved in this community, I sort of agree about the "Rube Goldberg" feel of his ideas, but Vitalik et al have delivered pretty reliably: I think both ethereum and casper are pretty safe bets at this point (yes, I'll likely get some comments telling me I'm wrong and how horrible ethereum and casper are)
The sharding stuff, however, is still iffy at the moment (I've studied it pretty closely) ...but if vitalik is confident he can make it work, I'll bet on v every time.
- nextos 9y agoEthereum is, so far, missing a key element for me to take it really seriously: Formal Methods. There are some small efforts, but I'd rather have formal methods from the beginning, not as an afterthought. The problem is that market forces favor releasing early rather than releasing correct things. It's the MIT vs NJ paradox again, or worse is better. But this time the potential risks are much bigger.
- drcode 9y agoWell it was a ton of work to get ethereum out the door... Adding a couple more years to formally prove everything first sounds like the perfect way to be stuck in development limbo forever. As you say, formal methods are being applied after the fact to some degree at least.
- nextos 9y agoI think it is a common misconception that formal methods will lead to an extremely slow development cycle. That is only the case if you go for the best guarantee of correctness: Theorem Proving. There are more agile options. For example, model checking all protocols is pretty easy in comparison to theorem proving. Still a significant effort, but perhaps an order of magnitude easier.
- rickycook 9y agowell, that would be tooling though. you wouldn’t say that x86 is missing formal methods therefor you shouldn’t use it right... solidity, etc sure maybe... but at that point, releasing early is probably a good thing so that you can get a whole community working on things and getting ideas and collaboration from a large group of people *edit: unless you mean like geth, or some minimal reference client should be formally proven
- tfha 9y agoWell, a lot of x86 actually does get proven using formal methods. Clearly not all of it, but we've realized that was a bad plan, and that we should go back to formally verifying all of our hardware.
- tfha 9y agoUh, I think that many cryptocurrency experts would take strong opposition to the idea that ethereum has delivered reliably. Just because a bridge is still standing today doesn't mean it's safe. Ethereum has been almost religious in violating best practice blockchain design.