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Ethereum has a lot of potential. Here's a more digestible summary of the whitepaper linked in the blog post, by a member of the founding team: http://bitcoinmag

Ethereum has a lot of potential. Here's a more digestible summary of the whitepaper linked in the blog post, by a member of the founding team: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9671/ethereum-next-generation-cryptocurrency-decentralized-application-platform/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9671/ethereum-next-generation-cry...

nullc 13y ago
I'm quite skeptical of Ethereum's ability to meaningfully contribute to these matters. An enormous amount of trustlessness is already possible in Bitcoin, but people just do not bother using it: They believe they can trust their counterparties (or they wouldn't transact!) and implementing trustless systems is substantially harder to do and harder to monetize (no central point to seek rents from). Witness Ethereum itself: Instead of targeted improvements to Bitcoin it's proposed as a whole new currency to be funded by eager speculators before it even exists. It is my experience that the limitations of trustlessness in the Bitcoin ecosystem have arisen almost exclusively from a lack of interest or knoweldge and not from any missing technological capability.
- paulbaumgart 13y ago
  That's an interesting point. I suspect the main reason people aren't using those capabilities of Bitcoin more frequently is that no one has spent the time to make the UX good. Unfortunately, that's also basically true of every consumer-oriented open source project ever. I'm not sure why it's the case, but it does seem that good UX requires a profit motive.
  - nullc 13y ago
    You can't really solve it with "UX" as a blanket thing. To build trustless service you must design cryptographic protocols that use the bitcoin "script" expression language— it's form of programming. Don't hold your breath for a good UI there. :) Once you've done that, you can slap a nice UI on it to make it available to mortals. An example: https://bitrated.com/ https://bitrated.com/
- drcode 13y ago
  Exactly, ethereum is "pushing the borders" on a "border" of bitcoin that noone seems to be running into yet, or caring about, anyway. Once multisig is used more heavily in the bitcoin world then maybe a better case can be made for ethereum becoming a success (though I nonetheless find ethereum tremendously exciting, from a pure technology standpoint)
  - nullc 13y ago
    > ethereum tremendously exciting, from a pure technology standpoint I don't. I think it's the wrong model and it's only interesting when you don't have a very complete model of what computation is doing inside a consensus system. What script is actually doing in Bitcoin is not "running code"— running identical code with identical on hundreds of thousands of nodes just for it own sake would be stupid and wasteful. What happens is that users of the network run the code themselves and their scriptSig is a proof that they ran the code correctly (and that the code accepted their inputs). The simplest way to do this is to replay the execution, but now it makes sense: The network runs the code to verify you ran it right, and by doing so the contract embedded in the script is made trustless. Running the code in the network has a lot of downsides, however. It completely lacks privacy (except to the extent that we have an opcode that implements a zero knoweldge proof of knoweldge of the discrete log of an EC point), and there is tremendous pressure on the computational complexity, implementation complexity risk, and size of these scripts because of the cost of verify them. Script execution is a pure externality that we only safely know how to cope with by making sure that it is very very cheap (we do this in Bitcoin by making sure that trivial static analysis can determine the execution cost (measure the size), and then bounding that cost). But actually executing the script isn't the only way to verify computation was performed correctly. Using cryptography it's possible to have constant size and complexity proofs, independent of the program size. This lets you cook up stuff like: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277389.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277389.0 and I find that a lot more exciting. Especially since these kinds of enhancements don't demand the risky tradeoffs that making script more expensive demands. I'm also excited about distributed oracles— programs that sign transactions conditional on user specified code, including— potentially— external inputs. The ability to have external inputs (trusted by the oracle) greatly increases the expressive power beyond what any in-consensus system could have, and using multisignatures with multiple oracles you can achieve good security though not trustlessness. E.g. "This tx pays to bob if bob.com is on the first page of google, otherwise after april 1st it can be redeemed by greg". I would expect to see any attempt at more powerful script first implemented via multisignature oracles before even considering making it trustless by merging it into the network.

nullc 13y ago

I'm quite skeptical of Ethereum's ability to meaningfully contribute to these matters. An enormous amount of trustlessness is already possible in Bitcoin, but people just do not bother using it: They believe they can trust their counterparties (or they wouldn't transact!) and implementing trustless systems is substantially harder to do and harder to monetize (no central point to seek rents from). Witness Ethereum itself: Instead of targeted improvements to Bitcoin it's proposed as a whole new currency to be funded by eager speculators before it even exists. It is my experience that the limitations of trustlessness in the Bitcoin ecosystem have arisen almost exclusively from a lack of interest or knoweldge and not from any missing technological capability.

paulbaumgart 13y ago
That's an interesting point. I suspect the main reason people aren't using those capabilities of Bitcoin more frequently is that no one has spent the time to make the UX good. Unfortunately, that's also basically true of every consumer-oriented open source project ever. I'm not sure why it's the case, but it does seem that good UX requires a profit motive.
- nullc 13y ago
  You can't really solve it with "UX" as a blanket thing. To build trustless service you must design cryptographic protocols that use the bitcoin "script" expression language— it's form of programming. Don't hold your breath for a good UI there. :) Once you've done that, you can slap a nice UI on it to make it available to mortals. An example: https://bitrated.com/ https://bitrated.com/
drcode 13y ago
Exactly, ethereum is "pushing the borders" on a "border" of bitcoin that noone seems to be running into yet, or caring about, anyway. Once multisig is used more heavily in the bitcoin world then maybe a better case can be made for ethereum becoming a success (though I nonetheless find ethereum tremendously exciting, from a pure technology standpoint)
- nullc 13y ago
  > ethereum tremendously exciting, from a pure technology standpoint I don't. I think it's the wrong model and it's only interesting when you don't have a very complete model of what computation is doing inside a consensus system. What script is actually doing in Bitcoin is not "running code"— running identical code with identical on hundreds of thousands of nodes just for it own sake would be stupid and wasteful. What happens is that users of the network run the code themselves and their scriptSig is a proof that they ran the code correctly (and that the code accepted their inputs). The simplest way to do this is to replay the execution, but now it makes sense: The network runs the code to verify you ran it right, and by doing so the contract embedded in the script is made trustless. Running the code in the network has a lot of downsides, however. It completely lacks privacy (except to the extent that we have an opcode that implements a zero knoweldge proof of knoweldge of the discrete log of an EC point), and there is tremendous pressure on the computational complexity, implementation complexity risk, and size of these scripts because of the cost of verify them. Script execution is a pure externality that we only safely know how to cope with by making sure that it is very very cheap (we do this in Bitcoin by making sure that trivial static analysis can determine the execution cost (measure the size), and then bounding that cost). But actually executing the script isn't the only way to verify computation was performed correctly. Using cryptography it's possible to have constant size and complexity proofs, independent of the program size. This lets you cook up stuff like: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277389.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=277389.0 and I find that a lot more exciting. Especially since these kinds of enhancements don't demand the risky tradeoffs that making script more expensive demands. I'm also excited about distributed oracles— programs that sign transactions conditional on user specified code, including— potentially— external inputs. The ability to have external inputs (trusted by the oracle) greatly increases the expressive power beyond what any in-consensus system could have, and using multisignatures with multiple oracles you can achieve good security though not trustlessness. E.g. "This tx pays to bob if bob.com is on the first page of google, otherwise after april 1st it can be redeemed by greg". I would expect to see any attempt at more powerful script first implemented via multisignature oracles before even considering making it trustless by merging it into the network.