Of course, Vitalik Buterin knows that so he resorted to "weak subjectivity", basically saying that if you are not online often enough, you need to trust someone with providing you check points to decide which fork is the "true" one.
The proofs of Gödel's theorems work by encoding the axioms and inference rules of the system in a way that can be dealt with within the system, and using that to encode statements like "this statement cannot be proven within the system" within the system.
I am not sure what the analogous thing would be if you were to attempt to carry the proof over. I am not even sure what it would mean to try to do that.
To prove that, there is no proof that can be carried out within proof of stake, that there is no proof of Falsum that can be carried out within proof of stake?
What would that even mean? What would it even mean for proof of stake to prove Falsum?
I am not asserting that proof of stake can work well, but I am not convinced by the line of reasoning that you lay out, with its current level of detail. Perhaps if you went into the details I would find it more convincing.
Proof of Stake strategy is to make it where attacks on the blockchain are impossible in the economic sense. Proof of work strategy is making the attack infeasible by making the work required impossibly large.
Now is PoS possible? No idea. That possible fork attack seems like an impossible barrier to overcome. But we will see.
Humans can be rational or irrational. That is how they are born. So far, we can only make tools and books to prevent irrationality.
It's completely circular. It's like the Bible trying to proof itself. With no anchor to the physical world, you can't actually ever know
I'm not saying that requiring clients to log in every 4 months is a reasonable security assumption, just showing that hand-waving it as "completely circular" is incorrect. It's more nuanced than that.
Good luck with that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail
With Ethereum PoS. It is dependent on ETH being distributed to many individuals. If only a few individuals own most of the ETH, then they will then have the power dictate what is the "truth" in the blockchain. Right now, ETH is very well distributed around the whole planet.
As you can see, one is oligarchic, the other is very democratic.
Ethereum is not a Corporation that is designed to make profits. It is non-profit, it's not even a company, it's simply a protocol implemented in Free Software.
I don't think its very good for the cryptocoin community, but hey, I'm up to see the grand experiment unfold.
That said, talking about this "fairness" is totally missing the point. As I mentioned, in the grand scheme of things it's all "rich get richer" and that's how capitalism works. The truly important question is how immutable an stable the ledger is, because that's what makes these blockchain projects meaningful.
If you ask anyone who has a thorough understanding of these technologies they would say PoW is superior to PoS in this sense. And Yes, this includes even the guys who are working on PoS blockchains. The only reason people bother with PoS is because PoW is having a hard time scaling and many people think maybe there may not even be an ultimate solution just with PoW.
You probably didn't even read my comment. Because it wasn't about whether PoW or PoS is more efficient.
“doesn’t scale” usually refers to technical difficulty with throughput. If you meant that Bitcoin et al cause massive environmental damage, you sure didn’t say it clearly.
I suggest that you would get a lot of mileage out of improving your writing skills first before trying to flame people. As it is, you’re just playing yourself.
I mean, in theory the market should push the profit down to a minimum, forcing the miners to spend their revenues in order to keep mining.
It won't be perfect. But it is definitely tons better than the current capitalism.
Another very important feature here is the ability to easily fork. So if we need to fix something, it can easily be done (no need to wait for an organized citizen revolution)(although this is probably better attributed to the idea of Free Software).
A low-income person getting into Ethereum today has no hope to ever get as much ethereum as anyone else in the early adopters.
Hell, a low-income person was too busy trying to buy food today and/or pay off credit card debt to even think about investing into Ethereum, the Stock Market, Bonds, or other securities.
If you wanted to be an early investor of facebook and you are a pleb, then you're out of luck. And you should have a big capital to join.
If you wanted to be an early adopter of Ethereum, then you only need an internet connection and a computer. You invest put practically any amount, so any pleb can join.
There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?
Pretty sure this is better than stock market.
Robinhood offers free trades on anything in the Stock Market. Literally free, you can't beat that.
> There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?
That's not the stock market. That's venture capitalism. The stock market is literally open to everybody with an internet connection from a variety of well trusted sources (RobinHood, E-trade, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, etc. etc.) and a variety of pricing schemes. ($0 for Robinhood, although it seems like their execution is not as good. You get what you pay for afterall)
Furthermore: the stock market is regulated. The National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) system in the USA ensures that everyone in the USA pays relatively consistent prices, or at least more-consistent than BTC / ETH. Unlike ETH or BTC, no one is going to steal your money Mt. Gox style as the SEC is a strict watchdog.
You get no assurances with Eth or BTC. Coinbase has different prices than Bitfinex. And some of these exchanges look like they're running scams (ie: Bitfinex's support of Tethercoin).
I think more "plebs" have been burned by Mt. Gox and other such failures in the cryptocoin marketplace. Its a hugely unregulated, and highly risky market. Cryptocoins are just not mature enough for mainstream speculation yet.
I wanna note though, regarding crypto exchanges. One does not need to use them to invest. Use your own wallet. Use decentralized exchange if you don't wanna risk using centralized exchange.
Funny you'd say that:
"Vitalik's project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer."
"Buterin later said he had “greatly overestimated” the likelihood of the team breaking mathematics"
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/
More: http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/
I tried to verify your sources, it seems to go back to Gregory Maxwell and an anonymous source, BitcoinErrorLog. David Gerard cites BitcoinErrorLog. zero proof.
Jorge Timón was pitched it
> Was he soliciting investment though? > Jorge Timón @timoncc Yes, he and another guy were claiming the classical computers simulating quantum would be a mining revolution.
interesting, but that sounds quiet differently from the claims from maxwell and your original post.
He has never denied trying to get money for a quantum project. If rumors were floating around that I had I'd instantly deny it 100%
perhaps because not a single person was dumb enough to fall for it?
How about this- for 4 years people have been talking about this, not once has he simply replied "I never tried to raise money to build a quantum bitcoin miner"
- ProverbBut if we're going to make the analogy to the present day, it's important to frame it right. Blockchains are just a subset of distributed databases, and the lasting "Benzes" of the field might be projects like FoundationDB rather than blockchain-anything.
This paper does a pretty good job of laying out a formal, mathematical proof that pos doesn't work
Ethereum is three years old. ICE is 200+.
Ethereum works today as well.
I think you missed the point of the analogy.
1. Sharding is fundamentally impossible; in any public blockchain, all computers must validate all transactions, and the scalability trilemma cannot be avoided, or
2. Sharding is possible, but the solutions outlined in the FAQ are unnecessarily complicated; a much simpler solution exists
You haven't provided arguments for either, and I can't even tell which argument you're making.
On a higher level, I could agree with the general sentiment that complicated solutions tend to be wrong or at least very suboptimal, but only as a heuristic. It's a heuristic that doesn't even hold very well in this space; in the space of PoW fork-choice rules, bitcoin-style longest-chain is simpler than Somplinsky's GHOST rule (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf), which is in turn simpler than ethereum's current "modified GHOST", but in each case the added complications really were necessary and lead to better properties.
The Ethereum designers don't want to recant their outlandish promises, so they keep proposing increasingly complex bells-and-whistles fixes that sound impressive in a 10,000 word FAQ but won't bring the "global supercomputer" substantially any closer to reality.
> Lieut, Zalenski's mirth interrupted him at this point. "Now," he resumed," when I started for Philadelphia I was careful to take with me a 10,000-pound gauge. That was my little equipment. This, as I suppose you know, or if you don't must take my word for it, is a standard instrument. Well, as soon as the Keely people saw this gauge they said to me, 'You had better not show it to Keely. It would only anger him!' Much I cared about angering him! I wanted justice. One of his partisans, however, informed Mr. Keely that I had brought this gauge with me, and the great man replied that he would not use it. In the course of his experiments he said he had got 50,000 pounds pressure. But—observe the but—he then remarked that he had broken all the pressure gauges he had. I then quietly rejoined that I had a pressure gauge which was only capable of registering 10,000 pounds. Said I, 'I would like to have you put it on, and break it for me.' Mr. Keely made no immediate reply to this. Shortly afterward, however, he remarked, with an air of feeble assertion, 'I do not believe in pressure gauges, anyhow.'"
> The subject appeared to be excruciatingly funny to Liet. Zalenski.
[1] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/09/24/106...
[2] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/11/16/106...
"And the energetic gentleman laughed in the same strain in which the cat was heard when she feelingly exclaimed, 'Hi, Hi! I have eaten the canary!'"
"The 'etherealized vaporic force' which was so liberally poured into the ears of a large and gullible public..."
I can't get enough. It's wonderful.
The sharding stuff, however, is still iffy at the moment (I've studied it pretty closely) ...but if vitalik is confident he can make it work, I'll bet on v every time.
There are some small efforts, but I'd rather have formal methods from the beginning, not as an afterthought.
The problem is that market forces favor releasing early rather than releasing correct things. It's the MIT vs NJ paradox again, or worse is better. But this time the potential risks are much bigger.
solidity, etc sure maybe... but at that point, releasing early is probably a good thing so that you can get a whole community working on things and getting ideas and collaboration from a large group of people
*edit: unless you mean like geth, or some minimal reference client should be formally proven
There are more agile options. For example, model checking all protocols is pretty easy in comparison to theorem proving. Still a significant effort, but perhaps an order of magnitude easier.
Just because a bridge is still standing today doesn't mean it's safe. Ethereum has been almost religious in violating best practice blockchain design.
The entire .eth registar runs in a smart contract. You put your ETH in to claim the domain, others also bid during the bidding period, the winners ETH is locked away and returned when they release the domain, the rest get refunded.
Considering DNS is continually politicized and still subject to points of failure (the CAs), distributed ENS is a far better design IMO
"solid track record" meaning cloning bitcoin and giving yourself and friends a bunch of free tokens worth $7,764,000,000:
"12 Million Ether were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers"
Can you name one thing he built/invented that does anything? Beyond collecting bitcoin.
The concept of memory-hardness is not really novel either, see: bcrypt/scrypt.
You've got everything that looks essential to me: add/sub, mul/div, logical and/or, bitwise, string, crypto, etc.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script#Opcodes
No disagreement that the Bitcoin development process is broken as fuck though.
And what does all this complexity buy? Cryptokitties. We sure this is a worthy tradeoff? Would they Eth guys even be able to recognize this considering what's invested personally and monetarily? There's plenty of suckers, so I'm sure the "next year" kicking the can down the road cycle can go on as long as it's needed, but I'm interested to see if we ever get something of value out of it.
The other evolutionary route interests me, but I'm too busy, lazy, ignorant, and disturbed by the entire space to test it out. Maybe some day.
etheraffle.com also seems like a relatively good use case for a ÐApp.
In fact there are thousands of good use cases.
I don't think you're familiar enough with the space to be providing meaningful criticism. Your reductio ad absurdum to "just cryptokitties" is fairly telling.
In fact there are thousands of good use cases.
If there are, then we'll surely see them. You're providing more of what I'm talking about - it's always next year, always coming, but the mainstream adoption is nascent.
Whether or not you "believe" raffles/lotteries to be a useful system does not change the fact that it was a system with a $280BN market cap in 2015. Lotteries on a blockchain with smart contracts solve three problems with traditional lotteries: transparency (provable fairness), easy and secure participation, easy and secure disbursement.
We'll surely see them.
I can tell you that the team is the least diverse (not just race/gender but in age/possible life experience) I've ever seen, which doesn't bode well. How different can their perspectives be?
The vast majority of those apps are cheap moneymaking schemes. Again, they have a place, but I'll very much take a wait and see approach, which I believe is realistic and more than warranted.
Those things were a bit slow to access over dial-up (porn in particular), but millions of people were using the web daily by the time Netscape IPO'ed.
There's no similar moment in sight for Ethereum's hypothetical "Web 3.0".
2. Even if we accept your statement as true, the world wide web became generally available in 1991. Blockchain technology has now been around for a decade. The web certainly showed its practical usefulness in its first 10 years, yet blockchain remains largely in the realm of hype.
Ethereum was the first blockchain with smart contracts and it only went live in July 2015...
I have yet to see any good use case for smart contracts, except for, of course, launching your own speculative asset.
I just want to see a real use case that has nothing to do with launching more tokens.
In 1872, a man named John Keely demonstrated a machine that operated on what he called the "vaporic" or "etheric" force:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely
The same year he raised 5 million dollars, equivalent to about $100M in today's money. Two years later he demonstrated a model that was described as a "hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine" with "quadruple negative harmonics". No doubt he'd be a blockchain entrepreneur today.
(Edit: Someone actually maintains a big wiki dedicated to Keely's "Sympathetic Vibratory Physics" and "Etheric Elements": http://www.svpwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Sympathetic+Vibra... Amazing that an investment fraud from 150 years ago is still producing "research"! A sobering reminder of the power of lies.)