I appreciate good criticism, and you bring up an important point (which the digital currency communities have solved so far in an ad-hoc manner using "oracles", look it up if you aren't already familiar with it. At best it's a half solution, but it's not quite as bad as you portray here).
But why add that last statement? Just to be a jerk? Revel in your superior understanding/arrogance? I don't get it.
Edit: And for the record, I own no Ethereum and a few cents or dollars worth of Bitcoin, not sure how much.
For those who don't know, Theymos is the name of the person who controls the most important communication channels: /r/Bitcoin, Bitcoin.org, and others. He has a clear and stated agenda and makes no bones about his policies. In short he curates social media channels to reflect his point of view and hide opposition.
The blatant censorship and the armies of trolls arguing their convoluted logic have ended most polite and reasoned conversation on the topic.
My prediction is that many many Ethereum users will be hearing the SFYL phrase when their promised 'trustless' system fails or the armies of scammers converge on a new blockchain.
Sorry for your loss.
Suppose every user who "slocks" something has to put up a stake, or an account with some Ether in it. If there is then a dispute a user could submit it to a decentralized jury of some sort, also putting up their own stake, and which ever party loses has to pay damages from the linked account.
Ethereum isn't interesting solely because it allows computations, but also because it provides a immutable datastore (as bitcoin does) that then can be used in Smart Contracts and systems. I see it as a platform for building trust, not a guarantee of trust.
"Decentralized jury", aka p2p conflict resolution sounds quite expensive and like a system even more ripe for gaming: this would not be servers slowly heating a room for some fractional hint of a reward, this would be people who would be extremely unlikely to donate their time unless they have some form of hidden agenda (which might be as generic as white supremacists, to pick any random group, always voting in favor of disputants who drop subtle hints of the "right" ethnicity in their problem description texts). And due to the extra-legal nature of the system, there would not even be a law against it.
As for your second point the proposed solution for that, as mentioned by varav in another comment, is Schelling Point[1] consensus, as described[2] by Vitalik Buterin.
In essence, you call multiple random assessors, with no knowledge of each other, to respond to your given question, or in this case to pass judgement. They're then rewarded based on how close they are to the "average" or consensus. Augur[3] and Truthcoin/Hivemind[4] use a similar idea, and the former is deployed live.
I don't think there's an automatic or immediately clear solution, but its by no means impossible, and the value added by Ethereum could justify coming up with one.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29
[2]: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal...
[3]: https://augur.net
If you incentivize assessors enough to make the rate of non-assessors sufficiently small, you not only make the process very expensive, you also open the door far and wide to non-assessing by not seriously considering the options and selecting one of the "truths" at random. Market research has this pretty much under control because they ask so many questions in one go and random-voters tend to enter subjectively-random values that are quite visible to statistical analysis, but i doubt this could be transferred to conflict resolution, because the requirements for a serious answer are so much higher there. I really doubt that this is solvable, not every problem is a good match for a crows-* solution.
I'm curious what you think of using a blockchain as a conflict resolver with a large company on the other end. Essentially, instead of having your average joe resolve the conflict, the user can pick eBay, Amazon, etc. to act as resolver.
I realize there is no incentive for established companies to provide this service, but I see it as quite empowering for the consumer and seller so maybe someday people will fight for it. I personally think that if this was to work, it wouldn't be a mom & pop shop providing conflict resolution, instead it would be a large semi-transparent entity like eBay. All blockchain would do is provide a trusted medium for everyone to transact on.
But are we still looking at problems solved by a blockchain or are we already looking at problems caused by it? Honestly, I think I've lost track at some point.
i find this statement worrisome on its face. for matters of the legal and/or moral variety, i don't want jurors to have an incentive. i want them to be compelled by law to execute the duties appointed to them by the democracy they participate in. jury duty should not be a financial opportunity.
'They're then rewarded based on how close they are to the "average" or consensus.'
similarly, i do not want a juror who's aiming to give the same answer most people would give, which sounds like a perverse sort of guessing game. i want a juror who will consider the evidence and pronounce a judgement based on their understanding of the evidence and the law. i want a juror to have the opportunity to exercise their right to jury nullification. etc.
i'm not saying that the current western implementations of democracy and jurisprudence are perfect. but they have at least grappled with a bunch of philosophical questions about what say an individual might have. and while i'm a big believer in the potential of things like the etherium and bitcoin blockchains to make our lives better and to facilitate relationships we couldn't have had before, i'm vary wary of the feeling that these systems by their very existence imply clear well-defined solutions to old political and social problems. that is not the case. the existence of a robust tool does not get you out of having to think philosophically.
Do you, though?
One large problem with bitcoin is that you cannot prove that you don't own a given address.
IF this is also true for Ethereum, all you really get is proof that you sent money to an address; not that the address necessarily belongs to anyone.
In a way though your point still stands, a user could always claim that someone else put the listing up or someother situation beyond their control, UNLESS there is previous history within the slock.it ecosystem, which would be very easy to see.
And how can those people prove that they didn't receive your money?
As in, I want to dispute that the address you've sent money to is under my control.
As for the reliability of external data sources to a contract running on Ethereum, there are multiple proposed solutions.
One is to use some sort of reputation tokens similar to what Augur[1] - a prediction market built on Ethereum; employs.
Another solution that was suggested by one of the co-founders of the Ethereum project is to use "Schelling points"[2] as guides since a large number of non-communicating reporters of events will most likely converge at what is closest to the truth[3].
> other people will honour the 'facts' decided by your program
I don't really see that as a technical limitation of Ethereum. IANAL but, if the terms of the smart contract can be codified into a legal agreement, then the decisions of the program can be made enforceable by law.
[1]: http://augur.link/augur.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29
[3]: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal...
ETH has a powerful use case as programmable money which settles faster and cheaper than any other, and has native support for payment channels and other complexities not only because of it's Turing complete language, but because it does not use bitcoin's UTXO architecture.
Not all interested in Ethereum view smart contracts as the best use case.
Care to elaborate the benefits of using ethereum for value transfers vs. bitcoin? Block size limit is an obvious advantage, but what are the others?
> ETH has a powerful use case as programmable money which settles faster and cheaper than any other
That is quite a claim, which makes me doubt if you know what you are talking about. In blockchain-based systems the costs are related to market dynamics. Eg. miners can decide what they put to blocks and at what price. Or is ethereum somehow fundamentally different in this aspect?
> and has native support for payment channels and other complexities not only because of it's Turing complete language, but because it does not use bitcoin's UTXO architecture.
Payment channels are perfectly supported by Bitcoin, what do you mean by "native"? Is it how much easier to use payment channels in ETH in practice, are people actually using them?
Why is ethereums account-based architecture better than Bitcoin's UTXO architecture? Isn't really obvious to me.
>In blockchain-based systems the costs are related to market dynamics. Eg. miners can decide what they put to blocks and at what price. Or is ethereum somehow fundamentally different in this aspect?
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are fundamentally different from current payment systems, and as Ethereum goes to PoS, it will likely be quite different than Bitcoin's PoW. Both probably represent an improvement on current transaction methods, i.e. credit card with 1-2%, plus $0.2 to $0.3 flat processing fees.
>Payment channels are perfectly supported by Bitcoin, what do you mean by "native"?
I mean that off-chain channels can be integrated without changes to the current Ethereum code.
http://www.arcturnus.com/ethereum-lightning-network-and-beyo...
>Why is ethereums account-based architecture better than Bitcoin's UTXO architecture? Isn't really obvious to me.
For bitcoin one txn requires n signatures for n unspent outputs. For Ethereum one txn requires just one signature. This has consequences for efficiency of micropayments and payment channels.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil...
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...
If you're not familiar with Bitcoin, "Bitcoin script" is the pseudolang that must be used to program Bitcoin. One of its most prominent features is that it has no loops. Most Bitcoin applications involve a ton of jumping through hoops to even make them work at all. The equivalent programs on Ethereum are short and look like C.
If Bitcoin can add real programmability, Ethereum is done for. But so far, the Bitcoin community has not even been able to change a single constant (I'm referring to the block size debate).
The thing the Ethereum client adds is the ability to take the data in the transaction storage (weather it be return or a defined datafield makes no difference) and pass it through an EVM to generate the current state. So there is no reason for that functionality to be limited to just the Ethereum client.
You would take that piece of the client and run the opscode in the return data storage across several transactions.
I thought this was obvious to anyone who understands the discussion on a reasonably technical level. I suspect many posters in this thread are just Ethereum investors with no programming knowledge.
You'd still need to trust the manufacturer, and that an entity with significant (nation-state? Fortune 50?) resources hasn't successfully tampered with it, but that's a lot easier than trusting the average owner of a lock.
2) Locks could be connected to the Internet without any messy block chains getting in the way. It would really on trust, but you wouldn't need any nation-states behind it. (You can also rent locks without internet connectivity at all and without blockchains, so Slock.it is really a double layer of wasted complexity)
EDIT: the intent here was to expose overconfidence and vague predictions, not pay fan service to ethereum or suggest an actual bet. if anybody is interested in how to make proper predictions, I recommend the books by Philip Tetlock, especially the latest called Superforecasting [1].
EDIT2: I wasn't aware my views are so controversial, so here is some more background: If somebody was convinced something couldn't happen, he'd assign a probability of 0 to that event. If that person wanted to act according to her believes, taking on bets, no matter the odds, would have positive expected utility. Since almost nobody takes on such bets, it suggests that we generally over-exaggerate when we say things like "impossible" or "sorry for you loss", hence we are being overconfident. The other is vagueness. By not being clear about what exactly we are predicting, we're leaving the door open to back out of it later. In fact, Tetlock has found that, by making vague predictions, experts could later convince themselves (and others) that they were "close", skewing their sense of accuracy. Unfortunately, when subject to a prediction tournament with strict rules, they would score no better than random [2].
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-The-Art-Science-Predi...
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp...
You should work on your reading comprehension. The parent never made these claims. Whose beliefs are you even talking about? Saying something is not useful and not practical is not the same as saying it will fail or stop existing.
The only thing you're doing here is psychologically manipulating someone into accepting a bet with conditions you yourself chose that are clearly in your favour.
You didn't even define what the vague phrases "the Etherum project will fail" or "the project is no longer around" is even supposed to mean. The betting conditions are effectively "give me everything you have when I feel like it".
You're offering a nonsensical bet.
We live a world where people often delight in keeping obscure things alive. Even http://nyan-coin.org still has a following!
As an illustration of what I mean, I'll be incredibly surprised if bitcoin ever truly dies, and the price ever truly tanks. I'd expect coins to remain above $100, as a few people will flat-out refuse to sell for less, and minimal trading will still take place. Anything in the "real" world though? naaaaah.
Not really; my point was that some things never die, however functionally useless they become.
The top comment said that Eth will become functionally useless, and the bet offered didn't involve it becoming functionally useless.
All it'd take is two bored people to stop this from happening, merrily trading just for their own delight.
As with bitcoin, I'd be really surprised if any of these coins stopped being used entirely, thanks to tech enthusiasts keeping them alive.
So why not try offering a bet on the success of a project, rather than going through the horror of trying to prove a negative?
You want to write something related to (say) a share price, or property ownership? Then your code needs to trust an external system providing the data, and the users need to trust that other people will honour the 'facts' decided by your program on the blockchain.
You want to create even a simple system that opens a lock when someone pays money? (The much-hyped Slock.it startup selling 'smart' locks) The blockchain makes no promise that a physical lock will operate based on bits in the blockchain. You have to trust that someone isn't cheating you.
And why is this need for extra trust a problem? Because once you require trust, you are back into the real world where we already have real solutions to these Ethereum based problems, that rely on trust (e.g. Share dealing, property sales, etc). By moving onto the blockchain, you have gained nothing and only complicated matters.
It's like the IoT: putting a blockchain into an existing system is just as helpful as wiring your fridge up to the Internet. For anyone getting seriously involved in Ethereum, sorry for your loss.