The Ethereum Paradox

[generalizethis]

Seems vit is bothered enough to do some damage control:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4b89ky/chris_derose_of_bitcoin_uncensored_says_ethereum/d16v43g

[TPTB_need_war]

It's the same story again and again, I can't understand why anyone would get suckered into this. Ethereum at its base seems quite insecure, so there's a good chance it will be worth nothing in the long run.

[...]

Today ETH can perform exactly the same as Bitcoin, as a currency too. Arguably even better. ETH is not Ethereum, it's a part of it. Saying that Ethereum was not designed to work as a currency is wrong. The correct definition is: Ethereum was not designed to be JUST a currency. People are usually confused by this subtle difference. Seems you are one of these people.

So, please explain what usefulness does Bitcoin have that Ethereum can't provide that makes Bitcoin  worth 40 times ETH?

Bitcoin is not turing complete for a reason

thms, Bitcoin's consensus algorithm doesn't have to support the scaling and Nash equilibrium problems that Dapps introduce. Thus Bitcoin is more viably secure than Ethereum can ever be.

[TPTB_need_war]

Seems vit[alik] is bothered enough to do some damage control:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4b89ky/chris_derose_of_bitcoin_uncensored_says_ethereum/d16v43g

Those two Monero investors are so easy to beat in a debate because they are technologically impaired.

Notice even I provided a link to Vitalik for this thread, and have refuted where he replied to me twice (once on Reddit and once on his blog for Casper), he has (afaik) never replied to my refutations and never refuted my allegations in this thread about scaling, sharding, Nash equilibrium and security.

Also wherein I have explained that most Dapps such as Augur and Slock.it can't work technologically.

He completely avoids debating me on these issues.

[TPTB_need_war]

There is no way to do sharding of smart contracts without breaking the Nash equilibrium that creates a majority consensus instead of many competing forks.

Considering that you have spoken kindly of Lucius Gregory Meredith (publicly) and have recognized him as a competent academic, I am having difficulty accepting that his comments on this issue are based on false pretenses.

I recognize that he appears to be a bonafide published research academic and I am not although I also do informal research and some math.

He also appears to be getting paid to say what people want to hear.

He is also making sweeping statements in video Hangouts such as "we modeled everything for Casper mathematically using process calculus and Nash equilibrium doesn't apply", without providing a complete derivation and detailed mathematical explanation. I have stated that I believe he is (either intentionally or unintentionally) not pointing out that modeling the consensus-by-betting does not mean the model won't show that there are flaws in convergence and/or that the model does not consider the externalities that apply to the Nash equilibrium.

In short, I believe he has some serious blind spots in his analysis, similar to the blind spots I allege about his white paper for Synereo.

Yeah he is intelligent and so am I. And I am sure who is correct on this matter (and isn't him). I will be vindicated in the end. But it really doesn't matter because I am working on my own project and by the time I am vindicated, my project will be worth more than Ethereum.

I don't have much more time to waste on this Ethereum shitcoin/Dapp nonsense. My stance is derogatory towards Ethereum and its shills, because I am confident is a scam that will never be adopted by users and is also an illegal unregistered security offered to unqualified USA investors.

[gamebak]

Really interesting batch of insights you've got there. From what I notice

1. Scalability will not come when things are decentralized
2. Decentralization stands in the way of scalability.
3. If the two blend together, stability could be lost.

Looking closely at how this evolves in the days to come.

[TPTB_need_war]

You don't build something worth $1 billion... by arguing with angry keyboard jockeys that have built nothing.

Not to be braggart, but to defend myself, I must point out that I have built million user products that have achieved commercial success:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-moore-iii-b31488b0

Whereas the young kids who are developing Ethereum have never produced anything but hype. At Vitalik's age at 21, I had already coded WordUp which was a significant commercial success with very significant user adoption (you do realize that 38,000+ copies of boxed software in the 1980s is equivalent to millions of uses in equivalent market share on the current internet population). The source code of WordUp was extensive given I wrote the majority of it in  68000 assembly before switching to C later in the project.

Also I think you fail to understand that market cap is a misleading metric. My accomplishments were in the real world, whereas Ethereum's are in the pump&dump vaporware and illegal unregistered securities underworld.

It's getting pretty hard for anyone to make the case that Ethereum isn't a giant bubble. What makes this coin worth a billion dollars?

Selling all the ETH will never net $billion. Maybe $10 million before the price is near 0 due to the selling.

Market cap is a misleading metric.

More relevant is volume, except we have no way to know what percent of the volume is real versus insiders buying from the themselves to pump the price and volume up.

I am not angry:

I created the thread(s) that attempts to decipher what the existing law is on this issue:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1218399.0

I have concluded that offering an ICO/IPO is incredibly risky for the developers and insiders. I think the G20 will eventually come after them in a concerted cooperation by governments to appease the voters who are fed up with corruption in government and banking. The G20 will use this as a political witch hunt to divert attention from the sovereign debt collapse that socialism created.

Having said that, philosophically I would wish for absolutely no regulation and let fools loose their money because they are fools. That should move the money to those who aren't fools and thus make the economy more productive.

But making decisions based on what I wish to be, is not a pragmatic methodology. Being a lead developer on my own crypto project, I must obey the law that is, not my fantasies of what I wish it would be.

[TPTB_need_war]

The sharding solution they have proposed, whereby contracts can only interact in the same shard, will work just fine.  That of course brings with it usability issues, whereby a contract/account on shard 5 can't interact in any way with a contract/account on shard 10.

Enabling contracts to interact across shards is a different level of hard altogether, and I'm at the tipping point of accepting that it can't be achieved after looking at the problem myself for the past year or so.

As many know, eMunie has partitioning (our name for sharding) of transactions, and these partitions can interact with accounts in a different partition.   Great you might think, then just apply the same mechanics to contracts.  

Unfortunately its not that simple, as with transactions you are managing a single, known state (the balance) that is native to the system, so you are able to build functionality and algorithms that leverage those properties to enable cross partition/sharding interactions.  With a contract its much more complex, as a contract may have many states, all of which will have an unknown/indeterminable function, and be arbitrary in nature.  

If the states of a contract are arbitrary, the system can never know what all the states might be (because they are defined by the contract creator).  Nor can it know the rules that govern them due to the same reason (the rules too are arbitrary), thus there is no way to enforce consensus across shards.  Therein lies the root of the problem.

For this to be possible at all would require that the system knows, natively, all possible states for any contract that may ever exist, and the rules that govern those states....

I endorse this. The user scripting is what breaks the ability to do cross-partitioned (cross-sharded) decentralized. Of course centralized or every validator validating every partition works but defeats the entire point of decentralized block chains and reliability by eliminating trust, reputation, and the power vacuum failure modes thereof.

Upthread I had explained how I think Fuserleer is managing handle cross-partitioning for ledger balance. In theory this could be applied to the gas if the gas wasn't also intertwined with the contract state transitions, but the gas must be so intertwined.

Also in that upthread post, I conjectured (having not seen his design specification yet) why I think Fuserleer's attempt will have to forsake long term Consistency or Access for those transaction trees which can't converge across all Partitions. Fuserleer apparently reduces the convergence problem to per-transaction graph, versus per-block. In other words, I conjecture that eMunie's design purports to isolate transaction trees which are conflicting and converges only on those transaction trees which are non-conflicting (in terms of a double-spend) across all partitions. i am expecting collatoral damage or other issue, but I must wait for the full specification before I can really comment meaningfully more than just wild conjecture based on what Fuserleer has written about eMunie's design in various threads.

I don't feel like searching the thread for the post I am referring to.

[TPTB_need_war]

We need some slick graphics presenting the truth competitively to Ethereum's geekcool media campaign.

Re: ... any real difference ... of crapcoins?

What a[n oxy]moronic thread

FTFY

This thread is just too wrong headed

In every meritocracy I have been involved in within my 50 years here on earth, whether it be team sports or team development of software, whether someone had ostensibly good or bad intentions was irrelevant. What mattered is what did they produce. If both Vitalik and Bobsurplus promulgate crapcoins, then is there any real difference. Not in a meritocracy of competition. Maybe at your church or social gathering there is a difference.

[YarkoL]

Anybody who has underwent the task of reading through the entire
thread actually needs to commemorate it by getting that T-shirt  

[TPTB_need_war]

Anybody who has underwent the task of reading through the entire
thread actually needs to commemorate it by getting that T-shirt  

Lol, my face resembles that feeling after enduring this thread.

[stoat]

So, can you even summarise what the complaint is?

After nearly 40 pages nobody is any the wiser,  seems like a load of old FUD to me.

[TPTB_need_war]

After nearly 40 pages ...  seems like a load of old FUD to me.

Ostensibly because your face doesn't resemble this feeling:

[stoat]

Come on man, admit it, you have nothing but what ifs and maybe's.

Not one single point of yours was not totally debunked. 

[mining1]

He said hes going to release his own coin,didnt he ?So its only wise to atack anything with potential that could dwarf your own crypto.I bet he has a huge eth bag aswell.

[TPTB_need_war]

Not one single point of yours was not totally debunked.  

Correct:

[...]

Notice even I provided a link to Vitalik for this thread, and have refuted where he replied to me twice (once on Reddit and once on his blog for Casper), he has (afaik) never replied to my refutations and never refuted my allegations in this thread about scaling, sharding, Nash equilibrium and security.

Also wherein I have explained that most Dapps such as Augur and Slock.it can't work technologically.

He completely avoids debating me on these issues.

[mining1]

So you want him to debate something they havent released yet and are currently working on ?There can be more reasons for that : 1.You may be right and its impossible for them to fix things (only you can,as you claimed,obviously smarter).
2.They havent decided on every aspect and its a work in progress.
3.Why would the leader of most advanced crypto go into a debate with you over something they still work on ?Give you and everyone else solutions to fix problems long before they can release?
Note that i dont understand blockchain technology in detail (not programmer) and im just making trying to make LOGICAL arguments.

[YourMother]

"There are people calling Ether a scam. Now there's something objectively silly. Vitalik passed every single round of questioning with flying colours. His posts on reddit are so technical that I don't understand a single line, yet I love it. It makes me trust him. It's legit. "

Almost every Ethereum investor.

[generalizethis]

So you want him to debate something they havent released yet and are currently working on ?There can be more reasons for that : 1.You may be right and its impossible for them to fix things (only you can,as you claimed,obviously smarter).
2.They havent decided on every aspect and its a work in progress.
3.Why would the leader of most advanced crypto go into a debate with you over something they still work on ?Give you and everyone else solutions to fix problems long before they can release?
Note that i dont understand blockchain technology in detail (not programmer) and im just making trying to make LOGICAL arguments.

This is common practice in academia, arguments about theoretical problems and theoretical solutions. If vitalik has a solution that he feels works and doesn't want to discuss the implementation, he can just say as much, but to completely avoid the argument is a little sketchy. Time will prove one of these guys right and everyone is free to bet on it or not.

[Mvann]

I'm curious TPTB_need_war,

Given your opinion that Ethereum is doomed, what is your opinion on safenet?

Would be cool if you could give me your thoughts, who knows, maybe you see some weak spots there as well. Not that I necessarily agree with your Ethereum criticism but nevertheless you clearly have something of value to add to the conversation. If I'm not mistaken the area which you are putting weight on is what even Vitalik himself probably would say a problem may arise.

[mining1]

So you want him to debate something they havent released yet and are currently working on ?There can be more reasons for that : 1.You may be right and its impossible for them to fix things (only you can,as you claimed,obviously smarter).
2.They havent decided on every aspect and its a work in progress.
3.Why would the leader of most advanced crypto go into a debate with you over something they still work on ?Give you and everyone else solutions to fix problems long before they can release?
Note that i dont understand blockchain technology in detail (not programmer) and im just making trying to make LOGICAL arguments.

This is common practice in academia, arguments about theoretical problems and theoretical solutions. If vitalik has a solution that he feels works and doesn't want to discuss the implementation, he can just say as much, but to completely avoid the argument is a little sketchy. Time will prove one of these guys right and everyone is free to bet on it or not.

Yes but take into consideration he wants to talk things that ethereum may release in ~1 year which is absurd.How can you debate someone about this?I mean hell,even you and your team dont have all the details about every step or decision you ll make,you would have to speak for your entire team which is absurd.
And as the guy above said vitalik passed every round of qestioning/interviews,and as i know so far they did release everything they planned and they work.Ofcourse if you wanna FUD you ll give an example of how they dont work which would be hypocrite,i mean do you really expect anything they release to work in every possible scenario and for everything that crosses your mind ?
Criticism is always welcome,but if ethereum did bad so far,every other crypto there did horrible including bitcoin.