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> IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're wanting for resources to do this right. I

> IMO the quality and process of the fundamental software enabling all of this is inexcusable - it's not like they're wanting for resources to do this right. If anything, this just shows how complex the system is. Distributed systems are hard to write. The recent Geth 1.10.22 bug only occurs on shutdown- an edge case I imagine they will be testing from now on.

kkielhofner 4y ago
I'm not saying it's not complex and hard. On the contrary - it's incredibly complex and hard but that raises another question: just how far from this ecosystem being ready for prime time are we? At the risk of yet another comparison of blockchain and the internet: Ethereum is at least seven years old, has a market cap of $200B, and the main "sponsor" alone (Ethereum Foundation) has over a billion dollars. For reference Google was built within two years (in the 90s!) with a total inflation adjusted investment of a few hundred thousands dollars - all starting a few years after the release of the web. I know it's not the same thing but CERN says "the web" was "released" in 1993. Would the web have been nearly as successful with these kinds of hijinks taking place with the fundamental enabling software and protocols in 2000? Seven years in the web and the internet (which was also incredibly complex and hard) was already rock solid (certainly by comparison) with many orders of magnitude more users interacting with and depending on it everyday. All of this (and countless other references) makes blockchain look more like fusion power than the "early days" (first thirteen years) of the internet, personal computers, mobile, etc.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Google wasn't "built within two years". It is a living software program backed by massive infrastructure. It was iterated on for decades and continues to be. The very first iteration of page rank maybe was done in two years. But stop implying that Sergey and Larry built it in their dorm and could walk away from it with zero input or assistance from the tens of thousands of engineers they hired in the ensuing years. The web "rock solid" in the year 2000? Bud, I was still on dial up in the year 2000. Microsoft was still licking its wounds from antitrust lawsuits regarding the web in the year 2000. Flash plugins with huge security deficiencies were still common on the web in 2000. JavaScript was slow as hell because some of Google's tens of thousands of employees hadn't invented V8 yet or Chrome browser yet. Good lord you are washing over a hell of a lot of complexity and effort that went into making the modern web fairly solid.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    The Wayback Machine begs to differ: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google... I'm clearly not talking about Google as the behemoth we know today - I'm talking about Google the search engine (yes, Page Rank) - which I was using in 1998 because it was already vastly superior to Altavista, Lycos, etc. I was on dial-up until 2004 (DSL, yeah!) but I was skipping trips to the library for homework by 1998 (at the latest) because the web and the fundamentals powering it (routers, modem banks, operating systems, server and client software, etc) were already vastly more mature than what we see in blockchain today (see my parent comment). HTTP 1.1 was published in 1999 and it still works today. Yet here we are, in 2022, with the entire Ethereum network being given a couple of weeks (at best) to deploy a massive software upgrade for a fundamental protocol level change or get left behind. Sure enough - 88% of clients aren't ready for it[0]. I don't know about you but I don't remember a single instance of "if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet. I was in a rural area and could only get 14.4 on my modem reliably (often 9600). It was slow but it worked. Besides, are we really comparing blockchain software reliability and quality in 2022 with the millions of miles and countless components of physical infrastructure that it took to bring the web to hundreds of millions of people by 2000? The web was slow (like blockchains aren't?) but still worked. It was slow because it turns out literally digging up entire countries to deploy broadband and laying submarine cables around the world is (to say the least) a challenging, extremely expensive, and long process. [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge https://ethernodes.org/merge
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      > The Wayback Machine begs to differ: Yeah, I get that the website google.com was around in 1998. I was around then, too, and used it too. But behind the scenes of that deceptively simple looking frontend, is a mass of data centers and a multi-million line code base that was (and indeed, still is) being updated and maintained by thousands of engineers to prevent it from falling apart or being abused by SEO maximizers to the point of being unusable. If it's so simple, please try to re-create it. It shouldn't take you too long. Just a wave of your hand. > if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet. Plenty of back-end servers with zero day exploits have to be patched all the time. Other incidents happen all the time behind the scenes that engineers are forced to fix on short notice to keep a massive service operational. I'm guessing you've never worked on call as a dev ops engineer. Ethereum works. It has 100% uptime since 2015. That's impressive. Not even Google can claim that.

kkielhofner 4y ago

I'm not saying it's not complex and hard. On the contrary - it's incredibly complex and hard but that raises another question: just how far from this ecosystem being ready for prime time are we? At the risk of yet another comparison of blockchain and the internet: Ethereum is at least seven years old, has a market cap of $200B, and the main "sponsor" alone (Ethereum Foundation) has over a billion dollars. For reference Google was built within two years (in the 90s!) with a total inflation adjusted investment of a few hundred thousands dollars - all starting a few years after the release of the web. I know it's not the same thing but CERN says "the web" was "released" in 1993. Would the web have been nearly as successful with these kinds of hijinks taking place with the fundamental enabling software and protocols in 2000? Seven years in the web and the internet (which was also incredibly complex and hard) was already rock solid (certainly by comparison) with many orders of magnitude more users interacting with and depending on it everyday. All of this (and countless other references) makes blockchain look more like fusion power than the "early days" (first thirteen years) of the internet, personal computers, mobile, etc.

chrisco255 4y ago
Google wasn't "built within two years". It is a living software program backed by massive infrastructure. It was iterated on for decades and continues to be. The very first iteration of page rank maybe was done in two years. But stop implying that Sergey and Larry built it in their dorm and could walk away from it with zero input or assistance from the tens of thousands of engineers they hired in the ensuing years. The web "rock solid" in the year 2000? Bud, I was still on dial up in the year 2000. Microsoft was still licking its wounds from antitrust lawsuits regarding the web in the year 2000. Flash plugins with huge security deficiencies were still common on the web in 2000. JavaScript was slow as hell because some of Google's tens of thousands of employees hadn't invented V8 yet or Chrome browser yet. Good lord you are washing over a hell of a lot of complexity and effort that went into making the modern web fairly solid.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  The Wayback Machine begs to differ: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google... I'm clearly not talking about Google as the behemoth we know today - I'm talking about Google the search engine (yes, Page Rank) - which I was using in 1998 because it was already vastly superior to Altavista, Lycos, etc. I was on dial-up until 2004 (DSL, yeah!) but I was skipping trips to the library for homework by 1998 (at the latest) because the web and the fundamentals powering it (routers, modem banks, operating systems, server and client software, etc) were already vastly more mature than what we see in blockchain today (see my parent comment). HTTP 1.1 was published in 1999 and it still works today. Yet here we are, in 2022, with the entire Ethereum network being given a couple of weeks (at best) to deploy a massive software upgrade for a fundamental protocol level change or get left behind. Sure enough - 88% of clients aren't ready for it[0]. I don't know about you but I don't remember a single instance of "if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet. I was in a rural area and could only get 14.4 on my modem reliably (often 9600). It was slow but it worked. Besides, are we really comparing blockchain software reliability and quality in 2022 with the millions of miles and countless components of physical infrastructure that it took to bring the web to hundreds of millions of people by 2000? The web was slow (like blockchains aren't?) but still worked. It was slow because it turns out literally digging up entire countries to deploy broadband and laying submarine cables around the world is (to say the least) a challenging, extremely expensive, and long process. [0] - https://ethernodes.org/merge https://ethernodes.org/merge
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    > The Wayback Machine begs to differ: Yeah, I get that the website google.com was around in 1998. I was around then, too, and used it too. But behind the scenes of that deceptively simple looking frontend, is a mass of data centers and a multi-million line code base that was (and indeed, still is) being updated and maintained by thousands of engineers to prevent it from falling apart or being abused by SEO maximizers to the point of being unusable. If it's so simple, please try to re-create it. It shouldn't take you too long. Just a wave of your hand. > if you don't upgrade your browser in the next two weeks it will not work at all" in my three decades of being on the internet. Plenty of back-end servers with zero day exploits have to be patched all the time. Other incidents happen all the time behind the scenes that engineers are forced to fix on short notice to keep a massive service operational. I'm guessing you've never worked on call as a dev ops engineer. Ethereum works. It has 100% uptime since 2015. That's impressive. Not even Google can claim that.