The Ethereum Paradox

[monsterer]

I don't think that's even possible because their stated goal seems to be a general purpose "world computer".  

I haven't seen that quote in their marketing spiel. For sure, it is not a 'world computer' and any claim to the contrary is delusional; however, it does have very specific applications in programmable-actions-on-transaction-receipt. That does open a lot of doors for developers who might have otherwise needed to create their own blockchain.

[enet]

In order to even think about touching Ethereum, you're basically required to ask yourself, is Vitalik an order of magnitude smarter than Satoshi?

You can evaluate the claims much more easily. You don't have to be a genius, one can ask some basic questions and proceed from there. Sound reasoning is in short supply in this area, in any case.

• look at the code, it's open source. is it well documented, does it make sense, what do the changes look like, etc.
• read the references papers, etc.
• look at occurring transactions, number of "dapps", etc.

As far as I know there are no dapps in operation (perhaps some can correct with some actual data). Vitalik recently tweeted an example of the best use cases, and they are all no in production. I have yet to see someone demonstrate an actual practical use se, live in code. All the tutorials I've seen where about hypotheticals. And if you look at talks where they talk about the worlds operating system, it's the same. It is all theory. For example the most basic use case is registering a name. The DNS example was used always as the most simple. Yet it is most unlikely ethereum can replace DNS and its not used. The same with the claims about "web3", "IoT",... all claims about some magical future.

FWIW I received the whitepaper in December 2013 I read the paper for 10 minutes and concluded it will not work, based on the fundamental datastructure of a tree (GHOST trees). I've looked at the code but can't figure out what it does, and didn't spend much time on it. On the upside the project familiarised a lot of people about the concept of smart contracts. It's hard for me to see where the 400M$ valuation should come from, but as I remember Litecoin peaked at 500M$ so its not all that unusual.

I think it is much more productive to think things through without constant appeal to science fiction. What could these systems actually do, and how could they be useful? Then in terms of implementation that's more complex, but one hint here. Bitcoin implements a partial order of transactions and SC's need total order. It is not that hard to come up with some models of event ordering.

This is an interesting post, and shows more the direction, although I don't agree with NS on ethereum.
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

[TPTB_need_war]

The legal case is being documented here and now. Keep on digging YOUR grave (as you are now bringing yourself into culpability as a promoter).

Weren't you also a promoter of Dash? You like the jail time coming...

OK...   this is getting out of hand...   take a FUCKIN' CHILL PILL and go re-read my posts...   if you still feel as strongly afterwards...   then you can just GO FUCK YOURSELF!!!  

Your problem will not be with me, but rather the community filing a legal case and the SEC action that might follow a case.

Just continue promoting ETH if you feel smug...

[TPTB_need_war]

Your problem will not be with me, but rather the community filing a legal case and the SEC action that might follow a case.

Just continue promoting ETH if you feel smug...

Or you're just having a bad day.

I'm rather enjoying this actually.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30?context=3

[TPTB_need_war]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30?context=3

Another reason one might imagine that perhaps Vitalik could be corrupted to participate in the pump by emphasizing Casper vaporware and hiding the fact they were not close to solving the fundamental technological issues. And yet they were running out of money (but not now if they can sustain these higher prices for ETH and/or have sold a lot of ETH on this price rise ... in either case selling ETH to bag holders).

So one might imagine perhaps the insiders have cleverly realized they could control Vitalik so they would be able to cash out.

The professionals play these games very strategically. You bag holders have no chance against them (unless of course you sell early enough and get out the door before the rest of the bag holders). Note I am not short ETH, but I did play this game strategically also. I waited for ETH to reach a nosebleed price before I started to reveal the truth more aggressively. This is a warning to these professionals (hucksters) to not fuck with my coin when I release it.

Edit: I have just challenged Vitalik directly:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czx5jej

Edit#2: Vitalik admits they've been selling on the pump (in violation of escrow?). And note he mentions raising monthly budget so more money in their pockets (see how this works, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine!):

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30

[r0ach]

It's interesting going somewhere like Ethereum Reddit.  It's a place full of professional software devs who should be able to figure out things discussed in this thread, but they honestly do not care one bit.  They aren't worried about the underlying aspects of Ethereum like it's consensus mechanism, scalability, or execution costs.  They think, hey, somebody else will fix that.  They have a laser beam focus and only care about what can be created inside the VM.  

Instead of being an Android developer, they want to be an Ethereum developer, imagining millions of different apps blasting off per second controlling every device in the world that uses a transistor.  Too bad the current state of crypto is attempting to figure out how to do the most primitive things imaginable in a reliable, secure way, like a time stamp.  These guys have skipped the basics and have gone straight to making video games on-chain.  Soon, I think Vitalik will catch Eth fever from his subjects and attempt to release Mortal Kombat Ethereum edition himself.

[TPTB_need_war]

Bitcoin implements a [unambiguous via longest chain rule] partial order of transactions and Smart Contracts's need total order. It is not that hard to come up with some models of event ordering [that show that total ordering is required].

This is an interesting post, and shows more the direction, although I don't agree with NS[Nick Szabo] on ethereum.
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

This is another essence of my technological point which I have stated previously as follows:

* computers are electronic elements with billions of components. how does such a machine achieve consistent state? see: Shannon and von Neumann and the early days of computing (maybe even Zuse)

* partitions, blocks, DAG's, .... all this stuff generally confuses the most fundamental notions. after investigating this matter for a very long time, I can assure you that almost nobody understands this.

I can assure you I've understood the point deeply about the impossibility of absolute global consistency in open systems (and a perfectly closed system is useless, i.e. static). Go read my debates with dmbarbour (David Barbour) from circa 2010.

Laymen let me attempt to explain this to you.

Putting Smart Contract data on a global block chain means that as those contracts interact, it is impossible to prove that the order that the contracts are run is commutative and that the contracts will halt.

This is well known because Turing Completeness (the ability to run any logic) requires unbounded recursion. This is the essence of the famous Halting Problem.

All you laymen need to know is that Ethereum and Nick Szabo propose that which is impossible. I told Charles Hoskinson this in Skype when he was contemplating forming Ethereum with Vitalik (I guess before it became a bigger thing with many others involved).

Ethereum responded by inventing gas, so that scripts would halt by failing once their gas is exhausted. This is horrific because it means the state machine is put into an indeterminate state. Indeterminism manifests as errors and chaotic machines that do random actions. On top of that, Vitalik recently admitted in one of the videos I watched that they know Ethereum violates commutativity (and they have no real solution).

WATCH IT BLOW UP FOLKS!

Nick "Satoshi" Szabo has just made another huge blunder by not realizing the above, as enet correctly points out. So please stop telling me Szabo is at Satoshi's level. Not even close.

[TPTB_need_war]

It's interesting going somewhere like Ethereum Reddit.  It's a place full of professional software devs who should be able to figure out things discussed in this thread, but they honestly do not care one bit.  They aren't worried about the underlying aspects of Ethereum like it's consensus mechanism, scalability, or execution costs.  They think, hey, somebody else will fix that.  They have a laser beam focus and only care about what can be created inside the VM.  

Instead of being an Android developer, they want to be an Ethereum developer, imagining millions of different apps blasting off per second controlling every device in the world that uses a transistor.  Too bad the current state of crypto is attempting to figure out how to do the most primitive things imaginable in a reliable, secure way, like a time stamp.  These guys have skipped the basics and have gone straight to making video games on-chain.  Soon, I think Vitalik will catch Eth fever from his subjects and attempt to release Mortal Kombat Ethereum edition himself.

n00bs seem to be oblivious of the distinction:

Are there any useful smart contracts that working already?

Yeah there are quite a few already live on the Ethereum network

Check the DappsList: https://dappslist.com/dapps

It's obvious that most are still in development though, as this is still completely new technology

These are my favourites so far:

https://app.augur.net/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/456abv/could_i_write_a_ponzi_scheme/

Those haven't been scaled yet and they can't be because Ethereum can't be scaled decentralized. Moreover Ethereum will blow up because it violates the fact that the speed-of-light isn't infinite.

n00bs are easily fooled by what they don't understand about the technology. "Oh I see Dapps, therefor Ethereum works". Sorry that is not correct.

[Cryptotraider16]

Can Etherium price ever drop down to 1$?
Is still aprox 3 mio etherium need to be mined?

[Dekker3D]

The price went down a bit, not sure though if there'll be another push or will it continue to go back to where it belong. I'm not seeing the reality in the price increase so there must be some group behind it.

[YarkoL]

Laymen let me attempt to explain this to you.

Putting Smart Contract data on a global block chain means that as those contracts interact, it is impossible to prove that the order that the contracts are run is commutative and that the contracts will halt.

I'm not sure where commutativity applies here. Contracts call public methods of
other contracts, so it is an ordered sequence.

Ethereum responded by inventing gas, so that scripts would halt by failing once their gas is exhausted. This is horrific because it means the state machine is put into an indeterminate state.

If there is not enough gas, EVM is supposed to roll back to the pre-execution state.
It is the responsibility of the caller script to take precautionary measures.

[monsterer]

Ethereum responded by inventing gas, so that scripts would halt by failing once their gas is exhausted. This is horrific because it means the state machine is put into an indeterminate state.

If there is not enough gas, EVM is supposed to roll back to the pre-execution state.
It is the responsibility of the caller script to take precautionary measures.

Right. That's not why Ethereum is indeterminate - within one single block things are fine. The problem is across multiple blocks - if execution is dependant on block order, orphans and re-orgs can cause big problems.

[sanas]

ether mining is still all GPU and they claim to be ASIC proof... i wouldnt expect Chinese exchanges to list ether until there's some ether mining in China.

Where do you think most of the Ethereum mining is based? Mostly outside China? I think the Chinese has cheap electricity.

[TPTB_need_war]

Laymen let me attempt to explain this to you.

Putting Smart Contract data on a global block chain means that as those contracts interact, it is impossible to prove that the order that the contracts are run is commutative and that the contracts will halt.

I'm not sure where commutativity applies here. Contracts call public methods of
other contracts, so it is an ordered sequence.

You've admitted to me before that your knowledge of Computer Science is limited. And your reply here makes that obvious.

It would be more truthful to yourself and others if you phrased your lack of knowledge as a question than as a statement. I am more respectful when answering questions than when n00bs effectively are slandering the facts I have written when they write false statements as you have done.

Why don't you go learn Computer Science at the university before you expect that you should even be capable of knowing "where commutativity applies here".

Making methods public has nothing to with the consistent ordering of transactions amongst all full nodes. If you had even understood my Decentralization thread, you would have understood that I explained that synchrony can't exist in distributed systems.

Please don't make me repeat myself. Just because you don't comprehend Computer Science, doesn't mean it is my responsibility to cram 4 years of education in a forum post for you.

You may feel I am not being nice, but how nice is it that you cram your ignorance down my throat forcing me to teach you what you didn't learn.

Ethereum responded by inventing gas, so that scripts would halt by failing once their gas is exhausted. This is horrific because it means the state machine is put into an indeterminate state.

If there is not enough gas, EVM is supposed to roll back to the pre-execution state.
It is the responsibility of the caller script to take precautionary measures.

The state of the script doesn't exist in isolation because again there is no global ordering and no global synchrony in our universe. Rolling back the different arbitrary partial orderings results in an indeterminate state, i.e. random disorder and divergence.

The block chain becomes one big tape in a Turing machine... please go learn Computer Science...

I think Ethereum and Bitcoin are complementary. One is a currency, the other is a currency as well as a trading platform.

One sort of works (Bitcoin) and the other one can't possibly work and is a lie.

Do you mean the bitcoin will work and the Ethereum does not work in its present form? Will further development change that?

Ethereum can't be fixed. No general purpose programmable smart contract block chain can be fixed. One might be able to design some very limited hard-coded contracts that are carefully studied, but even these  are very likely to produce the fundamental errors around commutativity, deadlocks, and other issues that plague distributed systems. It is simply impossible to have different people coding scripts and not have them blow up in pile of disorder.

The universe will not tolerate a total ordering, else our universe would not exist because the future would be predetermined by the past. Or stated another way, the speed-of-light would be infinite and the past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal point.

Bitcoin's scaling problem has potential technical solutions that aren't perfect but may work well enough in practice. However, the politics around Bitcoin suggests to me that the solution will come in an altcoin not in Bitcoin, but we will have to wait and see on the outcome.

Note the math wizard behind Synereo (Greg Meredith) has proposed a design for contracts that is enforced by social engineering (the cascade of individualized actions/partial orderings are expected to adhere to some social function) rather than by an enforced global ordering. I have my doubts about the applicability of this idea and it is certainly no where near what people mean now when they say "smart contract" on a global ledger.

[YarkoL]

Laymen let me attempt to explain this to you.

Putting Smart Contract data on a global block chain means that as those contracts interact, it is impossible to prove that the order that the contracts are run is commutative and that the contracts will halt.

I'm not sure where commutativity applies here. Contracts call public methods of
other contracts, so it is an ordered sequence.

You've admitted to me before that your knowledge of Computer Science is limited. And your reply here makes that obvious.

It would be more truthful to yourself and others if you phrased your lack of knowledge as a question than as a statement. I am more respectful when answering questions than when n00bs effectively are slandering the facts I have written when they write false statements as you have done.

Well... I don't think I was "slandering facts" or that either of the sentences
I wrote was false. The first one of them simply expresses my uncertainity of where
the commutativity problem comes from, and the execution of the calls does happen
in order.

But never mind. I'll promise that next time when I dare to open my mouth
in your presence it will be in a trembling, hushed voice with my garments rent
and covered with dust.

Right. That's not why Ethereum is indeterminate - within one single block things are fine. The problem is across multiple blocks - if execution is dependant on block order, orphans and re-orgs can cause big problems.

Thanks. I think I now see where the potential problem
is and so I have guidelines for further investigation.

[TPTB_need_war]

Can Etherium price ever drop down to 1$?
Is still aprox 3 mio etherium need to be mined?

One might imagine the price can drop to $0 if Ethereum runs out of funding (i.e. if they can't sell their ETH at high prices) and/or the speculators wake up and realize that Ethereum has been a grand lie.

[TPTB_need_war]

But never mind. I'll promise that next time when I dare to open my mouth
in your presence it will be in a trembling, hushed voice with my garments rent
and covered with dust.

I don't want you to stop asking questions. I want you to stop asserting statements that you don't know enough about. Because readers misinterpret your assertions as facts. Which then forces me to untangle the mess you made (since you were replying to what I asserted).

I am amicable as I was to you in the past many times, but I have a limited time and resources. I simply ask you to respect my limitations as I will respect yours.

Right. That's not why Ethereum is indeterminate - within one single block things are fine. The problem is across multiple blocks - if execution is dependant on block order, orphans and re-orgs can cause big problems.

Thanks. I think I now see where the potential problem
is and so I have guidelines for further investigation.

monsterer is wrong again. Even within the block there is no way to attain commutativity of ordering. Any particular choice of arbitrary orderings of script executions for a block result may achieve a different result for contracts than another ordering (unless the scripts are invariant to ordering but that basically means the scripts can do nothing). That is the definition of indeterminism.

[r0ach]

Now this is really interesting, for months on end, maybe a year, there's been automated bots spamming the Bitcoin speculation forum with things like "BTC PONZI SCHEME, SELL EVERYTHING, COIN GOING TO ZERO".  They create dozens of accounts per day with 5 jibberish letters in the username.  Even in obvious trades where you can easily tell the price is going to increase and you should get in on a long trade, they still want the price to go down, so I'm sitting here thinking, wow, these are some kind of annoying government sponsored Cointelpro/JIDF bots.

Just now the same bots started posting "Sell BTC Long Eth".  Even when the people running these bots could easily make money on BTC, they did not want to, they only wanted BTC to go down, yet now they want the price of Eth to go up when it's clearly dumb to buy in right now.  Very fucking fishy.  Large Eth holders seem to think crashing BTC to nothingness would actually be beneficial to them.

Here's one of the accts doing it, his last post was already deleted:  
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=769120

[TPTB_need_war]

Eth whales seem to think crashing BTC to nothingness would actually be beneficial to them.

That has been their theme in several threads, that Bitcoin is too limited and doomed by a scalecopalyse so therefor buy ETH. They don't tell you that ETH was doomed from the first time I spoke to Charles in Skype before Ethereum was formed and advised him none it would work. The lure of money is too much for some people. I like money too, but only if I produce something worth while. I also love the satisfaction of creating something real that helps people. These fucking scammers really boil my blood. This forum feels like it is infested with scammers and/or really naive speculators.

What happened to the ideology of Bitcoin and creating a better world   How can these people look in the mirror and respect themselves  

What happened to meritocracy. I still remember the first time I earned $5 cutting a very thick and large lawn at maybe age 12 or thereabouts. I worked hard physical labor in my youth to earn money. I worked hard programming in my adult life to earn money for real products that were used by millions of users. These scammers take $millions for doing nothing useful and sip their lattes.

All of you who bought ETH are contributing to this unethical cesspool.