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Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum, Talks Bitcoin’s Most Ambitious Successor

49 points by dcawrey 12y ago

Hermel 12y ago
Ethereum is not shooting for the moon, they are shooting for alpha centauri. I hope they succeed, but I'm skeptical whether the world is ready.
brayton 12y ago
Do we know how much of the $13M they have left?
- bachback 12y ago
  raised = 18m$ assets left = 7.5m$ expense = 4m$ trading losses = 6.5m It's an insane amount of money to burn through, without releasing anything of utility so far. I had to deal with several people from that team and they are scammers. Idea itself is interesting, but not workable.
  - 0x8D3A 12y ago
    Scammers isn't the least of it. The system they have designed and executed is ludicrously insecure and falls to even the most basic of flaws. It's unlikely that it will ever be able to achieve consensus given the endless stream of crashes and logic errors, like being able to send yourself a negative balance (thus, infinite money) or crashing every node in the network by sending a block header with a nonce of zero. The sheer quantity of security bugs and undefined behavior in the two clients attempting to act in bit-for-bit identical ways in two different languages is quite alarming. https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3Avuln+ https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9... I'd bet against it ever getting to try it's consensus given that their launch is now going to be completely centralized (ie, it can't stand up on it's own let alone with malicious attackers, so it's going to be remotely controlled by the developers for now). Will they ever remove the crutch and risk everything crumbling? Seems very doubtful.
    - drcode 12y ago
      Though I disagree with you, I upvoted your comment because its content is all factually correct.
    - bachback 12y ago
      Right. It's not really a block-chain, but a block-tree (whatever that is supposed to be). I suspect to make smart contracts work, one needs a different time-stamping/incentive system altogether (non-blockchain), but haven't seen any progress in that direction.
      - DennisP 12y ago
        For more information on the block tree see the GHOST protocol paper, which predates Ethereum. It does collapse into a linear chain for all but the most recent blocks. http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf
        bachback 12y ago
        I know that paper. The authors have no background in distributed systems and use math to prove absurd things. If you look at the core proposed algorithm, it's not even a P2P algorithm.
        DennisP 12y ago
        Eh? It's P2P just like Bitcoin. The only difference is how forks are resolved. Bitcoin nodes choose the longest chain they see. Another way to put that is: at any forking point, Bitcoin nodes choose the block with the longest chain after it. GHOST nodes choose the block with the most total computation after it (which may include additional branches).
- drcode 12y ago
  Last I heard, it was in the 5-7M range. Most of the decrease can be accounted for by the fall in Bitcoin since the presale- For the most part, the core team seems to have been pretty decent with maintaining a reasonable burn rate. (as much as outsiders can determine)
  - bachback 12y ago
    10M$ in one year, i.e. 30,000$ per day is a reasonable burn rate?
    - drcode 12y ago
      As I said, most of that is due to the drop in Bitcoin value, not an actual burn rate, in terms of how most people would consider the term "burn rate". For better or worse, had ethereum sold all their Bitcoin holdings immediately after the presale they would have been hated by a large chunk of the cryptocurrency community... They ended up taking a big volatility risk for this reason (among others) which worked against them.
spectrum1234 12y ago
No idea this was coming in 2015. Can't wait!!!
na85 12y ago
Looks like they've updated/changed their whitepapers. A few months ago their literature was chock-full of statements like "engendering positive disruption" which made me wonder how anyone takes this project seriously. Is it possible this is a serious project and not a pump-and-dump?
- drcode 12y ago
  If you're a developer, you look at this: https://github.com/ethereum https://github.com/ethereum
- IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  I'm not sure... I think there's quite a bit of genuine development. But at the end of the day, it appears anything you can build on ethereum you can build on bitcoin. Beyond that they did this huge crowd funding which was quite strange, not through investments or donations (ownership or charity/support), but rather through selling ethers, which is a bit like an API selling an access token. Only the ethers sold for upwards of $15-20 million as far as I remember, while not having any real value, and not being necessary in large volumes for developers to work with. They said it wasn't an investment, yet sold it as such. Nobody got any ownership, yet people didn't give them $15 million+ out of charity or support, either. They also had this strange scheme where the price continued going up, again, as if it was an investment that was 'on sale' and if you didn't buy now, it'd only become more expensive, in the span of like a few weeks while whatever you were supposed to buy (ethers) didn't go up in value, and in fact, remained non-existent as you couldn't use them as it my next point: vaporware. Sot the fact it's still vaporware (can change, but factually speaking its vaporware today) and the fact that nothing ethereum does can't be done on existing platforms, which unlike ethereum actually exist, work, are used by large companies and has network effects, and the focus on Vitalik being some brilliant 20 year old next Zuckerberg, it's very much reminiscent of pump & dump. We'll have to see. They've got the money, the team, a paper, and some promises for a 2015 launch. So we should know soon enough. I've got modest hope, but I'm not terribly excited.
natrius 12y ago
Don't confuse Ethereum for a currency that competes with Bitcoin. It's different. It's a decentralized, consensus-driven database that anyone can use. Anything that required a trustworthy middleman or counterparty can be replaced by this database where no one can forge entries or take unpredictable actions. Ethereum and systems like it make it easier for humans to interact with each other, and it will be a core part of the story of our era.
- fossuser 12y ago
  Can you give a little more detail? After reading this article and some of their web page I still have no idea what this actual is (beyond the fact that it's a decentralized platform for decentralized applications). Can you give an example of what this would be used for and how?
  - drcode 12y ago
    It's hard to really summarize ethereum well... it's just so different from any existing system, IMHO. Unless you're really into the nitty gritty of cryptocurrency technology, it won't really make sense until people manage to build some compelling apps for it, hopefully around the summer time.
    - zzalpha 12y ago
      So then list some of those compelling apps. Think like a marketing guy. I don't care about the specifics of the mechanism. Tell me what it will do for me, the user, that I'll care about.
      - drcode 12y ago
        OK, I'll give it a shot... At its heart, ethereum is a tool for minimizing counterparty risk and cost. You don't want Twitter to extinguish 3rd party twitter clients? You don't want Uber to take a 30% monopoly fee on every transaction? You don't want your stock broker to front-load your market orders? These are all forms of counterparty risk/cost. So the compelling applications for ethereum are: A prediction market with minimal counterparty risk, a stock exchange minimal counterparty risk, a product market with minimal counterparty risk, a currency exchange with minimal counterparty risk, a poker site with minimal counterparty risk, a social network with minimal counterparty risk, a ride sharing site with minimal counterparty risk, etc.
MCRed 12y ago
It's an alt coin, it's pre-mined and because of that it cannot be a successor to Bitcoin which was not pre-mined. (Though Satoshi mined a little bit, that bitcoin has been left out of circulation.) For alt-coins pre-mining generally means its a scam. They are proposing a whole bunch of next generation functionality, which if they pull it off may overcome the unfairness of pre-mining and make them all super rich. But it's super ambitious and isn't yet clear that it will even be possible to do what they want to do, and if they do it will take years to establish the trust necessary to use it for its intended purpose. Choosing to pre-mine means anyone who does due diligence won't be trusting them for quite awhile. I think this is still a lot of hype (And this article is just adding to it) without substance. I think the way bitcoin was done was correct-- no hype and just a release of code.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  You are factually wrong. Only one third of Ether is premined. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/04/10/the-issuance-model-in-ethereum/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/04/10/the-issuance-model-in-e...
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    "only"
  - chm 12y ago
    What one usually means by "pre-mining" is the allocation of a certain quantity of resources/value (in this case ether) _before_ the genesis block. So in this regard he was right.
- DennisP 12y ago
  Because of those ambitious goals, they thought it necessary to get a fair number of developers and cryptographers working on it full time. 98% of the premine was a public presale of coins, which paid the expenses for all those people. How would you have done it?
  - drcode 12y ago
anon4this1 12y ago
What's with the professionally posed shots of Vitalik? The whole project amounts to grandiose ideas backed nothing more than Buterin's aspergers syndrome..
- markeroon 12y ago
  Ironic that you'd throw such an insult as an anonymous internet commenter. He's actually a great guy to chat with.
- dang 12y ago
  Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
xnull6guest 12y ago
Yeah... we need decentralization, but I can't tell Ethereum apart from any of the other many proponents who have claimed to have invented that system and technology. If we were to apply a tech adaptation of Aaronson's red flags for outrageous math claims to Ethereum (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458) I'm convinced we'd walk away immediately.
- drcode 12y ago
  Well, I know of four systems that try to solve this problem: Codius, Counterparty, Ethereum, and Bithalo (in a limited sense.) I think all of the developers for each system would agree 100% that the other three have successfully solved the core problems, as well. Nobody is making any extrordinary claims that they have some sort of magical technology that others can't duplicate (and all of them except bithalo are open source, making duplication easy.) The only question is which platform will be first to deliver an experience that will attract main stream users, in terms of stability and functionality.
RustyRussell 12y ago
Compulsory reference: http://intheoreum.org/ http://intheoreum.org/

49 points by dcawrey 12y ago

Ethereum is not shooting for the moon, they are shooting for alpha centauri. I hope they succeed, but I'm skeptical whether the world is ready.

brayton 12y ago

Do we know how much of the $13M they have left?

bachback 12y ago
raised = 18m$ assets left = 7.5m$ expense = 4m$ trading losses = 6.5m It's an insane amount of money to burn through, without releasing anything of utility so far. I had to deal with several people from that team and they are scammers. Idea itself is interesting, but not workable.
- 0x8D3A 12y ago
  Scammers isn't the least of it. The system they have designed and executed is ludicrously insecure and falls to even the most basic of flaws. It's unlikely that it will ever be able to achieve consensus given the endless stream of crashes and logic errors, like being able to send yourself a negative balance (thus, infinite money) or crashing every node in the network by sending a block header with a nonce of zero. The sheer quantity of security bugs and undefined behavior in the two clients attempting to act in bit-for-bit identical ways in two different languages is quite alarming. https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3Avuln+ https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9... I'd bet against it ever getting to try it's consensus given that their launch is now going to be completely centralized (ie, it can't stand up on it's own let alone with malicious attackers, so it's going to be remotely controlled by the developers for now). Will they ever remove the crutch and risk everything crumbling? Seems very doubtful.
  - drcode 12y ago
    Though I disagree with you, I upvoted your comment because its content is all factually correct.
  - bachback 12y ago
    Right. It's not really a block-chain, but a block-tree (whatever that is supposed to be). I suspect to make smart contracts work, one needs a different time-stamping/incentive system altogether (non-blockchain), but haven't seen any progress in that direction.
    - DennisP 12y ago
      For more information on the block tree see the GHOST protocol paper, which predates Ethereum. It does collapse into a linear chain for all but the most recent blocks. http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf
      - bachback 12y ago
        I know that paper. The authors have no background in distributed systems and use math to prove absurd things. If you look at the core proposed algorithm, it's not even a P2P algorithm.
        DennisP 12y ago
        Eh? It's P2P just like Bitcoin. The only difference is how forks are resolved. Bitcoin nodes choose the longest chain they see. Another way to put that is: at any forking point, Bitcoin nodes choose the block with the longest chain after it. GHOST nodes choose the block with the most total computation after it (which may include additional branches).
drcode 12y ago
Last I heard, it was in the 5-7M range. Most of the decrease can be accounted for by the fall in Bitcoin since the presale- For the most part, the core team seems to have been pretty decent with maintaining a reasonable burn rate. (as much as outsiders can determine)
- bachback 12y ago
  10M$ in one year, i.e. 30,000$ per day is a reasonable burn rate?
  - drcode 12y ago
    As I said, most of that is due to the drop in Bitcoin value, not an actual burn rate, in terms of how most people would consider the term "burn rate". For better or worse, had ethereum sold all their Bitcoin holdings immediately after the presale they would have been hated by a large chunk of the cryptocurrency community... They ended up taking a big volatility risk for this reason (among others) which worked against them.

spectrum1234 12y ago

No idea this was coming in 2015. Can't wait!!!

na85 12y ago

Looks like they've updated/changed their whitepapers. A few months ago their literature was chock-full of statements like "engendering positive disruption" which made me wonder how anyone takes this project seriously. Is it possible this is a serious project and not a pump-and-dump?

drcode 12y ago
If you're a developer, you look at this: https://github.com/ethereum https://github.com/ethereum
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
I'm not sure... I think there's quite a bit of genuine development. But at the end of the day, it appears anything you can build on ethereum you can build on bitcoin. Beyond that they did this huge crowd funding which was quite strange, not through investments or donations (ownership or charity/support), but rather through selling ethers, which is a bit like an API selling an access token. Only the ethers sold for upwards of $15-20 million as far as I remember, while not having any real value, and not being necessary in large volumes for developers to work with. They said it wasn't an investment, yet sold it as such. Nobody got any ownership, yet people didn't give them $15 million+ out of charity or support, either. They also had this strange scheme where the price continued going up, again, as if it was an investment that was 'on sale' and if you didn't buy now, it'd only become more expensive, in the span of like a few weeks while whatever you were supposed to buy (ethers) didn't go up in value, and in fact, remained non-existent as you couldn't use them as it my next point: vaporware. Sot the fact it's still vaporware (can change, but factually speaking its vaporware today) and the fact that nothing ethereum does can't be done on existing platforms, which unlike ethereum actually exist, work, are used by large companies and has network effects, and the focus on Vitalik being some brilliant 20 year old next Zuckerberg, it's very much reminiscent of pump & dump. We'll have to see. They've got the money, the team, a paper, and some promises for a 2015 launch. So we should know soon enough. I've got modest hope, but I'm not terribly excited.

natrius 12y ago

Don't confuse Ethereum for a currency that competes with Bitcoin. It's different. It's a decentralized, consensus-driven database that anyone can use. Anything that required a trustworthy middleman or counterparty can be replaced by this database where no one can forge entries or take unpredictable actions. Ethereum and systems like it make it easier for humans to interact with each other, and it will be a core part of the story of our era.

fossuser 12y ago
Can you give a little more detail? After reading this article and some of their web page I still have no idea what this actual is (beyond the fact that it's a decentralized platform for decentralized applications). Can you give an example of what this would be used for and how?
- drcode 12y ago
  It's hard to really summarize ethereum well... it's just so different from any existing system, IMHO. Unless you're really into the nitty gritty of cryptocurrency technology, it won't really make sense until people manage to build some compelling apps for it, hopefully around the summer time.
  - zzalpha 12y ago
    So then list some of those compelling apps. Think like a marketing guy. I don't care about the specifics of the mechanism. Tell me what it will do for me, the user, that I'll care about.
    - drcode 12y ago
      OK, I'll give it a shot... At its heart, ethereum is a tool for minimizing counterparty risk and cost. You don't want Twitter to extinguish 3rd party twitter clients? You don't want Uber to take a 30% monopoly fee on every transaction? You don't want your stock broker to front-load your market orders? These are all forms of counterparty risk/cost. So the compelling applications for ethereum are: A prediction market with minimal counterparty risk, a stock exchange minimal counterparty risk, a product market with minimal counterparty risk, a currency exchange with minimal counterparty risk, a poker site with minimal counterparty risk, a social network with minimal counterparty risk, a ride sharing site with minimal counterparty risk, etc.

MCRed 12y ago

It's an alt coin, it's pre-mined and because of that it cannot be a successor to Bitcoin which was not pre-mined. (Though Satoshi mined a little bit, that bitcoin has been left out of circulation.) For alt-coins pre-mining generally means its a scam. They are proposing a whole bunch of next generation functionality, which if they pull it off may overcome the unfairness of pre-mining and make them all super rich. But it's super ambitious and isn't yet clear that it will even be possible to do what they want to do, and if they do it will take years to establish the trust necessary to use it for its intended purpose. Choosing to pre-mine means anyone who does due diligence won't be trusting them for quite awhile. I think this is still a lot of hype (And this article is just adding to it) without substance. I think the way bitcoin was done was correct-- no hype and just a release of code.

imaginenore 12y ago
You are factually wrong. Only one third of Ether is premined. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/04/10/the-issuance-model-in-ethereum/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/04/10/the-issuance-model-in-e...
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  "only"
- chm 12y ago
  What one usually means by "pre-mining" is the allocation of a certain quantity of resources/value (in this case ether) _before_ the genesis block. So in this regard he was right.
DennisP 12y ago
Because of those ambitious goals, they thought it necessary to get a fair number of developers and cryptographers working on it full time. 98% of the premine was a public presale of coins, which paid the expenses for all those people. How would you have done it?
- drcode 12y ago

anon4this1 12y ago

What's with the professionally posed shots of Vitalik? The whole project amounts to grandiose ideas backed nothing more than Buterin's aspergers syndrome..

markeroon 12y ago
Ironic that you'd throw such an insult as an anonymous internet commenter. He's actually a great guy to chat with.
dang 12y ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

xnull6guest 12y ago

Yeah... we need decentralization, but I can't tell Ethereum apart from any of the other many proponents who have claimed to have invented that system and technology. If we were to apply a tech adaptation of Aaronson's red flags for outrageous math claims to Ethereum (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458) I'm convinced we'd walk away immediately.

drcode 12y ago
Well, I know of four systems that try to solve this problem: Codius, Counterparty, Ethereum, and Bithalo (in a limited sense.) I think all of the developers for each system would agree 100% that the other three have successfully solved the core problems, as well. Nobody is making any extrordinary claims that they have some sort of magical technology that others can't duplicate (and all of them except bithalo are open source, making duplication easy.) The only question is which platform will be first to deliver an experience that will attract main stream users, in terms of stability and functionality.

RustyRussell 12y ago

Compulsory reference: http://intheoreum.org/ http://intheoreum.org/