I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it.

Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the power is. Having that alternative to current ledger and contract systems can be valuable to people in certain situations.

Thinking that Ethereum or Bitcoin or any blockchain tech escapes these fundamental power relationships is exactly the type of inanity that makes the tech seem unserious. It's a hype train, it's not true, but there is still the potential for value.

Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else.

Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments.

Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However, since they (apparently) get funded by receiving Bitcoin, they continue to operate. In the meantime, grad students and professors get the convenience of using sci-hub's interface to easily retrieve journal articles.

Even if sci-hub eventually gets taken down completely (or a researcher finds a catastrophic bug in all cryptocurrencies), the total time during which sci-hub served documents funded by Bitcoins was a benefit to society.

ETH allows fancier transaction scripts than Bitcoin, but the same argument holds-- a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.

Based on this article, I'd say there is value in ETH just as there is value in writing a complex, multi-threaded application in a memory-unsafe language. It's a bad idea, but for some special cases it may be better than doing nothing at all.

In most transaction, the third party also act as an insurance, a safety. If something goes wrong, the third party is supposed to be here to make sure everybody got their fair share without the need to take legal action, which can be difficult to near impossible sometime.

If I get scamed, does the smart contract allow a chargeback ? Who is going to make sure I was scam and not abusing ? etc.

What insurance would you need when sending a Bitcoin donation to a site where thousands of researchers already benefited by retrieving scientific journal articles?

I didn't write, "cryptocurrencies will replace all third party payment systems." I gave a single example of a situation where third party payment systems don't function and Bitcoin does.

They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

Since stopping cryptocurrencies is harder than freezing third party payments (evidence: see Wikileaks), this is a single, narrow example of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Researchers get the convenience of sci-hub's frontend for longer than they would if sci-hub had relied on a third party payment system.

Finally, there are a lot of good reasons why in democracy we vote per-head and not per-share. It's a big thing, but that is also being dismissed by cryptocurrencies.

They've forked before they could be forced to again.

Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

If you want to throw up your hands and declare this all a waste of time, feel free. You'll have lots of company, and for good reason, but setting some arbitrarily high goal such as "providing something new and useful to society" just makes it sound like you've got an axe to grind.

There's plenty of things about Ethereum (and blockchain exchanges and how they are used and hyped) to criticize legitimately, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

Ethereum forces a global authority :)

Not only do those who designed the cryptocoin plus early adapters (the former are the latter, but not necessarily vice versa) get more rich with thin air generated by electricity, they also get more powerful. No wonder these things rise up like mushrooms from the ground.

Man, if I were into this, I'd just convince people 24/7 to get into these cryptocoins. Best way to get rich doing virtually nothing but some marketing. Right?

And if you're just going to use ETH to pay for real compute hardware in the cloud so you can run real software, at that point why not just use BTC?

Turing-completeness doesn't automatically make something useful.

By the very nature of your argument if a Turing-complete blockchain isn't inherently worth something than a stack-based language which isn't Turing complete is certainly worthless.

I feel like your arguing with me for the sake of arguing? What's your point ETH isn't perfect, so what, it's relatively new tech which is exploring an interesting problem. The fact it's valued X _may be_ a fair evaluation or even undervalued given it's impact. The upside being possibly a DAO controlled by an AI efficiently providing resources to humanity in a way human's can't given traditional power structures. Or maybe fiat isn't so bad and we don't want robot overlords so we scrap it all. At the end of the day who cares, as long as your smart about the money you've invested into to the ecosystem you won't be hurt by a Black Swan in the cryptosphere. I think anyone working on ETH up to Vitak would have the same sentiment.

If you want to build a better language for interfacing with the VM your free to do so.

You argue for purity of a principle. Very few people actually care about such a notion. The majority has more practical concerns. The fact that a theft that would have made the whole currency seem insecure has been reversed was seen as a proof of solidity by many users.

The current system at least theoretically has democratic (or otherwise) control over who the 0.1% in power are. In a system like BTC or ETH it's just 'who has the most compute?' or in proof of stake, 'who's the richest?'

The 'diminish trust in the network' threat really only discourages an existing good actor (invested in the network) from turning into a bad actor.

If I've been mining a cryptocurrency for years and I decide I want to move on to mining something else, what stops me from using 51% to destroy the currency before I move on to mining something else? If I moved my currency holdings out (or have been liquidating them regularly, as any sensible miner might), what's to lose?

It may not be for you, and it may not be for society writ large, but it is an excellent and very important idea. Removing human judgement is exactly the point. Whether this thrills or horrifies you is, I think, a personality trait.

I attach neither horror nor thrill to that idea, I find it laughable. We all have our abstract ideals, and these abstract ideals eventually meet the reality of human interaction. There is no possibility of removing human judgement, as long as humans are in control of the machines. Humans may temporarily agree to go with whatever the machines say, but that is only a temporary status, as whoever controls the machines has ultimate control.

I'm still a little lost. What value does ETH provide if we cede to human emotions and social power structures at the end of the day? We don't need to invent a cryptocracy to realize a world where people who own 51% of the power can acceptably or at least "fairly" screw over the the dissenting lot with 49%... that is just old school power. It has been around for ages.

In theory, ETH proposed a playing field where law is specified using a language that everyone agrees upon, and where applications of said law are recorded on a decentralized public ledge and even executed using the compute power of the underlying network. The system was valuable precisely because it provided a cryptographically robust way to circumvent humanity for the purpose of recording law with authority and confidence.

But all we've learned from this experiment is that when someone messes up, or not, and it impacts a lot of people (in these cases negatively), they will appeal to the people who own the power and request execution of an "authorized" (not by the original rules but by virtue of ownership of power) out-of-band attack against the system. In other words, they'll collude to perform an illegal move in order to counter the undersireable outcome. In essence, it's a network coup.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is kinda cool too. And if ETH or blockchains or whatever is the zeitgeist what inspires people to continue to imagine and build transparent societies where we have better and better distribution of power, perhaps it has artistic value.

But these events jade people, and the reason they lose trust in the system is because they learn just how easily it is not to be trusted.. how human it is. You put your faith in a system only to see the network owners use their power to operate outside of it.

Of course this is great when you are the beneficiary of a network reset. But by condoning rewriting history, you've chosen to sacrifice the system and pander to your emotions above those of the people who shared trust with you when everyone agreed to play by the rules. So maybe you don't live in an ivory tower: there may appear to be few victimes (namely the bad actor) but finally don't forget the contracts that become void when the network is reset. To those who bought in ideologically to ETH, these events effectively invalidate the entire system. And ETH becomes a failed experiment.

We both appear to agree that ETH is still human. You claim this is a boon. I am skeptical. I am still curious why being human innately makes ETH more valuable. Perhaps you mean the fact that the participants evoked "human mode" over "machine mode" is an indication that people value this system dearly. I do not disagree. But I'd argue this value comes from a different place. This value comes from a desire for, well, value itself. This is a different, darker, value. It's no longer simply valued for its merit: the vision for a mechanically infungable system isolated from human emotional responses. But it's just another victim of human irrationality, greed, ignorance, and laziness. And that is a little sad in my opinion.

Just to be clear I'm not bitter I've never owned any ether.

What a completely idiotic notion that is. Language can be used to deceive, and if the neverending freakshow of "smart contract" bugs shows anything it is that computer languages are not exempt.

Removing human judgement is exactly the point.

The Underhanded C Contest is not about human judgement.

We have processes that deal with human reality. We build political parties to extend power, we have judges and parliaments, where laws are written, people enter contracts every day - the system works mostly well. Ethereum is an improvement on exactly what?

And even if it were, why roll back the block chain to rectify the situation? In traditional accounting, wouldn't you need a ledger record of both the mistake and its correction?

This is exactly what happened. The blockchain wasn't rolled back. New transactions crediting the victims were injected into it.

So can I make a purchase, receive the goods and then claim a bug?

Reversibility of platform bugs is a good thing, reversibility of contract bugs is basically reversibility of plain transactions, which makes the whole idea of cryptocurrency useless.