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Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks peo

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users... Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its potential. This month a layer-2 solution called optimism will launch a virtual machine called OVM (optimism vm) on top of ethereum smart contracts that can solve most of the current scalability issues (and there are other solutions being tested in parallel: zkrollups...). We are also starting to realize the potential of Dex and Defi (distributed exchanges and finance), DAOs (distributed organizations), NFT (non-fungible tokens) and a bunch of things more that 7 years after are appearing out of thin air. So even if Ethereum wasn't updated at all (although, we probably all agree that PoW is not environmental friendly and should be replaced with a better alternative: PoS) it could still thrive in the long term thanks to its most fundamental design choices (turing-complete...). I am truly amazed by this technology and Vitalik. I wish I knew a little bit more of the underlying fundamentals. What do you think?

numbsafari 6y ago
Never underestimate the efficiency with which money launderers and organized crime are able to innovate and adapt.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  It's easy to spot the people not knowledgeable in crypto when they just parrot the media's fear mongering narratives.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    It’s easier for me to see the utility in any given random HN post, than in any form of cryptocurrency.
Sargos 6y ago
It really is amazing when you understand the capabilities and speed of iterations of the growing use cases of this new shared trust machine. DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, so many different ecosystems currently being built cooperatively by hundreds of different companies and project teams. It's almost a force of nature.
mrkramer 6y ago
Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  One limitation of Bitcoin script is that it's not turing complete. But there are sidechains like rsk with defi apps like sovryn that bring smart contracts and defi to BTC.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    I'm not an expert in Computer Theory but other people proved Bitcoin and Bitcoin Script are Turing Complete: [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279 [2] https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scrypts-game-of-life-is-proof/ https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scryp... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c
    - tom_mellior 6y ago
      These are deliberate redefinitions of the term "Turing complete". The reasonable interpretation is that evaluating a single block can involve an arbitrary computation (if given enough gas). Ethereum has this property, Bitcoin doesn't. These redefinitions say that you can take a few computation steps per Bitcoin block and save their state such that a later block can take a few more steps, so over time, very slowly, spread out over many blocks, Bitcoin can also implement an arbitrary computation. This is theoretically cute but otherwise useless.
      - antimatter15 6y ago
pgsimp 6y ago
The point of Ethereum is not really to be a distributed computer. It also seems misleading to describe it that way, as it doesn't distribute computations. Every node computes the same thing.
- viraptor 6y ago
  It also barely computes anything. It's closer to distributed consensus. (Distributed tricky consensus? - I acknowledge there's a tiny bit of logic)
  - cachvico 6y ago
    It can compute anything you want it to compute.
    - keymone 6y ago
      No, it really can’t. Unless you mean it in a sense that Minecraft is a Turing complete machine and can compute anything you want it to compute. Good luck computing anything non trivial.
- derefr 6y ago
  Yes, Ethereum Mainnet isn’t much of a distributed computer in the Mosix sense (it’s more of a decentralized computer); but a private/protected PoA EVM blockchain very much would work to truly distribute computation. Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow N computers to work on pieces of N subproblems in parallel and use the state trie as a blackboard for syncing/linearization between those subproblems. (The actual heavy computation would have to occur outside the chain, in oracle sibling processes, but they could at least load their binaries from the state trie. Think of it like AI bot-clients cooperatively playing a MOO where users can define object code.) Essentially, Ethereum is a distributed database with Turing-complete CRDTs. Mind you, nobody’s using Ethereum that way, but that doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t natively capable of being used that way. (Just like, say, oldschool fixed-function-pipeline GPUs could be used as GPGPUs, if you could translate your linear-algebra problem into an equivalent scene-geometry rendering problem.)
martamorena943 6y ago
I don't think it was visionary. Ever since, blockchain has struggled to find a real-world use case. We know how blockchain works, the concept is thousands of years old. This problem existed in the past (coordinating in an environment where no one trusts anyone). However if this was a real problem in the real world, companies would have built blockchains long ago. This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain found some straws to hold on to. It could have been one of those millions go-nowhere projects just as likely. I think there are legit use cases for it, but ultimately, we are still far from mass adoption and without the crazy monetary gains, I don't even believe anyone would talk about blockchain these days. Technology wise, it's not a strong value proposition. We can do pretty much everything without blockchain. Yeah there are some cases where trustlessness helps, but once this problem would become serious enough, it's not hard to build blockchain technology. It basically follows directly from basic principles defined by the problem. And the fact that everyone "thinks blockchain is new", already proves that the problem actually doesn't really exist.
- herbst 6y ago
  I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of fees, have additional security and because it is simply comfortable and fast. Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee. Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example. Even if the crypto market is unstable, the last years it generally went up while holding USD or EUR basically was a loss game valued against ex. CHF. I personally cant imagine a world without blockchains anymore.
  - fock 6y ago
    do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?
    - willis936 6y ago
      IRS has entered the chat. Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.
bhjgh777 6y ago
The EVM is a natural extension of bitcoin's scripting system. Here's the original Ethereum whitepaper, Vitalik cites all sorts of pre-Ethereum work: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-all-files-go-to-wiki-wiki-instead/old-whitepaper-for-historical-reference.md https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-al... There were tokens (Colored Coins) and Dexs (Omni) running on Bitcoin before ETH was launched.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. That's what powers the Tether network. It's far from decentralized though. It's a cartel of exchanges that operate the network. Colored coins were a neat idea but completely impractical in practice. Hence, why they never took off. Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.
  - Proven 6y ago
    > Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. Complete nonsense. a) https://www.omnilayer.org/ https://www.omnilayer.org/ - it says "Built in top of the Bitcoin Blockchain" right there on the home page b) Usually a separate database with an index of overlay transactions is created to enable faster and easier access to overlay transactions in Bitcoin blocks
  - bhjgh777 6y ago
    >Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. This is plain false. It says so in big letters, right at the top of their website: https://www.omnilayer.org/ https://www.omnilayer.org/ >That's what powers the Tether network. Tether has issued tokens on the Omni protocol, Ethereum, and other networks. The blockchains and amounts are listed here: https://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency >Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on. My original point was that weak smart contract features on Bitcoin motivated Ethereum's creation (Vitalik's name is on the Colored Coins whitepaper). This is in contrast to GGP's proposition that Ethereum had underrated novelty.
seibelj 6y ago
There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the community here is so virulently against what I have devoted my life to. It’s very sad. My conclusions are numerous, but I think it’s death by a thousand cuts.
- heliodor 6y ago
  Where do the crypto folks hang out?
  - seibelj 6y ago
    Everything is organized around coins and projects. For example if you are into eth core then you are in eth magicians https://ethereum-magicians.org https://ethereum-magicians.org The most popular crypto mediums are telegram and discord. Twitter is the social media of choice. Reddit has some decent subreddits but it isn’t the primary place. This community is based on trust. Trust is earned through contributing code, knowledge, effort, etc. If you join in the bull market, stick around through the bear to show you are serious. Etc.
    - fock 6y ago
      sound a lot like the mob
- Rapzid 6y ago
  I'm positive about Bitcoin valuation over the long term. I'm negative about Bitcoins utility. I'm very, very positive on the utility of systems like EVM and their valuation over the long term. I'm still negative about mainstream adoption of direct usage. It's complicated and too easy to make unrecoverable mistakes. I believe a lot of the criticism on HN is valid and deserved within certain contexts. Some contexts, like block chain VMs, don't come up much here at all.
deanCommie 6y ago
> Am I the only one who thinks No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing legitimate concerns. First, you have to understand that at least half of the concepts you're talking about have completely not broken through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the first I've heard about OVM, Dex, Defi, and DAOs. That's not the fault of the tech community, that's the fault of the Blockchain community by allowing itself to be overrun with quasi-technical charlatans who promote world-changing revolution while yadda-yaddaing past the technical details. Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us. I think I fundamentally agree with you - Vitalik IS a Genius. Like Satoshi. But I am extremely concerned with the direction most mainstream adoption of this technology is taken, and the glee with which boosters like you allow it to be. The one item on your list that has a lot of familiarity for the technical community, and even the rest of the populace today is NFTs. You listed them in the other list of concepts I had no familiarity with. Yet I do know a thing or two about NFTs from what I researched. And I think it's one of the most apalling ideas to have been invented in this domain yet. Masquerading as a method to liberate artists and promote new opportunities for income, it is so clearly a giant money laundering scheme for the wealthiest of the world. That's before we get into the environmental impact. So....that's what I think.
- iamwil 6y ago
  > Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us. No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest. So that'd be your impression when you haven't spent time looking into it. But it sounds like you've at least looked at Vitalik's writings. The Eth core has plenty of hard core tech in various corners of crypto. It's just that they're organized by project, and not all in one place.
  - starfallg 6y ago
Rapzid 6y ago
Agree. The blockchain is the tape; amazing! I'm a bit late to the party, but have invested a reasonable amount into it recently. I'm on the side of ETH 2.0 and massive scalability and lower gas prices(even though I currently mine liquidity) so the true potential of smart contracts and DeFi can be realized. The Ethereum docs are pretty great if you want to learn more: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ .
tcgv 6y ago
I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto space from the outside for the past few years. Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste. It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential. So I started investing my free time for building an experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to develop myself / become qualified in this field. Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and some new friends. [1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions
- cachvico 6y ago
  Impressive!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tcgv 6y ago
    Thanks!
- soupsranjan 6y ago
  Amazing, love this idea!
  - tcgv 6y ago
    Thanks man!
- abledon 6y ago
  > 1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions so you _did_ end up buying a boat load of ethereum i presume?
  - tcgv 6y ago
3np 6y ago
If by the document you mean the original Ethereum yellow paper that first formalized it, the main author was actually Gavin Wood, not Vitalik :) Both were crucial in laying down the technical and theoretical foundation of Ethereum. Gavin is working on other things now. Vitalik is not the thought-leader he was in the early days (which is a good thing as he’s not a SPoF and decision making is more decentralized)
samvher 6y ago
I largely agree. I think the field is exciting and interesting, and like many crypto fanatics say, there might be parallels with the early days of the internet. I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though! There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road. Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters. I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  The existing banking system? Goliath was better than David at fighting and he was not keen to learn rock-slinging. (I'm not implying David will always win though. It's unlikely.)
  - samvher 6y ago
    Plenty of central banks seem interested in launching digital currencies. For me the main selling points of cryptocurrencies are programmability, easy international transactions, and potentially easy micro-transactions. Personally I don't care much about the fact that they are decentralized, and while I'm happy for my bank to see my transaction history I'm not that keen on having it public. If I could move my savings into a digital currency provided by a central bank I'd do it today. Bonus points if it can be stored in something like special drawing rights rather than euros.
keymone 6y ago
Sorry, plopping JavaScript on top of blockchain is not something I would call visionary. Smart contracts were there long before eth. Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and very little delivery. It’s got nice PR, but it’s really the PHP of cryptocurrencies. But of course almost everything else except bitcoin is much worse. Turing completeness is literally a bug in such system. It’s an anti-feature. You shouldn’t want it. It’s a model of evaluation where halting problem exists. But hey, it’s a nice buzzword for script kiddies. Great foundation for financial system, right? :)
- everfree 6y ago
  Ethereum gets around the halting problem by using a "gas" model, where it halts your execution if you run out of gas before the program returns. If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that puts it in a great spot for adoption.
  - keymone 6y ago
    In any non-trivial program you will not know how much gas it requires to complete because that’s what it means - to solve the halting problem. What a great basis for your financial system handling all people’s economic interactions. What can possibly go wrong. I’ll stick with deterministic bitcoin script, thankyouverymuch.
    - mvanaltvorst 6y ago
      You don't have to know how much gas it requires to /complete/, you can just run the program and check whether it runs out of gas before it exits. You do not need to solve the halting problem. Actually, it's pretty trivial to implement this and this model has scaled quite well considering the size of Ethereum today.
    - throwingduck001 6y ago
      Determining whether a Turing machine halts within k steps is computable: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-problem-within-a-finite-time-interval https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-pro... If the number of steps is specified in unary, then the problem is NP-complete: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html
herbst 6y ago
I few years ago i sold all my eth because i did not get the hype. Years later ETH sparked my interest and i agree that the technic is very likely the greatest crypto innovation since bitcoin. And the thing Bitcoin should have been to begin with.
TobyBrull 6y ago
It's not obvious that Turing-complete smart contracts are a good long term decision. I agree that Ethereum is fascinating tech, but with great power comes a great many ways to shoot yourselves in the foot. For financial institutions, being boring is to some degree a feature and not just a bug.

numbsafari 6y ago

Never underestimate the efficiency with which money launderers and organized crime are able to innovate and adapt.

hanniabu 6y ago
It's easy to spot the people not knowledgeable in crypto when they just parrot the media's fear mongering narratives.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  It’s easier for me to see the utility in any given random HN post, than in any form of cryptocurrency.

Sargos 6y ago

It really is amazing when you understand the capabilities and speed of iterations of the growing use cases of this new shared trust machine. DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, so many different ecosystems currently being built cooperatively by hundreds of different companies and project teams. It's almost a force of nature.

mrkramer 6y ago

Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

rawtxapp 6y ago
One limitation of Bitcoin script is that it's not turing complete. But there are sidechains like rsk with defi apps like sovryn that bring smart contracts and defi to BTC.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I'm not an expert in Computer Theory but other people proved Bitcoin and Bitcoin Script are Turing Complete: [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279 [2] https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scrypts-game-of-life-is-proof/ https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scryp... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    These are deliberate redefinitions of the term "Turing complete". The reasonable interpretation is that evaluating a single block can involve an arbitrary computation (if given enough gas). Ethereum has this property, Bitcoin doesn't. These redefinitions say that you can take a few computation steps per Bitcoin block and save their state such that a later block can take a few more steps, so over time, very slowly, spread out over many blocks, Bitcoin can also implement an arbitrary computation. This is theoretically cute but otherwise useless.
    - antimatter15 6y ago

pgsimp 6y ago

The point of Ethereum is not really to be a distributed computer. It also seems misleading to describe it that way, as it doesn't distribute computations. Every node computes the same thing.

viraptor 6y ago
It also barely computes anything. It's closer to distributed consensus. (Distributed tricky consensus? - I acknowledge there's a tiny bit of logic)
- cachvico 6y ago
  It can compute anything you want it to compute.
  - keymone 6y ago
    No, it really can’t. Unless you mean it in a sense that Minecraft is a Turing complete machine and can compute anything you want it to compute. Good luck computing anything non trivial.
derefr 6y ago
Yes, Ethereum Mainnet isn’t much of a distributed computer in the Mosix sense (it’s more of a decentralized computer); but a private/protected PoA EVM blockchain very much would work to truly distribute computation. Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow N computers to work on pieces of N subproblems in parallel and use the state trie as a blackboard for syncing/linearization between those subproblems. (The actual heavy computation would have to occur outside the chain, in oracle sibling processes, but they could at least load their binaries from the state trie. Think of it like AI bot-clients cooperatively playing a MOO where users can define object code.) Essentially, Ethereum is a distributed database with Turing-complete CRDTs. Mind you, nobody’s using Ethereum that way, but that doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t natively capable of being used that way. (Just like, say, oldschool fixed-function-pipeline GPUs could be used as GPGPUs, if you could translate your linear-algebra problem into an equivalent scene-geometry rendering problem.)

martamorena943 6y ago

I don't think it was visionary. Ever since, blockchain has struggled to find a real-world use case. We know how blockchain works, the concept is thousands of years old. This problem existed in the past (coordinating in an environment where no one trusts anyone). However if this was a real problem in the real world, companies would have built blockchains long ago. This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain found some straws to hold on to. It could have been one of those millions go-nowhere projects just as likely. I think there are legit use cases for it, but ultimately, we are still far from mass adoption and without the crazy monetary gains, I don't even believe anyone would talk about blockchain these days. Technology wise, it's not a strong value proposition. We can do pretty much everything without blockchain. Yeah there are some cases where trustlessness helps, but once this problem would become serious enough, it's not hard to build blockchain technology. It basically follows directly from basic principles defined by the problem. And the fact that everyone "thinks blockchain is new", already proves that the problem actually doesn't really exist.

herbst 6y ago
I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of fees, have additional security and because it is simply comfortable and fast. Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee. Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example. Even if the crypto market is unstable, the last years it generally went up while holding USD or EUR basically was a loss game valued against ex. CHF. I personally cant imagine a world without blockchains anymore.
- fock 6y ago
  do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?
  - willis936 6y ago
    IRS has entered the chat. Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.

bhjgh777 6y ago

The EVM is a natural extension of bitcoin's scripting system. Here's the original Ethereum whitepaper, Vitalik cites all sorts of pre-Ethereum work: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-all-files-go-to-wiki-wiki-instead/old-whitepaper-for-historical-reference.md https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-al... There were tokens (Colored Coins) and Dexs (Omni) running on Bitcoin before ETH was launched.

chrisco255 6y ago
Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. That's what powers the Tether network. It's far from decentralized though. It's a cartel of exchanges that operate the network. Colored coins were a neat idea but completely impractical in practice. Hence, why they never took off. Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.
- Proven 6y ago
  > Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. Complete nonsense. a) https://www.omnilayer.org/ https://www.omnilayer.org/ - it says "Built in top of the Bitcoin Blockchain" right there on the home page b) Usually a separate database with an index of overlay transactions is created to enable faster and easier access to overlay transactions in Bitcoin blocks
- bhjgh777 6y ago
  >Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. This is plain false. It says so in big letters, right at the top of their website: https://www.omnilayer.org/ https://www.omnilayer.org/ >That's what powers the Tether network. Tether has issued tokens on the Omni protocol, Ethereum, and other networks. The blockchains and amounts are listed here: https://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency >Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on. My original point was that weak smart contract features on Bitcoin motivated Ethereum's creation (Vitalik's name is on the Colored Coins whitepaper). This is in contrast to GGP's proposition that Ethereum had underrated novelty.

seibelj 6y ago

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry. I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the community here is so virulently against what I have devoted my life to. It’s very sad. My conclusions are numerous, but I think it’s death by a thousand cuts.

heliodor 6y ago
Where do the crypto folks hang out?
- seibelj 6y ago
  Everything is organized around coins and projects. For example if you are into eth core then you are in eth magicians https://ethereum-magicians.org https://ethereum-magicians.org The most popular crypto mediums are telegram and discord. Twitter is the social media of choice. Reddit has some decent subreddits but it isn’t the primary place. This community is based on trust. Trust is earned through contributing code, knowledge, effort, etc. If you join in the bull market, stick around through the bear to show you are serious. Etc.
  - fock 6y ago
    sound a lot like the mob
Rapzid 6y ago
I'm positive about Bitcoin valuation over the long term. I'm negative about Bitcoins utility. I'm very, very positive on the utility of systems like EVM and their valuation over the long term. I'm still negative about mainstream adoption of direct usage. It's complicated and too easy to make unrecoverable mistakes. I believe a lot of the criticism on HN is valid and deserved within certain contexts. Some contexts, like block chain VMs, don't come up much here at all.

deanCommie 6y ago

> Am I the only one who thinks No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing legitimate concerns. First, you have to understand that at least half of the concepts you're talking about have completely not broken through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the first I've heard about OVM, Dex, Defi, and DAOs. That's not the fault of the tech community, that's the fault of the Blockchain community by allowing itself to be overrun with quasi-technical charlatans who promote world-changing revolution while yadda-yaddaing past the technical details. Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us. I think I fundamentally agree with you - Vitalik IS a Genius. Like Satoshi. But I am extremely concerned with the direction most mainstream adoption of this technology is taken, and the glee with which boosters like you allow it to be. The one item on your list that has a lot of familiarity for the technical community, and even the rest of the populace today is NFTs. You listed them in the other list of concepts I had no familiarity with. Yet I do know a thing or two about NFTs from what I researched. And I think it's one of the most apalling ideas to have been invented in this domain yet. Masquerading as a method to liberate artists and promote new opportunities for income, it is so clearly a giant money laundering scheme for the wealthiest of the world. That's before we get into the environmental impact. So....that's what I think.

iamwil 6y ago
> Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us. No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest. So that'd be your impression when you haven't spent time looking into it. But it sounds like you've at least looked at Vitalik's writings. The Eth core has plenty of hard core tech in various corners of crypto. It's just that they're organized by project, and not all in one place.
- starfallg 6y ago

Rapzid 6y ago

Agree. The blockchain is the tape; amazing! I'm a bit late to the party, but have invested a reasonable amount into it recently. I'm on the side of ETH 2.0 and massive scalability and lower gas prices(even though I currently mine liquidity) so the true potential of smart contracts and DeFi can be realized. The Ethereum docs are pretty great if you want to learn more: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ .

tcgv 6y ago

I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto space from the outside for the past few years. Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste. It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential. So I started investing my free time for building an experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to develop myself / become qualified in this field. Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and some new friends. [1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions

cachvico 6y ago
Impressive!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tcgv 6y ago
  Thanks!
soupsranjan 6y ago
Amazing, love this idea!
- tcgv 6y ago
  Thanks man!
abledon 6y ago
> 1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions so you _did_ end up buying a boat load of ethereum i presume?
- tcgv 6y ago

3np 6y ago

If by the document you mean the original Ethereum yellow paper that first formalized it, the main author was actually Gavin Wood, not Vitalik :) Both were crucial in laying down the technical and theoretical foundation of Ethereum. Gavin is working on other things now. Vitalik is not the thought-leader he was in the early days (which is a good thing as he’s not a SPoF and decision making is more decentralized)

samvher 6y ago

I largely agree. I think the field is exciting and interesting, and like many crypto fanatics say, there might be parallels with the early days of the internet. I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though! There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road. Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters. I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)

kubanczyk 6y ago
The existing banking system? Goliath was better than David at fighting and he was not keen to learn rock-slinging. (I'm not implying David will always win though. It's unlikely.)
- samvher 6y ago
  Plenty of central banks seem interested in launching digital currencies. For me the main selling points of cryptocurrencies are programmability, easy international transactions, and potentially easy micro-transactions. Personally I don't care much about the fact that they are decentralized, and while I'm happy for my bank to see my transaction history I'm not that keen on having it public. If I could move my savings into a digital currency provided by a central bank I'd do it today. Bonus points if it can be stored in something like special drawing rights rather than euros.

keymone 6y ago

Sorry, plopping JavaScript on top of blockchain is not something I would call visionary. Smart contracts were there long before eth. Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and very little delivery. It’s got nice PR, but it’s really the PHP of cryptocurrencies. But of course almost everything else except bitcoin is much worse. Turing completeness is literally a bug in such system. It’s an anti-feature. You shouldn’t want it. It’s a model of evaluation where halting problem exists. But hey, it’s a nice buzzword for script kiddies. Great foundation for financial system, right? :)

everfree 6y ago
Ethereum gets around the halting problem by using a "gas" model, where it halts your execution if you run out of gas before the program returns. If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that puts it in a great spot for adoption.
- keymone 6y ago
  In any non-trivial program you will not know how much gas it requires to complete because that’s what it means - to solve the halting problem. What a great basis for your financial system handling all people’s economic interactions. What can possibly go wrong. I’ll stick with deterministic bitcoin script, thankyouverymuch.
  - mvanaltvorst 6y ago
    You don't have to know how much gas it requires to /complete/, you can just run the program and check whether it runs out of gas before it exits. You do not need to solve the halting problem. Actually, it's pretty trivial to implement this and this model has scaled quite well considering the size of Ethereum today.
  - throwingduck001 6y ago
    Determining whether a Turing machine halts within k steps is computable: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-problem-within-a-finite-time-interval https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-pro... If the number of steps is specified in unary, then the problem is NP-complete: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html

herbst 6y ago

I few years ago i sold all my eth because i did not get the hype. Years later ETH sparked my interest and i agree that the technic is very likely the greatest crypto innovation since bitcoin. And the thing Bitcoin should have been to begin with.

TobyBrull 6y ago

It's not obvious that Turing-complete smart contracts are a good long term decision. I agree that Ethereum is fascinating tech, but with great power comes a great many ways to shoot yourselves in the foot. For financial institutions, being boring is to some degree a feature and not just a bug.