As a side project, I've been reimplementing a large chunk of Ethereum PoC-5 in Haskell. Given all the stuff that's going on in that ecosystem, though, I've basi

As a side project, I've been reimplementing a large chunk of Ethereum PoC-5 in Haskell. Given all the stuff that's going on in that ecosystem, though, I've basically stopped development. Bitcoin is held together by a delicate balance of cryptography, software design, and community involvement. Most altcoins are very conservative about the changes they introduce, keeping them as close as possible to successful designs and carefully monitoring the blockchain for stability. Ethereum, meanwhile, no longer bears much resemblance to the projects that inspired it. Even if Ethereum's core algorithms are sound -- and it's becoming difficult for anyone outside the project to evaluate that at this point -- there's no concrete evidence that it will be stable in practice, and they're already building many layers of code on an uncertain foundation. I'd love for Ethereum to succeed; I've always been more interested in Bitcoin as a distributed system than as a currency, so it's great to see people pushing it in that direction. But it's gone past the point where I can evaluate all the new stuff that's happening, and I feel weird devoting time to a project when I can't see where it's headed. We'll see what happens once the dust settles...