The Ethereum Paradox

[Come-from-Beyond]

The algorithm for the "memory hard" hash function isn't going to allow you to implement it with a non-sequential architecture. The parallelism that is attained is to due to reducing memory latency by coalescing memory accesses, or by trading memory accesses for increased computation to maximize the consumption of available computational resources (e.g. on the GPU).

1. (Ideal) ANNs can do super-Turing computations.
2. ANNs don't have the memory bottleneck.
3. ANNs can be simulated on FPGAs.

Ergo: FPGAs can do hashing of such functions efficiently.

Or am I wrong?

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[TPTB_need_war]

The algorithm for the "memory hard" hash function isn't going to allow you to implement it with a non-sequential architecture. The parallelism that is attained is to due to reducing memory latency by coalescing memory accesses, or by trading memory accesses for increased computation to maximize the consumption of available computational resources (e.g. on the GPU).

1. (Ideal) ANNs can do super-Turing computations.
2. ANNs don't have the memory bottleneck.
3. ANNs can be simulated on FPGAs.

Ergo: FPGAs can do hashing of such functions efficiently.

Or am I wrong?

I am too sleepy to learn enough about super-Turing computation and alternatives to von Neumann to attempt an answer right now.

The memory hard hash functions are designed to sufficiently randomized such that there is no alternative to reading the memory locations sequentially.

There are also asymmetric proof-of-work such as tromp's Cuckcoo and others which are based on NP hard problems. These may be susceptible to other algorithms on other architectures. This may be a very deep topic, certainly more than I can muster right now sleepy.

What you say tromp?

[TPTB_need_war]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

[tromp]

There are also asymmetric proof-of-work such as tromp's Cuckcoo and others which are based on NP hard problems.

Cuckoo Cycle is based on finding cycles in undirected graphs.
While the latter is obviously in P (and thus not NP hard, unless P=NP),
the full graph description is exponentially larger than the 128-bit siphash key that defines it.

But while the "is there a cycle for this key" version is in NP\P (again assuming NP != P),
it almost certainly is not NP hard (that is, you cannot reduce all other NP problems to it).

I really fail to see how artificial neural networks (ANN) are applicable to proof-of-work.
Certainly, no reasonable sized ANN can compute a memory-hard function.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Certainly, no reasonable sized ANN can compute a memory-hard function.

This requires to be proven. If an ideal ANN can solve Halting problem, then a real-world ANN still ought to do amazing things.

[BitconAssociation]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

Sorta working for BTC, no?
BRB, off to the ponzi sub of this forum, teach intrepid investors about unsustainable business models.

[monsterer]

Certainly, no reasonable sized ANN can compute a memory-hard function.

This requires to be proven. If an ideal ANN can solve Halting problem, then a real-world ANN still ought to do amazing things.

Why would you use a neural network to solve a problem which doesn't require learning? Surely you should be more concerned with ASICs?

[Come-from-Beyond]

Why would you use a neural network to solve a problem which doesn't require learning? Surely you should be more concerned with ASICs?

ASICs can also be used once a good configuration is found on a FPGA. ANN don't have memory bottleneck, this is why they are superior to memory-hard tasks.

[tromp]

ASICs can also be used once a good configuration is found on a FPGA. ANN don't have memory bottleneck, this is why they are superior to memory-hard tasks.

My abacus also doesn't have a memory bottleneck.
That doesn't make it superior to memory-hard tasks:-(

[Come-from-Beyond]

My abacus also doesn't have a memory bottleneck.
That doesn't make it superior to memory-hard tasks:-(

Good analogy, looks like I was wrong all the way.

[TPTB_need_war]

There are also asymmetric proof-of-work such as tromp's Cuckcoo and others which are based on NP hard problems.

Cuckoo Cycle is based on finding cycles in undirected graphs.
While the latter is obviously in P (and thus not NP hard, unless P=NP),
the full graph description is exponentially larger than the 128-bit siphash key that defines it.

But while the "is there a cycle for this key" version is in NP\P (again assuming NP != P),
it almost certainly is not NP hard (that is, you cannot reduce all other NP problems to it).

It was 3 hours past my sleeping time and so I just wrote NP as a placeholder, because honestly I really couldn't reload the complexity classes in my head last night.

My point is that the Cuckoo Cycle is verifiable in polynomial time (i.e. fast) but apparently a brute force search for a solution is slower, which is afaik is what makes it an asymmetric (fast to validate, slow to compute) proof-of-work. Thus is it EXPTIME and not P? (just asking and haven't really looked at the Cuckcoo Cycle algorithm lately and I have forgotten it since I last did)

As for the major unsolved problem of mathematics and computer science of whether P = NP, I think perhaps I outlined conceptually how to prove they are not equal. Intending to come back to that in the future when I have free time.

[TPTB_need_war]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

Sorta working for BTC, no?

Huh Despite having become by now arguably controlled by the Chinese mining cartel, Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized and I can spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally.

[BitconAssociation]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

Sorta working for BTC, no?

Huh Despite having become by now arguably controlled by the Chinese mining cartel, Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized and I can spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally.

>Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized
Yeah, way back when you couldn't
>spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally.
Don't dwell on the past. It's over.

Billed as noninflationary -> inflating @ 10 -12%/yr
Billed as virtually instant -> sometimes virtually instant
Billed as virtually free -> fees growing and are guesswork
Billed as money 2.0, the next world currency -> 3tps tops; not enough for a suburban shopping mall
Billed as p2p cash -> bank2bank sidechain settlement layer.

So yeah, with the only unique use cases being ransomware, child porn, online gambling & DNMs, I'd say fancy poker chips; speculative value only (regardless of teh backstory du jour).

[TPTB_need_war]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

Sorta working for BTC, no?

Huh Despite having become by now arguably controlled by the Chinese mining cartel, Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized and I can spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally.

>Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized
Yeah, way back when you couldn't
>spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally :-

Billed as noninflationary -> inflating @ 10 -12%/yr
Billed as virtually instant -> sometimes virtually instant
Billed as virtually free -> fees growing and are guesswork
Billed as money 2.0, the next world currency -> 3tps tops; not enough for a suburban shopping mall
Billed as p2p cash -> bank2bank sidechain settlement layer.

So yeah, with the only unique use cases being ransomware, child porn, online gambling & DNMs, I'd say fancy poker chips; speculative value only (regardless of teh backstory du jour).

And compared to what? Ethereum with 0 users versus Bitcoin's 1 million users.

Yes Bitcoin has stalled. We all know that. But the shit offered so far to replace it is useless/flawed lies and hype.

Bitcoin fulfilled a significant portion of its promise. Enough such that we now all have a crypto unit-of-account to trade from.

I of course agree that Satoshi hyped Bitcoin as a less debased gold, which is bullshit. But it worked! We now have the crypto unit-of-account to trade from.

[BitconAssociation]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

Sorta working for BTC, no?

Huh Despite having become by now arguably controlled by the Chinese mining cartel, Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized and I can spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally.

>Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized
Yeah, way back when you couldn't
>spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally :-

Billed as noninflationary -> inflating @ 10 -12%/yr
Billed as virtually instant -> sometimes virtually instant
Billed as virtually free -> fees growing and are guesswork
Billed as money 2.0, the next world currency -> 3tps tops; not enough for a suburban shopping mall
Billed as p2p cash -> bank2bank sidechain settlement layer.

So yeah, with the only unique use cases being ransomware, child porn, online gambling & DNMs, I'd say fancy poker chips; speculative value only (regardless of teh backstory du jour).

And compared to what? Ethereum with 0 users versus Bitcoin's 1 million users.

Yes Bitcoin has stalled. We all know that. But the shit offered so far to replace it is useless/flawed lies and hype.

Bitcoin fulfilled a significant portion of its promise. Enough such that we now all have a crypto unit-of-account to trade from.

A unit of account that fluctuates as much as BTC is about as useful as ...let's just say it's not useful.
Bitcoin, outside of DNMs, was always a purely speculative commodity, a way to gamble online without the associated social stigma, tell [overly trusting] friends you're a currencies trader
Still an interesting laundering vehicle, but that's not gonna last more than a year or two. Less, if there's serious growth.
TL;DR: Bitcoin, like house dealers and cool bands, was great when it was obscure. Success just doesn't become it

[fartbags]

Ethereum 1.0 sucks. Ethereum 2.0 is being worked on right now. I have high hopes for it.

[Ubertroco]

Ethereum 1.0 sucks. Ethereum 2.0 is being worked on right now. I have high hopes for it.

Exactly. ETH 1 is just a pump and dump machine. ETH 2 will be the real deal.

[TPTB_need_war]

More reasons Ethereum can't scale decentralized:

Check https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/492fse/serenity_poc2_ethereum_blog/d0okwaw and https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/492fse/serenity_poc2_ethereum_blog/d0oik7j, please. Are those centralization concerns legit? I suspect that any real criticism will be shadowbanned on sites controlled by Ethereum marketing team, so I'm asking here.

Truth is started to come out...





Also the Dapps look mostly like nonsense or they don't need Turing complete scripts:

WOW....

all these prediction would be fit perfectly in augur... LOL  

Except that augur is nonsense, because the market is not an accurate prediction paradigm. The market speaks, but after the fact.

I could sell you idiots turds wrapped in a Snicker's bar wrapper and you'd buy it, take it home proudly, and put in your ref for safe storage without ever opening to verify it. Then later when your frig smells like shit, you go searching for some poo and never open the Snicker.

augur more like decentralized betting market,  they want us to bet on everything.  if you look at it that way, it actually make sense.

True. But we can already do that. What augur is trying to do is figure out how to record of the outcomes decentralized. But the problem is that violates the Nash equilibrium (since users have game theories to profit on reporting different outcomes). I don't expect Augur to function decentralized and expect it to diverge into chaotic disorder unless they centralize control of the recording of the outcomes (in which case they've accomplished nothing). Bitshares is centralized which enables using a price feed for the BitUSD algorithm.

There is a lot of bullshit floating around in this forum.

I'd estimate, that 'working' DAPPs can only be nichy ones w/o any real risk exposure. Similar to bitcoin early bootstrapping with Silkroad you can start with:

Gaming, Betting, Cheating, Porn...

I need to spend more time thinking about it in detail. Devil is in the details.

Let's consider the example of the use of a smart contract by Slock.it to validate availability of and then escrow funds during an electric charging service. The escrow is necessary because the charging time is not an instantaneous transfer of a good for payment

https://blog.slock.it/partnering-with-rwe-to-explore-the-future-of-the-energy-sector-1cc89b9993e6
http://www.coindesk.com/german-utility-company-turns-to-blockchain-amid-shifting-energy-landscape/

This does not benefit from a smart contract for an analogous reason as to why Augur and BitUSD are not secure without centralization of the prediction outcome or price feed respectively. That is that a decentralized block chain can not determine whether the charging completed successfully.

The only verification of the success of the charging can be either a) mutual agreement of the service provider and the client, or b) a trusted third party escrow agent. In either case, we don't need smart contracts to do this, as we can do it with multi-sig transactions on Bitcoin.

This generative essence flaw that block chains can't validate external events and must trust humans to sign for events, renders most Dapps no better than what we can do with Bitcoin and external business logic.

Of the 7 cool Dapps listed for Ethereum, the Vevue project should be implemented with a decentralized file store employing a DHT for quick lookup by geographical target with a list of approved hashes stored on a block chain (per my suggested improvement for decentralized file storage systems to make them not useless/banned pirating systems). There is absolutely no reason that any of the logic needs to be contained in a smart contract! Because even if you do incorporate a means of disapproving hashes (e.g. for plagiarized content), the decentralized block chain can't make this determination per the prior paragraph. 4G Capital's use case, decentralized micro-blogging, and empowering artists can be similarly handled without smart contracts.

Etheria is a different case because it wants a global consensus on the state of all the resources (tiles and blocks). Therefor it needs an enforcable smart contract in order to guarantee the global state is updated corrrectly and under control of the protocol (enforced by the smart contract), i.e. not controlled by an entity. This could run on its own shard (i.e. effectively its own block chain!), except for the problem that it uses ETH which I explained upthread is impossible to shard without breaking the Nash equilibrium and creating a Prisoner's Dilemma for validators and the security of the block chain. Thus the way to implement Etheria correctly is for it to run on its own shard with its own currency unit. Those who want to play have to purchase its currency unit (and note the work I did recently on decentralized exchange). But this does not solve the scaling problem, because there will be no way to shard this Etheria currency unit (token). And Etheria's block chain's security would have to be provided by its own miners/validators, not Ethereum's. Once again, we come full circle and see that for the applications where smart contracts are required and would work, they don't work because there is no way to scale them decentralized. Crowdfunding is another valid use case for a smart contract, but with the same problems.

The more important issue for block chain 2.0 is getting the decentralized consensus correct for a normal block chain (without smart contracts) which can store hashes of data, not the entire data nor enforce business logic. For the cases where we need smart contracts and they work, then we first need to solve the scaling and decentralized consensus. Again I have explained that Ethereum is headed the wrong direction with Casper and it can't work. I have an idea of how to make this all work. I have already explained my idea.

[TPTB_need_war]

Ethereum 1.0 sucks. Ethereum 2.0 is being worked on right now. I have high hopes for it.

Exactly. ETH 1 is just a pump and dump machine. ETH 2 will be the real deal.

Ethereum 1.0 sucks. Ethereum 2.0 is being worked on right now. I have high hopes for it.

exactly,

Technology idiots, uniformed dreamers, and/or pumpers who haven't read my posts in this thread.

[TPTB_need_war]

I suppose everyone understand this, but I will state it for the record.

With a $200,000+ monthly budget, Ethereum can afford fancy website design and paid promotion at sites such as Coindesk, etc..

We gave them $18 million to produce no solution to the fundamental challenges they never solved, and they spent our money on hype to fool other greater fools into buying at nosebleed, manipulated prices. We invested in screwing the newbies who come to crypto.

That is not a sustainable model for growing our ecosystem. We are poisoning the well from which we drink.

Sorta working for BTC, no?

Huh Despite having become by now arguably controlled by the Chinese mining cartel, Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized and I can spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally.

>Bitcoin had some years of being mined from laptops decentralized
Yeah, way back when you couldn't
>spend Bitcoin widely and use it to transfer funds internationally :-

Billed as noninflationary -> inflating @ 10 -12%/yr
Billed as virtually instant -> sometimes virtually instant
Billed as virtually free -> fees growing and are guesswork
Billed as money 2.0, the next world currency -> 3tps tops; not enough for a suburban shopping mall
Billed as p2p cash -> bank2bank sidechain settlement layer.

So yeah, with the only unique use cases being ransomware, child porn, online gambling & DNMs, I'd say fancy poker chips; speculative value only (regardless of teh backstory du jour).

And compared to what? Ethereum with 0 users versus Bitcoin's 1 million users.

Yes Bitcoin has stalled. We all know that. But the shit offered so far to replace it is useless/flawed lies and hype.

Bitcoin fulfilled a significant portion of its promise. Enough such that we now all have a crypto unit-of-account to trade from.

A unit of account that fluctuates as much as BTC is about as useful as ...let's just say it's not useful.

Myopic given a major use of BTC is for accumulating more of by using it as a barometer against and with to trade between altcoins.

Bitcoin, outside of DNMs, was always a purely speculative commodity, a way to gamble online without the associated social stigma, tell [overly trusting] friends you're a currencies trader

It also provides a bridge to that savoircoin which will actually provide the use cases. It pulled a lot of capital into our arena in order to incentivize someone like myself to devote 4 years of my life to studying it.

Still an interesting laundering vehicle, but that's not gonna last more than a year or two. Less, if there's serious growth.
TL;DR: Bitcoin, like house dealers and cool bands, was great when it was obscure. Success just doesn't become it

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Bitcoin has served an essential role.