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Love to see a poll: will Ethereum ever launch? I can't tell if this is all horseshit, or too deep for me to understand.

wyager 12y ago
>I can't tell if this is all horseshit, or too deep for me to understand. A mixture of horseshit and mildly interesting stuff. Even though ethereum is technically feasible, it's plagued by developmental issues (including, IIRC, failed attempts at roll-your-own crypto), and even if it does ever get launched, the incentive structure doesn't make sense and the whole platform is essentially useless. It's absolutely no good for distributed apps; you still need oracles for those to do anything useful, and if you have oracles, you might as well put the apps on the oracles in the first place. It might be useful for digital contracts, but Bitcoin already handles those very well in the vast majority of cases.
- DennisP 12y ago
  It's not like they're coming up with their own encryption algorithms. The original parts are things that haven't been done before. Roll-your-own is the only option. It's worth noting maybe that Ralph Merkle is on the team. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25269r/dr_ralph_merkle_of_merkle_tree_fame_just_joined/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25269r/dr_ralph_mer... The only thing you need oracles for is getting information from the outside world. I can think of plenty of applications that don't require that. But even then you don't really need oracles if you use the Schelling mechanism they've been talking about.
  - wyager 12y ago
    >It's not like they're coming up with their own encryption algorithms. I seem to remember something about a tree-based hash algorithm for mining purposes that turned out to be cryptographically insecure. >The only thing you need oracles for is getting information from the outside world. Or for having any effect on the outside world (i.e. the things that people usually want programs to do). > I can think of plenty of applications that don't require that. Besides financials/contract processing, what? >Schelling mechanism Do you have a link about this?
    - DennisP 12y ago
      Schelling: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal-trust-universal-data-feed/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/30/advanced-contract-programming-example-schellingcoin/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/30/advanced-contract-progr...
semiel 12y ago
I've been following development pretty closely, and I'm reasonably convinced that they will launch in the first half of 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if they missed their target ("before March 21st") by a month or two, but they seem committed to getting a reasonable 1.0 out the door soon. This was much less clear a few months ago, since they kept coming up with yet another company-sized idea to implement every week or so. But apparently Nick Szabo put the fear of god into them and reminded them that there's no point in designing a perfect system that never ships. It's worth noting that this blog post is explicitly about ideas for the as-of-yet hypothetical version 2.0. They don't need to figure this out in order to launch.

>I can't tell if this is all horseshit, or too deep for me to understand. A mixture of horseshit and mildly interesting stuff. Even though ethereum is technically feasible, it's plagued by developmental issues (including, IIRC, failed attempts at roll-your-own crypto), and even if it does ever get launched, the incentive structure doesn't make sense and the whole platform is essentially useless. It's absolutely no good for distributed apps; you still need oracles for those to do anything useful, and if you have oracles, you might as well put the apps on the oracles in the first place. It might be useful for digital contracts, but Bitcoin already handles those very well in the vast majority of cases.

DennisP 12y ago
It's not like they're coming up with their own encryption algorithms. The original parts are things that haven't been done before. Roll-your-own is the only option. It's worth noting maybe that Ralph Merkle is on the team. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25269r/dr_ralph_merkle_of_merkle_tree_fame_just_joined/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/25269r/dr_ralph_mer... The only thing you need oracles for is getting information from the outside world. I can think of plenty of applications that don't require that. But even then you don't really need oracles if you use the Schelling mechanism they've been talking about.
- wyager 12y ago
  >It's not like they're coming up with their own encryption algorithms. I seem to remember something about a tree-based hash algorithm for mining purposes that turned out to be cryptographically insecure. >The only thing you need oracles for is getting information from the outside world. Or for having any effect on the outside world (i.e. the things that people usually want programs to do). > I can think of plenty of applications that don't require that. Besides financials/contract processing, what? >Schelling mechanism Do you have a link about this?
  - DennisP 12y ago
    Schelling: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal-trust-universal-data-feed/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal... https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/30/advanced-contract-programming-example-schellingcoin/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/30/advanced-contract-progr...

semiel 12y ago

I've been following development pretty closely, and I'm reasonably convinced that they will launch in the first half of 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if they missed their target ("before March 21st") by a month or two, but they seem committed to getting a reasonable 1.0 out the door soon. This was much less clear a few months ago, since they kept coming up with yet another company-sized idea to implement every week or so. But apparently Nick Szabo put the fear of god into them and reminded them that there's no point in designing a perfect system that never ships. It's worth noting that this blog post is explicitly about ideas for the as-of-yet hypothetical version 2.0. They don't need to figure this out in order to launch.