News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ethereum Sharding FAQ. Parent comment

Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by drcode on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:56PM (#16926058)
As someone deeply involved in this community, I sort of agree about the "Rube Goldberg" feel of his ideas, but Vitalik et al have delivered pretty reliably: I think both ethereum and casper are pretty safe bets at this point (yes, I'll likely get some comments telling me I'm wrong and how horrible ethereum and casper are)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by nextos on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:07PM (#16926174)
Ethereum is, so far, missing a key element for me to take it really seriously: Formal Methods.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by rickycook on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @06:31PM (#16926928)
well, that would be tooling though. you wouldn’t say that x86 is missing formal methods therefor you shouldn’t use it right...

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by tfha on Thursday April 26, 2018 @01:22AM (#16929029)
Well, a lot of x86 actually does get proven using formal methods. Clearly not all of it, but we've realized that was a bad plan, and that we should go back to formally verifying all of our hardware.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by drcode on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @05:36PM (#16926430)
Well it was a ton of work to get ethereum out the door... Adding a couple more years to formally prove everything first sounds like the perfect way to be stuck in development limbo forever. As you say, formal methods are being applied after the fact to some degree at least.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by nextos on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @06:44PM (#16927030)
I think it is a common misconception that formal methods will lead to an extremely slow development cycle. That is only the case if you go for the best guarantee of correctness: Theorem Proving.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by tfha on Thursday April 26, 2018 @01:21AM (#16929018)
Uh, I think that many cryptocurrency experts would take strong opposition to the idea that ethereum has delivered reliably.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]