9 ms·

Ethereum: what’s about to happen

107 points by llamataboot 11y ago

natch 11y ago
This is good writing, although it doesn't fulfill the promise at the beginning of explaining the blockchain. Very intrigued by Ethereum now.
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  "by the end of this article, you’re going to understand blockchains well enough to decide what they mean to your life." I very deliberately didn't explain mining or blocks or consensus protocols because, really, that's technical gubbins that fits between "BEGIN TRANSACTION" and "COMMIT TRANSACTION" in an SQL database. Unless your technical concerns are between those two statements, you don't need to care about mining. That's where we've been going wrong explaining blockchains so far.
  - natch 11y ago
    I already understand mining. I didn't need to learn about mining. It's just looking for hashes with successively larger numbers of zeros at the ends as the difficulty increases (or the other way around.. the difficulty increases as the zeros do). But I wanted to understand the blockchain, which I didn't, and still don't. Apparently it being distributed is important in some way, and there is some mechanism by which it gets updated with records of recent transactions (again nothing to do with mining) but I don't know the details, and would like to. The promise was not fulfilled. But otherwise, great article. BTW I have no database background but do know what a transaction is.
- asdfgP 11y ago
  Good writing indeed. And for a technical audience, I also like to use the following (if oversimplified) description of Ethereum (quoting from [1]): "... In a way, Ethereum is like a cloud infrastructure that is extremely open. You can run any code you like in this cloud, as long as you follow some rules. Firstly, the code you run in Ethereum has to be essentially open source: you can only run your code if you publish it, unmodified. Secondly, even your database contents are public. (Privacy is still possible with client-side encryption, though client-side encryption will not work if the server also needs to read the data. In that case, preserving full privacy is still possible, though it may require sophisticated cryptography). The openness goes further: the underlying cloud infrastructure has no single owner. Rather, Ethereum is a fully distributed system, enabled by the block chain technology. Why would anybody need this much openness? There are certain applications that truly require this level of trust and auditability. The Bitcoin currency is one example. Bitcoin already uses the same underlying block chain technology as Ethereum (in fact, Bitcoin pioneered it). It is unlikely that Bitcoin could have succeeded otherwise. Indeed, who would trust a startup that essentially prints and sells their own money, and whose founders are not known?" [1] https://ristoalas.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/what-is-ethereum/ https://ristoalas.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/what-is-ethereum/
Hexayurt 11y ago
Hi, I'm the author of the piece, and the release coordinator for Ethereum. If you have any questions about the launch, please ask me. You can watch the new network stats here https://stats.ethdev.com/ https://stats.ethdev.com/ or download a client at https://ethereum.org/ https://ethereum.org/ and get involved!
- sschueller 11y ago
  I get a certificate error when I visit the page from my Android phone. http://imgur.com/69AR8JG http://imgur.com/69AR8JG
  - Hexayurt 11y ago
    Thanks, I've passed that on to our web guys.
j_s 11y ago
I'm interested in more about the sustainability of this project: what's paying the bills now, and what's going to ensure the bills are payed in the future? Bitcoin survived long enough to become within a reasonable approximation of self-sustaining... is Ethereum basically someone spending their early-adopter Bitcoin collection as runway? Edit: found this blogpost - https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-the-first-year/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-the-first-year... My TL,DR: Ethereum development is under a non-profit initially 'VC-funded(-ish)' (with Bitcoin) vs. how Bitcoin itself was organically 'bootstrapped'.
- drcode 11y ago
  The ethereum foundation was given a sizeable endowment of ether currency to help advance development, as part of the launch. It will take 3-4 days before we'll have any idea of the market price of ether, and I won't speculate, but this will be a critical data point to answer your question.
  - j_s 11y ago
    Thanks! My gut feeling is that the technology is sound, but it remains to be seen whether or not enough of a community grows to sustain things like the headcount behind the glitzy PR campaign. I wish the Ethereum team great success in this endeavor; if nothing else it is uncharted territory!
    - Hexayurt 11y ago
      We really do hope that there will be mass adoption, and that we can continue to build out Metropolis (a web-browser that extends the security of the block chain right the way through rich user apps) and Serenity (parallel supercomputer performance from blockchains.) But only the people can decide.
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  We still have a substantial reserve of bitcoin and fiat currency, plus the pre-mined Ether which the Ethereum Foundation holds for further development. I can't speak on this officially, but Vitalik Buterin has mentioned it in the past https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/2zoawi/ethereum_foundation_out_of_money_xpost_rbitcoin/cpkxg3y https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/2zoawi/ethereum_f...
yc1010 11y ago
So how come Satoshi makes a brilliant breaktrough and released a really well designed/coded opensource project (Bitcoin) to the world without asking anyone for a cent, and then promptly disappearing (dead?) with all the coins he mined at the beginning not moved despite now being worth billions. Yet every day, yet another project such as Ethereum, Maidsafe, Storj, OpenBazaar popup make grand promises via fancy websites and raise millions worth of bitcoin and then ... ... nothing. BTW #3 on > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfunding_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu... Please stop with all the promises and "crowdfunding" (which downright smells) and actually deliver something.
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  I think we have just delivered quite a lot: the network is up and running, transactions enabled Monday or Tuesday, and the code is all FOSS and available for download. We have shipped.
  - yc1010 11y ago
    From what I gather one has to pay you (in bitcoin of course) to get ether to even use the network. Now once again contrast it to how Satoshi quietly created probably one of the most important projects of the last decade without asking for a cent. You do understand that the whole crowdfunding thing quite literally sends all sorts of alarm bells rolling, especially since so many other project are doing the same. Now granted out of all the projects i listed above yours is the most promising and the most ambitious, but once again the whole thing stinks.
    - Hexayurt 11y ago
      Programmers generally have to be hired and paid. We do not know what Satoshi's financial arrangements were, and we do not know if he mined early on in the network using accounts which are not publicly associated with him. I do not think your position is stable under close examination.
      - 11y ago
explorigin 11y ago
Bitcoin's big push was to make central banks obsolete. It's a temporary success, long-term failure because the blockchain grows infinitely. Soon only big corps will be able to afford maintaining instances of the blockchain. The more successful it is, the less it achieves its original goals. Ethereum uses a blockchain and therefore has the same fault (although democratization is not a stated goal of Ethereum). I'm sure it will be a useful platform for some but the pre-mining thing leaves as bad a taste as all other alt-coins that popped up. It's the big-business version of the digital Ponzi scheme. I'm still waiting on Maidsafe.
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions. 1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a half. 2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions. Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they have a complete history. And these are just the naive approaches. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ for a more sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)
  - explorigin 11y ago
    Thanks for this response. I'm not liking things a little less.
    - Hexayurt 11y ago
      Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Strilanc 11y ago
How much thought has gone into preventing underhanded [1] smart contracts? It seems like, if this catches on, there could be large rewards for sneaking in hard-to-notice "mistakes". And given how little attention people already pay to EULAs... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest
- drcode 11y ago
  The solidity programming language is expected to support embedded proofs in the near future, so that contract developers can specify invariants that are guaranteed to hold true if the contract compiles... so you'll be able to state things like "No person other than the depositor in a bank will be able to withdraw the money" and the compiler will generate a proof to verify this, visible to any users of the contract. (That said, this is an EXTREMELY ambitious feature and I'm mildly skeptical that they'll be able to deliver it... but the team working on Solidity has put out very good work so far...)
- highfiveghost 11y ago
  So, one potential idea is to incentivise developers to "audit" smart contracts in repositories. The metrics of the audit score can then be shown to the end user to let them make the decision as to whether a smart contract is safe or not. It's a start.
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  A very good question about a very hard problem. We've discussed a variety of approaches. The one I like best is that "contract interpreters" offer a professional service, which is that they read a contract and tell you what it will do. You pay them for this service, and they have a public bond of sufficient size that if they screw up, a claim against their public bond will make the person affected whole. This assumes a few things: dispute resolution services, flexible escrow agreements, and a lot of human judgement in a relatively corruption-free environment. My guess is that this is going to be expensive to provide, and might well rest up against existing contracting infrastructure (i.e. KPMG type agencies might offer a blockchain auditing service with insurance in some imagined futures.) Hence I'd expect a long tail from high value, deeply audited contracts with insurance and bonds to back them up, through to collaborative pools that just note when they've been ripped off, down to "it worked for me!" reviews on forums. I'm not sure there's a better solution than this, but it's a topic of ongoing research and discussion.
ubersync 11y ago
Ethereum is getting a lot of heat for being "pre-mined". What stops someone from running an alt-ethereum blockchain which is not pre-mined? AKA a non-pre-mined Ethereum fork?
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  A desire for a funded entity to continue development work.
- drcode 11y ago
  1. It would be more prone to 51% attacks, unless they use a different mining algorithm than the more popular chain 2. The usefulness of contracts involving money is directly proportional to the stability and aggregate value of the base currency, and a copycat will not be able to match the official net on this measure. 3. The grim trigger equillibrium would doom such a blockchain if it becomes successful (look up on wikipedia) 4. There would be no dev team to support ongoing development if it overtakes the main net. 5. Network effects
kodablah 11y ago
I like the idea of Ethereum but it does not solve distributed application needs IMO. I fear it is not able to solve large-scale app problems considering it only has the computation power of a "1999 phone", requires every to store (or at least know about) all state, and requires everyone up to date to run EVERY computation. For instance, take a distributed Reddit where posts can be mappings, even by deferring the costs to the viewers in terms of small amounts of wei per view, it surely wouldn't be enough to cover the expense of centralized permanent store (I understand Whisper is coming but it isn't permanent enough). I see a couple of Ehtereum frameworks out there using things IPFS for storage. Are there any plans for Ethereum to solve concerns about forcing everyone to run all calculations or should it always be seen as a small DHT that you only want to use when you have real auditability concerns?
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  Agreed. Right now it's a single shared processor emulated with cryptography and massive replication - but that's not an architecture that will get you supercomputer performance. The work on that thread - getting Ethereum to supercomputer status - is called CASPAR and you can read more about the efforts to get a formal proof for it here: http://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/Ethereum-+-Synereo/ http://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/Ethereum-+-Synereo/
- drcode 11y ago
  This is probably the most cogent criticism that can be leveled against ethereum right now- The performance constraints for ethereum dapps are pretty extreme. There are indeed plans to solve the problem you describe (read posts on blog.ethereum.org mentioning scalability) and these problems are probably solvable, but a working system remains far off. That said, I think ethereum dapps are going to be substantively different from traditional apps people are used to- I think there's a lot of opportunity in this type of system for people who don't take the mindset of "This system is bad at running existing app X therefore it is bad for everything."
  - heliumcraft 11y ago
    I think criticism is valid in regards to TPS. But for storage it's misguided. The blockchain is meant for consensus, storing reddit comments or cat pictures is an expensive and inefficient misuse of the blockchain.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
natrius 11y ago
Here's another angle on Ethereum: I think it's going to put Walmart, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb out of business. Consider Amazon. They buy goods from manufacturers, then sell those goods to consumers for higher prices and pocket (or spend) the profits. Pretty simple. They provide a great service that makes it easier for people to buy and sell stuff, and they get paid well to do it. But what if all of Amazon's customers wanted to band together and cut out the middleman? They could use their collective buying power to get the same prices from manufacturers, but eliminate the profit and just pay lower prices. It's possible, but it'd be hard to achieve. Who would run the system? How would they make decisions? It's so hard that the customers would give up, finish buying their disposable consumer goods, watch an episode of Humans and go to sleep. Or one of them could come up with a solution. "Hey y'all, I wrote the software for a marketplace system to connect us all directly to manufacturers, but I know you can't trust me to never take a cut if I run the system myself. So instead, I'll run it on a global computer that no one controls. Programs on the global computer can never change, and no one can fake their data. That means the system will be out of my control and the rules are set in stone. It's everyone's system." That global computer is called Ethereum, and it lets us build new kinds of software that can coordinate human interactions so powerfully that this guy's solution just might work. You could build other kinds of apps on Ethereum too, like voluntary social safety nets, apps that let your future smart appliances talk to each other long after their manufacturer shuts down, or pretty much the entire financial industry—all without any middlemen to charge you or restrict your access. If you know how to program, you should learn how to build apps on Ethereum. And not just the code that runs directly on the global computer, but web apps and mobile apps that you already know how to build, just with the global computer as the backend instead of a private computer. I will help you get started. (niran@niran.org) Maybe I'm overly optimistic. That's a risk I'm willing to take. You should too.
- bgilroy26 11y ago
  I think there will be a similar flood of ideas of business to run on ethereum that are ahead of the market. Back in the dot com boom, there were people who understood the potential of the internet and pushed plans to take advantage. Many failed to hold together because there had not been a large enough migration of users to the new medium. I agree with you about Ethereum's potential, but I think the first businesses to succeed will be low overhead outfits that can handle waiting out the slow transition. I am thinking about what would have happened with Amazon if they had started AWS, Amazon Instant Video, and Amazon Prime Now back in '97. They would never have been able to pay developer salaries waiting for 2011 to come. The biggest upside on Ethereum will be a company that understands the medium, starts small, and presses the envelope.
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ethereum crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ether list anywhere!!!!
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER list anywhere!!!!
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!!
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!
calneva01 11y ago
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!

107 points by llamataboot 11y ago

natch 11y ago

This is good writing, although it doesn't fulfill the promise at the beginning of explaining the blockchain. Very intrigued by Ethereum now.

Hexayurt 11y ago
"by the end of this article, you’re going to understand blockchains well enough to decide what they mean to your life." I very deliberately didn't explain mining or blocks or consensus protocols because, really, that's technical gubbins that fits between "BEGIN TRANSACTION" and "COMMIT TRANSACTION" in an SQL database. Unless your technical concerns are between those two statements, you don't need to care about mining. That's where we've been going wrong explaining blockchains so far.
- natch 11y ago
  I already understand mining. I didn't need to learn about mining. It's just looking for hashes with successively larger numbers of zeros at the ends as the difficulty increases (or the other way around.. the difficulty increases as the zeros do). But I wanted to understand the blockchain, which I didn't, and still don't. Apparently it being distributed is important in some way, and there is some mechanism by which it gets updated with records of recent transactions (again nothing to do with mining) but I don't know the details, and would like to. The promise was not fulfilled. But otherwise, great article. BTW I have no database background but do know what a transaction is.
asdfgP 11y ago
Good writing indeed. And for a technical audience, I also like to use the following (if oversimplified) description of Ethereum (quoting from [1]): "... In a way, Ethereum is like a cloud infrastructure that is extremely open. You can run any code you like in this cloud, as long as you follow some rules. Firstly, the code you run in Ethereum has to be essentially open source: you can only run your code if you publish it, unmodified. Secondly, even your database contents are public. (Privacy is still possible with client-side encryption, though client-side encryption will not work if the server also needs to read the data. In that case, preserving full privacy is still possible, though it may require sophisticated cryptography). The openness goes further: the underlying cloud infrastructure has no single owner. Rather, Ethereum is a fully distributed system, enabled by the block chain technology. Why would anybody need this much openness? There are certain applications that truly require this level of trust and auditability. The Bitcoin currency is one example. Bitcoin already uses the same underlying block chain technology as Ethereum (in fact, Bitcoin pioneered it). It is unlikely that Bitcoin could have succeeded otherwise. Indeed, who would trust a startup that essentially prints and sells their own money, and whose founders are not known?" [1] https://ristoalas.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/what-is-ethereum/ https://ristoalas.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/what-is-ethereum/

Hexayurt 11y ago

Hi, I'm the author of the piece, and the release coordinator for Ethereum. If you have any questions about the launch, please ask me. You can watch the new network stats here https://stats.ethdev.com/ https://stats.ethdev.com/ or download a client at https://ethereum.org/ https://ethereum.org/ and get involved!

sschueller 11y ago
I get a certificate error when I visit the page from my Android phone. http://imgur.com/69AR8JG http://imgur.com/69AR8JG
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  Thanks, I've passed that on to our web guys.

j_s 11y ago

I'm interested in more about the sustainability of this project: what's paying the bills now, and what's going to ensure the bills are payed in the future? Bitcoin survived long enough to become within a reasonable approximation of self-sustaining... is Ethereum basically someone spending their early-adopter Bitcoin collection as runway? Edit: found this blogpost - https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-the-first-year/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-the-first-year... My TL,DR: Ethereum development is under a non-profit initially 'VC-funded(-ish)' (with Bitcoin) vs. how Bitcoin itself was organically 'bootstrapped'.

drcode 11y ago
The ethereum foundation was given a sizeable endowment of ether currency to help advance development, as part of the launch. It will take 3-4 days before we'll have any idea of the market price of ether, and I won't speculate, but this will be a critical data point to answer your question.
- j_s 11y ago
  Thanks! My gut feeling is that the technology is sound, but it remains to be seen whether or not enough of a community grows to sustain things like the headcount behind the glitzy PR campaign. I wish the Ethereum team great success in this endeavor; if nothing else it is uncharted territory!
  - Hexayurt 11y ago
    We really do hope that there will be mass adoption, and that we can continue to build out Metropolis (a web-browser that extends the security of the block chain right the way through rich user apps) and Serenity (parallel supercomputer performance from blockchains.) But only the people can decide.
Hexayurt 11y ago
We still have a substantial reserve of bitcoin and fiat currency, plus the pre-mined Ether which the Ethereum Foundation holds for further development. I can't speak on this officially, but Vitalik Buterin has mentioned it in the past https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/2zoawi/ethereum_foundation_out_of_money_xpost_rbitcoin/cpkxg3y https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/2zoawi/ethereum_f...

yc1010 11y ago

So how come Satoshi makes a brilliant breaktrough and released a really well designed/coded opensource project (Bitcoin) to the world without asking anyone for a cent, and then promptly disappearing (dead?) with all the coins he mined at the beginning not moved despite now being worth billions. Yet every day, yet another project such as Ethereum, Maidsafe, Storj, OpenBazaar popup make grand promises via fancy websites and raise millions worth of bitcoin and then ... ... nothing. BTW #3 on > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfunding_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu... Please stop with all the promises and "crowdfunding" (which downright smells) and actually deliver something.

Hexayurt 11y ago
I think we have just delivered quite a lot: the network is up and running, transactions enabled Monday or Tuesday, and the code is all FOSS and available for download. We have shipped.
- yc1010 11y ago
  From what I gather one has to pay you (in bitcoin of course) to get ether to even use the network. Now once again contrast it to how Satoshi quietly created probably one of the most important projects of the last decade without asking for a cent. You do understand that the whole crowdfunding thing quite literally sends all sorts of alarm bells rolling, especially since so many other project are doing the same. Now granted out of all the projects i listed above yours is the most promising and the most ambitious, but once again the whole thing stinks.
  - Hexayurt 11y ago
    Programmers generally have to be hired and paid. We do not know what Satoshi's financial arrangements were, and we do not know if he mined early on in the network using accounts which are not publicly associated with him. I do not think your position is stable under close examination.
    - 11y ago

explorigin 11y ago

Bitcoin's big push was to make central banks obsolete. It's a temporary success, long-term failure because the blockchain grows infinitely. Soon only big corps will be able to afford maintaining instances of the blockchain. The more successful it is, the less it achieves its original goals. Ethereum uses a blockchain and therefore has the same fault (although democratization is not a stated goal of Ethereum). I'm sure it will be a useful platform for some but the pre-mining thing leaves as bad a taste as all other alt-coins that popped up. It's the big-business version of the digital Ponzi scheme. I'm still waiting on Maidsafe.

Hexayurt 11y ago
Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions. 1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a half. 2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions. Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they have a complete history. And these are just the naive approaches. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ for a more sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)
- explorigin 11y ago
  Thanks for this response. I'm not liking things a little less.
  - Hexayurt 11y ago
    Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

Strilanc 11y ago

How much thought has gone into preventing underhanded [1] smart contracts? It seems like, if this catches on, there could be large rewards for sneaking in hard-to-notice "mistakes". And given how little attention people already pay to EULAs... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest

drcode 11y ago
The solidity programming language is expected to support embedded proofs in the near future, so that contract developers can specify invariants that are guaranteed to hold true if the contract compiles... so you'll be able to state things like "No person other than the depositor in a bank will be able to withdraw the money" and the compiler will generate a proof to verify this, visible to any users of the contract. (That said, this is an EXTREMELY ambitious feature and I'm mildly skeptical that they'll be able to deliver it... but the team working on Solidity has put out very good work so far...)
highfiveghost 11y ago
So, one potential idea is to incentivise developers to "audit" smart contracts in repositories. The metrics of the audit score can then be shown to the end user to let them make the decision as to whether a smart contract is safe or not. It's a start.
Hexayurt 11y ago
A very good question about a very hard problem. We've discussed a variety of approaches. The one I like best is that "contract interpreters" offer a professional service, which is that they read a contract and tell you what it will do. You pay them for this service, and they have a public bond of sufficient size that if they screw up, a claim against their public bond will make the person affected whole. This assumes a few things: dispute resolution services, flexible escrow agreements, and a lot of human judgement in a relatively corruption-free environment. My guess is that this is going to be expensive to provide, and might well rest up against existing contracting infrastructure (i.e. KPMG type agencies might offer a blockchain auditing service with insurance in some imagined futures.) Hence I'd expect a long tail from high value, deeply audited contracts with insurance and bonds to back them up, through to collaborative pools that just note when they've been ripped off, down to "it worked for me!" reviews on forums. I'm not sure there's a better solution than this, but it's a topic of ongoing research and discussion.

ubersync 11y ago

Ethereum is getting a lot of heat for being "pre-mined". What stops someone from running an alt-ethereum blockchain which is not pre-mined? AKA a non-pre-mined Ethereum fork?

Hexayurt 11y ago
A desire for a funded entity to continue development work.
drcode 11y ago
1. It would be more prone to 51% attacks, unless they use a different mining algorithm than the more popular chain 2. The usefulness of contracts involving money is directly proportional to the stability and aggregate value of the base currency, and a copycat will not be able to match the official net on this measure. 3. The grim trigger equillibrium would doom such a blockchain if it becomes successful (look up on wikipedia) 4. There would be no dev team to support ongoing development if it overtakes the main net. 5. Network effects

kodablah 11y ago

I like the idea of Ethereum but it does not solve distributed application needs IMO. I fear it is not able to solve large-scale app problems considering it only has the computation power of a "1999 phone", requires every to store (or at least know about) all state, and requires everyone up to date to run EVERY computation. For instance, take a distributed Reddit where posts can be mappings, even by deferring the costs to the viewers in terms of small amounts of wei per view, it surely wouldn't be enough to cover the expense of centralized permanent store (I understand Whisper is coming but it isn't permanent enough). I see a couple of Ehtereum frameworks out there using things IPFS for storage. Are there any plans for Ethereum to solve concerns about forcing everyone to run all calculations or should it always be seen as a small DHT that you only want to use when you have real auditability concerns?

Hexayurt 11y ago
Agreed. Right now it's a single shared processor emulated with cryptography and massive replication - but that's not an architecture that will get you supercomputer performance. The work on that thread - getting Ethereum to supercomputer status - is called CASPAR and you can read more about the efforts to get a formal proof for it here: http://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/Ethereum-+-Synereo/ http://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/Ethereum-+-Synereo/
drcode 11y ago
This is probably the most cogent criticism that can be leveled against ethereum right now- The performance constraints for ethereum dapps are pretty extreme. There are indeed plans to solve the problem you describe (read posts on blog.ethereum.org mentioning scalability) and these problems are probably solvable, but a working system remains far off. That said, I think ethereum dapps are going to be substantively different from traditional apps people are used to- I think there's a lot of opportunity in this type of system for people who don't take the mindset of "This system is bad at running existing app X therefore it is bad for everything."
- heliumcraft 11y ago
  I think criticism is valid in regards to TPS. But for storage it's misguided. The blockchain is meant for consensus, storing reddit comments or cat pictures is an expensive and inefficient misuse of the blockchain.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

natrius 11y ago

Here's another angle on Ethereum: I think it's going to put Walmart, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb out of business. Consider Amazon. They buy goods from manufacturers, then sell those goods to consumers for higher prices and pocket (or spend) the profits. Pretty simple. They provide a great service that makes it easier for people to buy and sell stuff, and they get paid well to do it. But what if all of Amazon's customers wanted to band together and cut out the middleman? They could use their collective buying power to get the same prices from manufacturers, but eliminate the profit and just pay lower prices. It's possible, but it'd be hard to achieve. Who would run the system? How would they make decisions? It's so hard that the customers would give up, finish buying their disposable consumer goods, watch an episode of Humans and go to sleep. Or one of them could come up with a solution. "Hey y'all, I wrote the software for a marketplace system to connect us all directly to manufacturers, but I know you can't trust me to never take a cut if I run the system myself. So instead, I'll run it on a global computer that no one controls. Programs on the global computer can never change, and no one can fake their data. That means the system will be out of my control and the rules are set in stone. It's everyone's system." That global computer is called Ethereum, and it lets us build new kinds of software that can coordinate human interactions so powerfully that this guy's solution just might work. You could build other kinds of apps on Ethereum too, like voluntary social safety nets, apps that let your future smart appliances talk to each other long after their manufacturer shuts down, or pretty much the entire financial industry—all without any middlemen to charge you or restrict your access. If you know how to program, you should learn how to build apps on Ethereum. And not just the code that runs directly on the global computer, but web apps and mobile apps that you already know how to build, just with the global computer as the backend instead of a private computer. I will help you get started. (niran@niran.org) Maybe I'm overly optimistic. That's a risk I'm willing to take. You should too.

bgilroy26 11y ago
I think there will be a similar flood of ideas of business to run on ethereum that are ahead of the market. Back in the dot com boom, there were people who understood the potential of the internet and pushed plans to take advantage. Many failed to hold together because there had not been a large enough migration of users to the new medium. I agree with you about Ethereum's potential, but I think the first businesses to succeed will be low overhead outfits that can handle waiting out the slow transition. I am thinking about what would have happened with Amazon if they had started AWS, Amazon Instant Video, and Amazon Prime Now back in '97. They would never have been able to pay developer salaries waiting for 2011 to come. The biggest upside on Ethereum will be a company that understands the medium, starts small, and presses the envelope.

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ethereum crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ether list anywhere!!!!

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER list anywhere!!!!

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!!

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!

calneva01 11y ago

How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!