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Well, the details are more convoluted than two sentences on a public forum can convey. If you are seriously interested in how digital money works, I suggest you

Well, the details are more convoluted than two sentences on a public forum can convey. If you are seriously interested in how digital money works, I suggest you to read „Mastering Bitcoin“ which I found quite accessible even without a strong background in cryptography. Once you understood the BTC network you get a good grasp of what ETH is doing. The former also employs an execution stack for running transactions but it is much more limited and I believe Turing incomplete (as a conscious choice).

ShamelessC 4y ago
The problem is these contracts will have bugs, as most software written by normal coders can attest to. Further! there is no decentralized way to settle disputes. Finally, modern contracts are at least ostensibly premised on being human readable. You may think such "pure logic" of some JS-alike smart contract is somehow easier to understand, but this will never be true while keeping the language meangfully capable, due to turing completeness (and other friends). Such a system, where stakeholders are required to trust coders, destroys the benefits you claim. You now have the bottleneck of required human vetting/interacting. -This- is what people mean when they say such a system cant work in practice and is essentially no better (and definitely has lots of strange quirks like gas fees) than existing financial instruments.
- G3rn0ti 4y ago
  > -This- is what people mean when they say such a system cant work in practice Not sure what you are talking about. First of all I did not argue whether smart contracts have benefits (the thread was about L2 chains in the ETH context and whether that was overengineered). Secondly, I would suggest you try ETH out. With the bubble over, gas fees are back to reasonable values. Buy a hundred bugs of ETH on Coinbase, move that to your Coinbase wallet and store some of it in the AAVE lender contract. While you might lose about $10 in gas fees and Coinbase fees, you’ll earn an interest rate on a decentralized network not involving banks. I found that pretty cool when I tried it for my first time. The test may be more fun if you happen to know sb willing to sell you ETH directly and guide you through the ramp up phase.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    I bought 10$ of ETH once about a year ago in the hopes that I could donate to some developers on GitHub. I never used it, and certainly wouldn't hold it for speculation as that is just pumping US cash dollars into a system full of people trying to cash out on a greater fool's scheme. Anyway, doesn't seem like we are going to see eye-to-eye and no one has the energy to refute the complex uselessness that is crypto-currency. Dan Olson did a better job than I ever could - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g case in point, this fun little copy-pasta you've given us: "Secondly, I would suggest you try ETH out. With the bubble over, gas fees are back to reasonable values. Buy a hundred bugs of ETH on Coinbase, move that to your Coinbase wallet and store some of it in the AAVE lender contract. While you might lose about $10 in gas fees and Coinbase fees, you’ll earn an interest rate on a decentralized network not involving banks. I found that pretty cool when I tried it for my first time. The test may be more fun if you happen to know sb willing to sell you ETH directly and guide you through the ramp up phase. " My favorite part about this is that you deliberately explain _none_ of it (don't worry, I'm really not interested). Do you really think average people know what all this is? Or are you just hoping they'll ask so you can cheerlead each concept individually?
    - G3rn0ti 4y ago
      > My favorite part about this is that you deliberately explain _none_ of it Have you ever tried to explain what a bank account is to a person who’s never used money? Alternatively, had you tried to explain what the World Wide Web is supposed to be about to a boomer back in the 90s? Then maybe you begin to understand how I feel when interacting with people like you.
      - ShamelessC 4y ago
        > Appeals to “the potential for innovation” are always amorphous and hand-wavy rhetorical gestures towards the potential for some tech that could exist but which we don’t fully understand the implications of. However bitcoin is a technology which did not arise out of an engineering effort directed towards a specific problem or market inefficiency, but instead out of a anarchist political narrative that views democratic control of the money supply and law enforcement as the problem. (from https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/non-innovation.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/non-innovation.html)

ShamelessC 4y ago

The problem is these contracts will have bugs, as most software written by normal coders can attest to. Further! there is no decentralized way to settle disputes. Finally, modern contracts are at least ostensibly premised on being human readable. You may think such "pure logic" of some JS-alike smart contract is somehow easier to understand, but this will never be true while keeping the language meangfully capable, due to turing completeness (and other friends). Such a system, where stakeholders are required to trust coders, destroys the benefits you claim. You now have the bottleneck of required human vetting/interacting. -This- is what people mean when they say such a system cant work in practice and is essentially no better (and definitely has lots of strange quirks like gas fees) than existing financial instruments.

G3rn0ti 4y ago
> -This- is what people mean when they say such a system cant work in practice Not sure what you are talking about. First of all I did not argue whether smart contracts have benefits (the thread was about L2 chains in the ETH context and whether that was overengineered). Secondly, I would suggest you try ETH out. With the bubble over, gas fees are back to reasonable values. Buy a hundred bugs of ETH on Coinbase, move that to your Coinbase wallet and store some of it in the AAVE lender contract. While you might lose about $10 in gas fees and Coinbase fees, you’ll earn an interest rate on a decentralized network not involving banks. I found that pretty cool when I tried it for my first time. The test may be more fun if you happen to know sb willing to sell you ETH directly and guide you through the ramp up phase.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  I bought 10$ of ETH once about a year ago in the hopes that I could donate to some developers on GitHub. I never used it, and certainly wouldn't hold it for speculation as that is just pumping US cash dollars into a system full of people trying to cash out on a greater fool's scheme. Anyway, doesn't seem like we are going to see eye-to-eye and no one has the energy to refute the complex uselessness that is crypto-currency. Dan Olson did a better job than I ever could - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g case in point, this fun little copy-pasta you've given us: "Secondly, I would suggest you try ETH out. With the bubble over, gas fees are back to reasonable values. Buy a hundred bugs of ETH on Coinbase, move that to your Coinbase wallet and store some of it in the AAVE lender contract. While you might lose about $10 in gas fees and Coinbase fees, you’ll earn an interest rate on a decentralized network not involving banks. I found that pretty cool when I tried it for my first time. The test may be more fun if you happen to know sb willing to sell you ETH directly and guide you through the ramp up phase. " My favorite part about this is that you deliberately explain _none_ of it (don't worry, I'm really not interested). Do you really think average people know what all this is? Or are you just hoping they'll ask so you can cheerlead each concept individually?
  - G3rn0ti 4y ago
    > My favorite part about this is that you deliberately explain _none_ of it Have you ever tried to explain what a bank account is to a person who’s never used money? Alternatively, had you tried to explain what the World Wide Web is supposed to be about to a boomer back in the 90s? Then maybe you begin to understand how I feel when interacting with people like you.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      > Appeals to “the potential for innovation” are always amorphous and hand-wavy rhetorical gestures towards the potential for some tech that could exist but which we don’t fully understand the implications of. However bitcoin is a technology which did not arise out of an engineering effort directed towards a specific problem or market inefficiency, but instead out of a anarchist political narrative that views democratic control of the money supply and law enforcement as the problem. (from https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/non-innovation.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/non-innovation.html)