Also, the idea that Ethereum at $100 implies this amazing decentralized future is simply wrong, because that also implies that Ethereum at $1 didn't mean anything. Instead his argument should center around the many different businesses, products and experiments being built on the platform.
What you're trying to do is define a space so that you can capture an outsized share of the attention and therefore the financial value from it. Plenty of people name spaces without needing that capture.
Insufficient political radicalism?
Sorry if I don't trust the "small group of legends" more than the government.
Even something banally simple as "if such and such win the world cup deposit earnings there" cannot be 100% trustless. How does one overcome this problem?
I don't think smart contracts can overcome this problem while remaining 100% trustless.
There is no cloud, just other people's computers.
Smart contracts can make trust relationships explicit.
By using a blockchain system, you entrust a network - which you may have no control over - with application state. If you rely on such a network, you indirectly also rely on the network infrastructure and operators' social and economic incentives.
Do you know about http://erights.org ? They are good - great - on terminology.
1. The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you lose the millions of dollars as the DAO did after it passed audits.
2. Competing implementations of consensus code in different languages greatly increases breakdown of consensus. (more millions have been lost over this, and it created a fork at about 10 percent the value of the old chain.)
3. You can buy things with bitcoin. What can you buy with ETH? If you can't buy anything with a currency, it's not a currency.
Thus, human resolved chain rollbacks? Check. Failed consensus between implementations? Check. Passed audit yet totally failed smart contracts? Check. No place to spend them? Check. New tokens given out all the time forever? Check.
Every dollar that goes into bad ideas is taken directly from the good ideas. Smart contracts can never be smart until oracles are solved. Oracles aren't solved. ETH has all the technical odds and history stacked against it, however some how, the people that bought them aren't dumping.
There's a saying that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
The Halting Problem states that you can't create a general purpose algorithm for predicting what an arbitrary program in a Turing Complete language will do. This is very different.
You can look at some programs with your mind, and tell quite clearly what they'll do.
You can't write a _program_ that will look at other programs, and always give a correct answer.
This is the one that really sticks out to me. What do people need any of this for? I think they did a fine job pitching the value of smart contract / blockchain technology. But why do I, or a bank, or society need anything beyond those?
The tech may be useful, but what 99% of these discussions come down to is whether you think a decentralized currency and disintermediated payments system have value. I don't really see the need for the vast majority of society to have the former in the long run, and I think the latter is actively harmful and impractical. Like you pointed out, you're inevitably going to have these code failures, disagreements, etc. Those are basic failures of any human-designed and human-negotiated system. As far as those go, I still prefer to wager my business on the time-worn technology of English common law.
As far as the tech goes, yes, banks should get behind some of this. Their infrastructure is garbage and could well benefit from associations of private chains and the like.
I can write an app for managing a business, fund it, and then walk away forever. Ethereum is a platform for hosting autonomous corporations.
So it makes more sense to view it as a commodity.
While others have pointed out that this is wrong, it's worth amplifying: Turing machines are deterministic. You can run the contract locally and observe how it behaves, and it will behave the same way in the same environment elsewhere. If this wasn't the case, you couldn't have consensus at all.
> 2. Competing implementations of consensus code in different languages greatly increases breakdown of consensus. (more millions have been lost over this, and it created a fork at about 10 percent the value of the old chain.)
The DAO hard fork had nothing to do with a consensus failure. There's been one single short-lived mainnet fork due to a consensus issue, which was quickly resolved with - to the best of my knowledge - no financial loss.
"Deterministic" != "feasible to reason about halting states for all inputs." Running it locally to see how it behaves for a handful of inputs is definitely not sufficient for claiming that the code behaves correctly (i.e. is "secure").
Recall that people lost money in the DAO not because they didn't test how the DAO behaved when they sent their Ether to it. They lost money because someone discovered the contract as implemented did not behave the way it was expected and advertised to behave. Had it been possible to reason about the DAO's halting states for all possible inputs, the re-entrance bug would have been caught and fixed before the DAO was released.
The "Halting Problem" is a red herring here - eth transactions are technically not Turing complete since they automatically halt when they run out of the finite supply of ether attached to the transaction. Saying that ethereum isn't feasible because of the halting problem is like saying cars aren't feasible because an object in motion stays in motion - there are countless practical ways to manage it, and if nothing else stops you, in the end you'll definitely run out of gas.
Did you ever consider that the currency part of cryptocurrency was a misnomer and has nothing to do with the value of the asset?
And note I'm trying to be technology agnostic as we build out the VC firm and the Internet of Agreements organisation - I am not of the opinion any of these systems are going to scale cleanly. I think we will need to go back and build it from scratch on an abstraction like pi calculus and work it up from there, not try to accelerate the Proof of Work systems by increments.
Only time will tell, though. I'm flexible on this.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/854271590804140033
I doubt this is true. When Bitcoin came out I think a lot of people realized a whole new game was afoot. An autonomous ledger was demonstrated and the race was on to create the autonomous everything else. An autonomous application host was the obvious brass ring, and whoever got it seemed assured to spark a market at least as big as Bitcoin.
I can't imagine Vitalik was thinking anything other than "if this works, it will be huge." That's a big if, but I think the stakes were clear.
Much practice. I am old (45)
Of course, we will look back on this in 5 years and think $100 ETHER was cheap!
You could buy now and dump it when it hits $900 - $1000. It will.
As far as I am concerned, the current iteration of *coin are just pump and dump basically.
"Just pump and dump" implies you don't believe legitimate uses underlie the coin.
This is interesting. Where Bitcoin seems to reward miners based on solving NP hard problems, Etherium is just handed out randomly?
