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Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by paulmd on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @06:53PM (#16927111)
Speaking of which, Ethereum is not really novel either. Bitcoin includes its own VM which has opcodes that allow smart contracts too... just most of them are disabled because the reference implementation had bugs at the time Satoshi abandoned the project, and the development process is currently so calcified and politicized that development has essentially ground to a halt.

The concept of memory-hardness is not really novel either, see: bcrypt/scrypt.

Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by lojack on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @07:26PM (#16927369)
Vitalk was originally a bitcoin developer who proposed extending the op codes to make a more general purpose computer, and only started Ethereum after he encountered resistance to the idea. I don’t think anyone was claiming bitcoin wasn’t prior work.
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by petertodd on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @09:37PM (#16928123)
Can you cite any evidence at all that he actually proposed new op codes? I've heard this claim many times, but never seen any evidence to back it up.
Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by paulmd on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @11:10PM (#16928508)
What opcodes does Ethereum support that Bitcoin does not support, or could not be implemented using Bitcoin's opcodes?

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.

Re:Ethereum Sharding FAQ by lojack on Thursday April 26, 2018 @11:44PM (#16938320)
Bitcoin specifically avoids loops and recursion. The codes you included allow basic contracts, but bitcoin scripts are guaranteed to halt. Its a conscious decision, and I'm not sure its a bad choice for the project.