Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste.
It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential.
So I started investing my free time for building an experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to develop myself / become qualified in this field.
Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and some new friends.
so you _did_ end up buying a boat load of ethereum i presume?
When I started coding this project ETH price was around US$ 500, and gas prices around ~40 Gwei, making it feasible to launch the project on mainnet without much hassle using my own funds.
Since then ETH has gone up to the roof. Now ETH is ~US$ 1900 and gas price ~150 Gewi, making it 14x more expensive to launch.
I'm still evaluating if I should launch on ethereum mainnet or in a different solidity compatible blockchain (ex: Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche) once the project reaches a beta version due to the cost of deployment.
In the project main page I ask for donations for covering deployment costs [1], but so far I was unable to secure any funds.
I use draw.io [1] for technical diagrams (ex: flowchart, UML, etc) and Google Drawings [2] for more generic diagrams (ex: system designs).
[1] http://draw.io/
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611
There is a lot more bitcoin wrapped onto ethereum that there is on lightning. (Now 1% of total supply). Ethereum is eating bitcoin.
It's partly why Bitcoin is 5x Ethereum's market cap, despite technically being less capable. It's less capable of losing money, of DAO attacks, or other serious failures too.
SPARK[0] isn't Turing complete but it's still pretty useful, and likely a better language than Solidity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279
[2] https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scryp...
These redefinitions say that you can take a few computation steps per Bitcoin block and save their state such that a later block can take a few more steps, so over time, very slowly, spread out over many blocks, Bitcoin can also implement an arbitrary computation. This is theoretically cute but otherwise useless.
Ethereum has a Turing complete language that is only limited in practice by external constraints like the gas limit. Bitcoin doesn't have such a language.
This can even be proved from first principles: bitcoin, and blockchains generally exist to validate the execution of contracts which have already occurred in meat-space. Basically you and I agree to conditions under which some money is transferred from me to you and vice-versa, which is the actual contract, then write a program (the "smart" contract) which validates that those rules were faithfully executed. It can be shown though that any Turing-complete contract rules can be validated using a non-Turing-complete language like Bitcoin script (ignoring runtime limits). The block chain doesn't need to run every contract, it just needs to validate that every contract ran correctly. A different problem, for which Turing completeness is not required.
Edit: For the down-voters, show me a Turing-complete contract that can't have its execution trace validated in a non-Turing complete language. In the 10 years I've been in this space I've yet to encounter a single one.
No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing legitimate concerns.
First, you have to understand that at least half of the concepts you're talking about have completely not broken through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the first I've heard about OVM, Dex, Defi, and DAOs.
That's not the fault of the tech community, that's the fault of the Blockchain community by allowing itself to be overrun with quasi-technical charlatans who promote world-changing revolution while yadda-yaddaing past the technical details.
Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us.
I think I fundamentally agree with you - Vitalik IS a Genius. Like Satoshi. But I am extremely concerned with the direction most mainstream adoption of this technology is taken, and the glee with which boosters like you allow it to be.
The one item on your list that has a lot of familiarity for the technical community, and even the rest of the populace today is NFTs.
You listed them in the other list of concepts I had no familiarity with. Yet I do know a thing or two about NFTs from what I researched. And I think it's one of the most apalling ideas to have been invented in this domain yet. Masquerading as a method to liberate artists and promote new opportunities for income, it is so clearly a giant money laundering scheme for the wealthiest of the world. That's before we get into the environmental impact.
So....that's what I think.
No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest. So that'd be your impression when you haven't spent time looking into it.
But it sounds like you've at least looked at Vitalik's writings. The Eth core has plenty of hard core tech in various corners of crypto. It's just that they're organized by project, and not all in one place.
In order to make it in the crypto market this is the way they have to behave, because the measure of success is the coin price, which is directly tied to the number of people buying into their coin (the vast majority know nothing of the underlying technical details and don't care). It's a race to the bottom and a real problem with the industry, reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, but I think far more pervasive in crypto. This is also why crypto will keep experiencing popping bubbles until it finds enough use cases with actual advantageous compared to existing solutions.
I'm saying, if you dig beyond the hype machine, you'll find plenty of hard core tech and tech adopters that you found in previous platforms, like PC and internet.
OP apparently cares about the underlying technical details. I'm saying if he/she looks deeper, they'll find what they're looking for.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-al...
There were tokens (Colored Coins) and Dexs (Omni) running on Bitcoin before ETH was launched.
Colored coins were a neat idea but completely impractical in practice. Hence, why they never took off. Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.
This is plain false. It says so in big letters, right at the top of their website:
>That's what powers the Tether network.
Tether has issued tokens on the Omni protocol, Ethereum, and other networks. The blockchains and amounts are listed here:
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
>Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.
My original point was that weak smart contract features on Bitcoin motivated Ethereum's creation (Vitalik's name is on the Colored Coins whitepaper). This is in contrast to GGP's proposition that Ethereum had underrated novelty.
I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the community here is so virulently against what I have devoted my life to. It’s very sad. My conclusions are numerous, but I think it’s death by a thousand cuts.
I'm negative about Bitcoins utility.
I'm very, very positive on the utility of systems like EVM and their valuation over the long term.
I'm still negative about mainstream adoption of direct usage. It's complicated and too easy to make unrecoverable mistakes.
I believe a lot of the criticism on HN is valid and deserved within certain contexts. Some contexts, like block chain VMs, don't come up much here at all.
Crypto is exactly the movement to give power back to the people (for a while at least) its sad to hear such a negative attudide from a otherwise forward thinking community
If you never got lost, you might not see the value of GPS.
Others don't need to get lost, but they are better at seeing the economic implications like increased efficiency when navigating roads, waterways, airspace, ...
Instead, the disbeliefers consider it expensive, unecological, and related company stocks as in a bubble.
Let's say you're trying to launch rabbit token that's going to be the next only-fans replacement. You have a ton of motivation to hard sell your product and for this reason people are going to be equally not so exited and will have their guards up. I think it'd be naive to expect a OpenSource launch like happy reaction...
So it's 1) bad guys in that industry that have the wrong motivation giving the industry a partial deserved bad name.
2) A recognition that people espousing a technology are not purely talking about those technologies but have a vested interest in those assets having a positive view in other people's perception.
Ofcourse it comes with the territory. Like if a lawyer says, wonder "why is my profession, not universally loved?"
"Its just the 80% of the corrupt politicians giving the rest of the 20% a bad name."
Not passing judgement or moral judgement but I don't think crypto is going to shake-off the suspicion for quite a while.
This is because there is a knowledge gap between the masses and the people that know how things work. Till you have that gap there will be opportunists that will want to cash out on the knowledge arbitrage.
Its actually not just with crypto. Look at products that talk about AI enhanced this and AI enhanced that. Those guys are viewed with suspicion as well. Just slap-on an AI label to your PPT and bang your product is now cutting edge. Everyone see through that BS..
Jokes aside, How do you compare an ICO to cash? Its more closer to an IPO process.. if you started allowing listings in the stock market backed solely by 5-6 nice LinkedIn profiles and some 'white-paper' I'm sure the exact same people will list their companies in the stock exchanges as well.. Unlike an IPO, there is no vetting process, there are no mandatory disclosures or oversight.
That is freedom from central control, sure. But, the cost of freedom is the risk that gets loaded on the part of the investors. This gap is wide open for people that are thus inclined to cheat and make a quick buck. I am not berating crypto, but, I have a lot of confidence in criminals going after easy money that doesn't have too many down sides.
Will this lead to better returns for Ethereum over Bitcoin medium- or long-term, eventually? When will that switchover happen (if not already)?
The most popular crypto mediums are telegram and discord. Twitter is the social media of choice. Reddit has some decent subreddits but it isn’t the primary place.
This community is based on trust. Trust is earned through contributing code, knowledge, effort, etc. If you join in the bull market, stick around through the bear to show you are serious. Etc.
This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain found some straws to hold on to. It could have been one of those millions go-nowhere projects just as likely.
I think there are legit use cases for it, but ultimately, we are still far from mass adoption and without the crazy monetary gains, I don't even believe anyone would talk about blockchain these days. Technology wise, it's not a strong value proposition. We can do pretty much everything without blockchain. Yeah there are some cases where trustlessness helps, but once this problem would become serious enough, it's not hard to build blockchain technology. It basically follows directly from basic principles defined by the problem. And the fact that everyone "thinks blockchain is new", already proves that the problem actually doesn't really exist.
Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee.
Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example.
Even if the crypto market is unstable, the last years it generally went up while holding USD or EUR basically was a loss game valued against ex. CHF.
I personally cant imagine a world without blockchains anymore.
Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.
Let me give you a real world example. You buy something for $10. Then ethereums $5 fee sounds crazy compared to 3% or so for creditcard or paypal. However transfer $1000 and those 5$ suddenly sound a lot better than the 30$ the creditcard or paypal charges.
I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though!
There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road.
Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters.
I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)
If I could move my savings into a digital currency provided by a central bank I'd do it today. Bonus points if it can be stored in something like special drawing rights rather than euros.
The Ethereum docs are pretty great if you want to learn more: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ .
Both were crucial in laying down the technical and theoretical foundation of Ethereum.
Gavin is working on other things now. Vitalik is not the thought-leader he was in the early days (which is a good thing as he’s not a SPoF and decision making is more decentralized)
Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow N computers to work on pieces of N subproblems in parallel and use the state trie as a blackboard for syncing/linearization between those subproblems. (The actual heavy computation would have to occur outside the chain, in oracle sibling processes, but they could at least load their binaries from the state trie. Think of it like AI bot-clients cooperatively playing a MOO where users can define object code.) Essentially, Ethereum is a distributed database with Turing-complete CRDTs.
Mind you, nobody’s using Ethereum that way, but that doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t natively capable of being used that way. (Just like, say, oldschool fixed-function-pipeline GPUs could be used as GPGPUs, if you could translate your linear-algebra problem into an equivalent scene-geometry rendering problem.)
ETH seemed to have a higher tolerance for introducing the trade offs of Oracles than Bitcoin.
But without Oracles, the overlay networks you speak of couldn’t compute any meaningful logic without requiring an absurd amount of resources from the main net.
If you’re making a distributed computer, it’s like you’re scaling silicon circuits up to the network level. So any operation using those circuits will of course be more expensive. That means that many computations on the main net are cost prohibitive.
I would like to learn more about the trade-offs and risks of a blockchain relying on Oracles as a source of truth.
But to directly address your statement, in general, oracles as a concept are “trustworthy” iff 1. they rely solely on public information as input; or 2. are run by a centralized entity, which is the same entity that has sole ownership of the resource being modified by the oracle; or 3. the system is built such that any oracles can submit a cryptographic proof of X, and as soon as any oracle does so, the condition is triggered.
Re: case 1, just as you can re-compute the transactions of a blockchain to arrive at the same consensus state, you should be able to grab a copy of the oracle’s code yourself and run it in a proper “context”, whereupon it will re-assert all the same transactions it ever originally asserted to the chain. This requires that all APIs the oracle deduces its assertions from have historical-data variants.
Re: case 2, the oracle is basically just standing in for a human. If you trust a human to do X, then you trust an oracle to do X.
Re: case 3, this is what on-chain prediction markets do. Rather than the win-condition for a prediction being something a human watches for and then enters, many private individuals (bettors) are incentivized to each have their own oracle running that watches for the win-condition however they like, and then — as soon as that condition attains — proves to the smart contract that the condition attains. The smart contract doesn’t have to care which oracle submitted the proof, only that there is now such a proof.
Turing completeness is literally a bug in such system. It’s an anti-feature. You shouldn’t want it. It’s a model of evaluation where halting problem exists.
But hey, it’s a nice buzzword for script kiddies. Great foundation for financial system, right? :)
If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that puts it in a great spot for adoption.
I’ll stick with deterministic bitcoin script, thankyouverymuch.
If the number of steps is specified in unary, then the problem is NP-complete: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html
Now that HN knows that you're so opinionated about the tech stack of your bank - can you detail down what type of infrastructure your current bank has, and why it's so good? Or is that just something you assume since you basically have zero knowledge about what traditional finance uses as back-ends?
It doesn't really matter what backend my bank uses because there's regulatory backstops (eg. FDIC) to protect me if something goes wrong. The same can't be said for crytpo.
You really should visit https://ethereum.org/
Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its potential. This month a layer-2 solution called optimism will launch a virtual machine called OVM (optimism vm) on top of ethereum smart contracts that can solve most of the current scalability issues (and there are other solutions being tested in parallel: zkrollups...). We are also starting to realize the potential of Dex and Defi (distributed exchanges and finance), DAOs (distributed organizations), NFT (non-fungible tokens) and a bunch of things more that 7 years after are appearing out of thin air. So even if Ethereum wasn't updated at all (although, we probably all agree that PoW is not environmental friendly and should be replaced with a better alternative: PoS) it could still thrive in the long term thanks to its most fundamental design choices (turing-complete...). I am truly amazed by this technology and Vitalik. I wish I knew a little bit more of the underlying fundamentals. What do you think?