The Ethereum Paradox

[ProfessionalGoogler]

Even if you could force the external entity to declare the full lineage of the input data (i.e. 100% dependently typed), that would require that the scripting can't be programmable, i.e. the external I/O capability would be eliminated. If you don't understand why, please go learn about the typing systems Coq and Epigram.

I just came again across this initiative
http://www.idni.org/

like much of the discussion in this thread,
it occupies the higher stratosphere of crypto-related theory,
but as much as I'm able to make out of it, it endeavors to steer
clear of many pitfalls that have been explored here by employing
purely functional language "that contains a blockchain support built-in"

They are trying to apply 100% dependent typing to a distributed database by limiting the universe within which a script resides to a family of rules:

http://tauchain.org/tauchain.pdf

This means the programmability of that universe ("locally, not the network" meaning they also can't control external I/O) is limited to the permutations of the rules (which must not be unbounded, else it is Turing complete and thus no longer dependently typed). These universes won't be able to talk to each other unless by intepreter universe which speaks both families perhaps.

Some where the programmer will bump into a limitation that can't work. This is why Haskell MUST have the UnsafeIO class.

The fundamental issue will not be ameliorated by any design. I am not that worried about external failure, for as long as the external failure can be attributed to using a certain set of external logic (and thus not kill the block chain system's perceived value and thus not kill the Nash equilibrium). We need to think about how externalities will integrate with the programmable block chain.

I am really not ready to research that. I have other more important things to work on first.

The point is that scriptable block chains are something that won't mature and become a real adoption market until after many years from now (perhaps decades). The wild price rise of ETH is much too premature and purely hype.

Hi I want to ask you about tauchain, im quoting this post since you mentioned it here.

Can you explain this in layman terms? Im not a coder but I like to know what im investing into, and I have managed to understand the point of everything I've invested into but this tauchain thing is too tricky.

While I learn about it I want to know if this is competition for Ethereum and Maidsafe or it's a third different thing?

Do you think it's a good long term investment that may eventually blow up so getting some "just in case" makes sense?

Do you think that it will get a sooner-than-expected big pump like Ethereum and Maidsafe did due being a project that's at least interesting (just like those 2) as opposed to most of the altcoins which are crap?

Let me make it simpler. All the coins mentioned above will fail. Only own them for the P&D gambler's gains.

Summarizing all detailed arguments for layman is something on my future todo list. I really don't think you are going to understand unless we have a 1 month lecture series that every speculator needs to pass with a grade of at least a B. For example, how do I explain esoteric computer science topic of "dependent typing" to a layman  

The ignorance is strong with this one.

Don't take advice from someone who clearly does not know what he is talking about.

A 13 year old programmer knows more than this guy.

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[TPTB_need_war]

Let me make it simpler. All the coins mentioned above will fail. Only own them for the P&D gambler's gains.

Summarizing all detailed arguments for layman is something on my future todo list. I really don't think you are going to understand unless we have a 1 month lecture series that every speculator needs to pass with a grade of at least a B. For example, how do I explain esoteric computer science topic of "dependent typing" to a layman  

The ignorance is strong with this one.

Don't take advice from someone who clearly does not know what he is talking about.

A 13 year old programmer knows more than this guy.

The guy who solves a 50 year old major problem in computer science and who is designing a new computer programming language is what is known as a 1 in 50 rarity top programmer:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14715888#msg14715888

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14685179#msg14685179

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14698495#msg14698495

There aren't any 13 year old programmers on the planet who can match my computer science expertise. If you randomly picked 100 programmers, there is a good chance I am in the top 2.

[ProfessionalGoogler]

Let me make it simpler. All the coins mentioned above will fail. Only own them for the P&D gambler's gains.

Summarizing all detailed arguments for layman is something on my future todo list. I really don't think you are going to understand unless we have a 1 month lecture series that every speculator needs to pass with a grade of at least a B. For example, how do I explain esoteric computer science topic of "dependent typing" to a layman  

The ignorance is strong with this one.

Don't take advice from someone who clearly does not know what he is talking about.

A 13 year old programmer knows more than this guy.

The guy who solves a 50 year old major problem in computer science and who is designing a new computer programming language is what is known as a 1 in 50 rarity top programmer:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14715888#msg14715888

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14685179#msg14685179

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14698495#msg14698495

There aren't any 13 year old programmers on the planet who can match my computer science expertise. If you randomly picked 100 programmers, there is a good chance I am in the top 2.

Don't even try to kid yourself, people like you are a dime a dozen in this age.

Sounds like you have a ego problem though, or you are a new type of special.

[TPTB_need_war]

Don't even try to kid yourself, people like you are a dime a dozen in this age.

Remove Linus Torvalds from open source and then come back and make your point.  

And btw, wtf are your technical credentials. 

[r0ach]

In movies like "Margin Call", which is a pretty accurate representation of our civilization, the smartest people tend to be involved in creating Rube Goldberg financial products to siphon wealth from the majority.  Vitalik is a prime example of that, in that he started off as some guy people claim is going to do big things to move Bitcoin forward.  Then Ethereum happens and:

a cabal of vampire parasites takes its place....

[TPTB_need_war]

In movies like "Margin Call", which is a pretty accurate representation of our civilization, the smartest people tend to be involved in creating Rube Goldberg financial products to siphon wealth from the majority.

Because that is the easiest way to become filthy rich. And little people with big egos feel that money is their most important achievement.

Some few of us realize that most significant accomplishments require extensive sacrifice and hard work over a long period of time. But if it is a labor of love, then it fit those of us who want a more difficult challenge. Genghis Kahn would be a prime example, and I've read some statistic that something on the order-of-magnitude of 1 in every 5 people have his genetic code because he fathered so many children. The hard work was the wars he waged to unify Mongolia and advance the economy of his people by doing so.

Edit: I am not referring to Vitalik in either case above. He is smart math geek who got in over his head and is more like a kid in a candy store and fantasizing about technology but doesn't have enough experience yet to see the pitfalls in advance.

[r0ach]

Don't forget Vitalik is a radical socialist that claims Bitcoin is a "transition technology" because capitalism itself will go away due to being inherently inefficient.  Here's a 4 minute Kool-aid drinking video of him overjoyed at the idea of being imprisoned inside an authoritarian state as his smart car pod drives him around while being deducted micropayments to be allowed freedom of travel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5VVmTI9F9s&feature=youtu.be&t=168

The fact that we all know Ethereum was created solely to be a money grab scheme and not a decentralized currency with both an IPO and "founder allocation" on top of that (cash + coins to dump for more cash), makes this video even more obscene.  He's embracing radical socialism as a means of increased efficiency (everyone on earth being dead is also energy efficient) and says money won't be important, but he sure as hell wants as much of your cash as he can get his hands on right now!

[YarkoL]

Oh I get it now.

Not only is Ethereum impossible, it's creator is
downright evil.

[RoommateAgreement]

Oh I get it now.

Not only is Ethereum impossible, it's creator is
downright evil.

lol, i don't know about evil but i will personally never trust an altcoin which the developer dumps his own coin for fiat. and not a small amount of pre launch coin, no, a lot of coins worth 1 million dollars dumped.

[r0ach]

Oh I get it now.

Not only is Ethereum impossible, it's creator is
downright evil.

It depends if you believe the monetary system should be, or can be trusted to be a function of the state or not.  If you believe radical socialism is required or inevitable, you can skip the whole facade of pretending to make a decentralized currency (closed entropy PoS systems are permissiond ledgers), and go straight to drafting the legislation to force people into a system of collectivism through coercion.

You can't run collectivist systems without top down control, so the only type of chain that would make any sense for that is a federated chain.  But calling systems like this socialism or collectivism is really disingenuous, because in practice they're just dictatorships.  In the video, Vitalik has fallen for the standard technocrat fallacy where he embraces this system of top down control because he fantasizes about himself being part of the controller class.  There are no Vitaliks running North Korea.  The state would have him making shoes in a factory somewhere while the ruthless killers claw their way to the top of leadership.

Why is all this relevant?  Because cryptocurrency is a form of governance, or the lack of one culminating in Nash equilibrium.  We all compete with each other in a system designed around preventing one of the ruthless killers from getting to the top and taking complete control.  Vitalik is math smart, but the stuff he's saying and attempting to create are kind of the antithesis of the field he's supposed to be operating in.

[TPTB_need_war]

In the video, Vitalik has fallen for the standard technocrat fallacy where he embraces this system of top down control because he fantasizes about himself being part of the controller class.

Vitalik drank the Koolaid that says if good people like him are in control of the technology, then the other 99% can be happy because he is good guy and loves everyone. What he fails to grasp is the Iron Law of Political Economics which says that centralized governance is a power vacuum. That means that whom ever is nice, is pushed aside by those who are more ruthless and can lie better.

As I wrote in my prior post, Vitalik is a naive just-out-of-teenage boyish young man who thinks $18 million of IPO money is Monopoly money. He has a father with a net worth of at least $60 million who probably hobnobs with the elite crowd and has injected some of this sort of thinking into his son's brain.

Vitalik doesn't seem to understand we are moving into a post Industrial era where so many people can be artists, musicians, game developers and 1000s of other creativity oriented jobs.

It will never be the case the 1% of the people do 99% of the work. Never has been and never will be. Humans are too damn diverse and interesting.

Yes he is math smart. But his economic understanding is highly flawed. Also his musings about new technical applications of Bitcoin skip a lot of detailed analysis. He likes to fantasize. I kind of understand. I remember when I was age 22, I had a lot of fantasies. It is normal for that age.

[r0ach]

Iron Law of Political Economics

Some people like him and some people don't, but I like the Thoreau explanation the best:

"Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society."

[thejaytiesto]

Even if you could force the external entity to declare the full lineage of the input data (i.e. 100% dependently typed), that would require that the scripting can't be programmable, i.e. the external I/O capability would be eliminated. If you don't understand why, please go learn about the typing systems Coq and Epigram.

I just came again across this initiative
http://www.idni.org/

like much of the discussion in this thread,
it occupies the higher stratosphere of crypto-related theory,
but as much as I'm able to make out of it, it endeavors to steer
clear of many pitfalls that have been explored here by employing
purely functional language "that contains a blockchain support built-in"

They are trying to apply 100% dependent typing to a distributed database by limiting the universe within which a script resides to a family of rules:

http://tauchain.org/tauchain.pdf

This means the programmability of that universe ("locally, not the network" meaning they also can't control external I/O) is limited to the permutations of the rules (which must not be unbounded, else it is Turing complete and thus no longer dependently typed). These universes won't be able to talk to each other unless by intepreter universe which speaks both families perhaps.

Some where the programmer will bump into a limitation that can't work. This is why Haskell MUST have the UnsafeIO class.

The fundamental issue will not be ameliorated by any design. I am not that worried about external failure, for as long as the external failure can be attributed to using a certain set of external logic (and thus not kill the block chain system's perceived value and thus not kill the Nash equilibrium). We need to think about how externalities will integrate with the programmable block chain.

I am really not ready to research that. I have other more important things to work on first.

The point is that scriptable block chains are something that won't mature and become a real adoption market until after many years from now (perhaps decades). The wild price rise of ETH is much too premature and purely hype.

Hi I want to ask you about tauchain, im quoting this post since you mentioned it here.

Can you explain this in layman terms? Im not a coder but I like to know what im investing into, and I have managed to understand the point of everything I've invested into but this tauchain thing is too tricky.

While I learn about it I want to know if this is competition for Ethereum and Maidsafe or it's a third different thing?

Do you think it's a good long term investment that may eventually blow up so getting some "just in case" makes sense?

Do you think that it will get a sooner-than-expected big pump like Ethereum and Maidsafe did due being a project that's at least interesting (just like those 2) as opposed to most of the altcoins which are crap?

Let me make it simpler. All the coins mentioned above will fail. Only own them for the P&D gambler's gains.

Summarizing all detailed arguments for layman is something on my future todo list. I really don't think you are going to understand unless we have a 1 month lecture series that every speculator needs to pass with a grade of at least a B. For example, how do I explain esoteric computer science topic of "dependent typing" to a layman  

You really think ETH and MAID are doomed? I've heard ETH has problems scaling because the blockchain is already insanely big, then MAID has this problem of the incentive token (they are having problems going from "MaidsafeCoin" to "SafeCoin") and some say some of those problems are unfixable.

Even if they had unfixable problems, I think something like Tauchain may have good pump %. The problem is I don't even know what token does that thing use? How are you supposed to "invest in Tauchain"? it doesn't have a ticket.

Let me make it simpler. All the coins mentioned above will fail. Only own them for the P&D gambler's gains.

Summarizing all detailed arguments for layman is something on my future todo list. I really don't think you are going to understand unless we have a 1 month lecture series that every speculator needs to pass with a grade of at least a B. For example, how do I explain esoteric computer science topic of "dependent typing" to a layman 

The ignorance is strong with this one.

Don't take advice from someone who clearly does not know what he is talking about.

A 13 year old programmer knows more than this guy.

The guy who solves a 50 year old major problem in computer science and who is designing a new computer programming language is what is known as a 1 in 50 rarity top programmer:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14715888#msg14715888

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14685179#msg14685179

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg14698495#msg14698495

There aren't any 13 year old programmers on the planet who can match my computer science expertise. If you randomly picked 100 programmers, there is a good chance I am in the top 2.

If you are that smart why you didn't come up with segwit? :p

Are you going to make a super coin that fixes everything? I would if I was that smart.

[TPTB_need_war]

If you read my past posts about MaidSafe you'd know why I think that all decentralized file storage systems are inherently flawed and unfixable.

Why must I repeat myself every new reader who can't find what I wrote a dozen times in the past. So make it 13 times? 14 times? 100 times? How would I ever code if I spend all my time repeating myself.

Ditto on ETH and Tauchain.

I'll get around to writing that white paper when it makes sense in my priorities.

If you are that smart why you didn't come up with segwit? :p

I did before Blockstream did and I dismissed the design. Some of the greatest danger of centralization from "SigWit" is not from the block chain scaling "improvements", but from the Trojan Horse that Blockstream is introducing soft fork versioning which in reality will let them have control over hard forking. Decentralized coins should be very difficult to hard fork the protocol.

Did you miss the question I (and followed by smooth) asked gmaxwell last week which last I checked, he had ignored.

Are you going to make a super coin that fixes everything? I would if I was that smart.

I have the design already. Implementation is a slow route because the design requires I have a million users first. I am on the tangent of creating a programming language first. There is a method to my madness.

[BitconAssociation]

...
Why must I repeat myself every new reader who can't find what I wrote a dozen times in the past. So make it 13 times? 14 times? 100 times? How would I ever code if I spend all my time repeating myself.
...
I'll get around to writing that white paper when it makes sense in my priorities.
...
I did before Blockstream did and I dismissed the design.
...
I have the design already.

I was great and strong.

People who meet me on the street would shy to one side and I would pass through a crowd like a flat iron.

My feet would often be kissed, but I didn't protest: I knew I deserved it. Why deprive people of the pleasure of honouring me?
I myself, being extraordinarily lithe of body, even tried to kiss myself on my own foot. I sat on a bench, got hold of my right foot and pulled it up to my face. I managed to kiss the big toe.
I was happy.
I understood the happiness of others.

Everyone worshipped me!
And not only people, but even beasts, and even various insects crawled before me and wagged their tails.
And cats! They simply adored me and, somehow gripping each other's paws, would run in front of me whenever I was on the staircase.

[generalizethis]

...
Why must I repeat myself every new reader who can't find what I wrote a dozen times in the past. So make it 13 times? 14 times? 100 times? How would I ever code if I spend all my time repeating myself.
...
I'll get around to writing that white paper when it makes sense in my priorities.
...
I did before Blockstream did and I dismissed the design.
...
I have the design already.

I was great and strong.

People who meet me on the street would shy to one side and I would pass through a crowd like a flat iron.

My feet would often be kissed, but I didn't protest: I knew I deserved it. Why deprive people of the pleasure of honouring me?
I myself, being extraordinarily lithe of body, even tried to kiss myself on my own foot. I sat on a bench, got hold of my right foot and pulled it up to my face. I managed to kiss the big toe.
I was happy.
I understood the happiness of others.

Everyone worshipped me!
And not only people, but even beasts, and even various insects crawled before me and wagged their tails.
And cats! They simply adored me and, somehow gripping each other's paws, would run in front of me whenever I was on the staircase.

Talk about long winded. This dude topped that in one sentence.

“I'm the greatest, I'm a bad man, and I'm pretty!”  Mohammad Ali

[r0ach]

Will be interesting to see the next flavor of the month bubble after this $martcontract$ bubble dies.  The tape will probably rewind back to anonymity coins bubble again at some point in time.  Decentralized storefront related coins have surprisingly had no bubble activity at all.  It's the equivalent of internet in 1990, no business had any clue of how or why they would want to have an internet store.

[ProfessionalGoogler]

Will be interesting to see the next flavor of the month bubble after this $martcontract$ bubble dies.  The tape will probably rewind back to anonymity coins bubble again at some point in time.  Decentralized storefront related coins have surprisingly had no bubble activity at all.  It's the equivalent of internet in 1990, no business had any clue of how or why they would want to have an internet store.

So far you continue to be proven wrong in every possible way.

[r0ach]

So far you continue to be proven wrong in every possible way.

Proven wrong about what?  You think because Eth hasn't crashed to below zero value that this thread is wrong?  Markets can remain irrational for long periods.  

The real world stock market example of Ethereum:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-07/market-top-meet-1-billion-company-zero-revenues

The only difference is, bankers were mad they missed the launch of BTC, so they utilized Vitalik as a useful idiot figurehead and bought a large amount of this fundamentally broken coin and pumped it with the R3 group.  Now bankers are bag holding a billion dollars worth of useless coin that they thought they could challenge BTC with.

[r0ach]

Eth holders discuss the best way to force everyone into socialism:  http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/538/self-redistributing-wealth