4 ms·
What about Ethereum? I'm not in the space much and follow it rather loosely, but Ether seems like one of the better options out there.
by HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
What about Ethereum? I'm not in the space much and follow it rather loosely, but Ether seems like one of the better options out there.
- xiphias2 8y agoEthereum is very interesting, but it has some red flags for me: - It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary. - Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients. - With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier). - The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts. - It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world. - State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol