[RFC] æthereum: a turing-complete coin distributed as per bitcoin's blockchain

[l4p7]

Sorry but this is crap. For it to work you (the developers) would need to be better at developing and maintaining the ethereum services than the origional Ethereum theam (induding their supporting community). Now is there a dev team plus a supporting community for every innovative altcoin?

Edit: Plus you ad a bad token distribution which is bad for security if it is a POS project....

any contra arguments?

Because it is a clone of the open source code, the original and successive versions will be copied.

What kind of counterargument is this?

What would give a coin more value: a) dedicated dev team that can expand and elucidate on the coin's feature set or b) some cloner?

Can the OP Peter R, take a stance on this?

The value of a coin is all about usage/adaption, an analogy: If you were a company and you wanted to use some Linux software within your company (say a server). Would you rather use a Linux distro maintained and supported by Red Hat or would you use the same Red Hat Linux copy (it is the exact same thing, it is open source) which you might even get for free but with no support or with less quality support and less well maintained (security implications...). So with crypto currency projects it is even more so because the users don't care about the exchange rate of the coin. A user would just buy the coin or hold it pay with it and consume the product if the service provided by coin / DAC is money transfer. Now maintainance and security is even more an issue with a complicated project like ethereum!
Please hit me with arguments!

Btw, would this æthereum model be an application of the side chain suggestion http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-core-developers-bitcoin-side-chains/ ?

[YarkoL]

Btw, would this æthereum model be an application of the side chain suggestion http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-core-developers-bitcoin-side-chains/ ?

No, it's a different concept
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563972.0

[Adrian-x]

What would give a coin more value: a) dedicated dev team that can expand and elucidate on the coin's feature set or b) some cloner?

Neither. From the users' point of view they are the same.

In principle. But in practice the human perception of one as the clone and the other as the original could be a factor.

I don't know - I sort of like the idea as a service for coin developers, but reading the posts it looks like you guys are more delighted by the threat aspect of the scheme, and this for me is a turn-off, and I may not be the only one.

I'm all for developers doing innovative things. Pre-mines that attempt to line their pockets from day zero whether or not they actually add any value to the project going forward not so much.

There are better business models, and I hope developers adopt them.

The developers blockchain with pre-mine can be included in the spin-off effectively Bitcoin + alt. That way the developers have a stake in the success of the open source version, it may encourage development in it as the altclone value supersedes there stake in the for profit original.

[Peter R]

The developers blockchain with pre-mine can be included in the spin-off effectively Bitcoin + alt. That way the developers have a stake in the success of the open source version, it may encourage development in it as the altclone value supersedes there stake in the for profit original.

It seems the IPO investors have the least power in every case.  Perhaps I am missing something, but I cannot think of a scenario where the incentive of the economic majority remains aligned with the original IPO chain (except the case where no one really cares b/c the coin doesn't appear to have a future).  

I launch the spin-off according to the OP and immediately have a large user base and support from the bitcoin community due to the perceived legitimacy of the pre-mine distribution.    

You (sympathetic to the devs or perhaps even working on behalf of them) fork my code, sweetening the deal for the devs but still distributing the rest of the pre-mine as per bitcoin's unspent outputs.

Although the devs might give lip service to their support of the IPO chain, it seems the only people who would be incentivized to keep the original chain dominant are the IPO investors.  And they are the group that would appear least able to do so.

I still expect the true spin-off to win (if the coin is perceived as useful), but I think you've provided evidence that there are many ways the devs could be incentivized to abandon the original (IPO) chain.  

[Peter R]

Can the OP Peter R, take a stance on this?

The value of a coin is all about usage/adaption, an analogy: If you were a company and you wanted to use some Linux software within your company (say a server). Would you rather use a Linux distro maintained and supported by Red Hat or would you use the same Red Hat Linux copy (it is the exact same thing, it is open source) which you might even get for free but with no support or with less quality support and less well maintained (security implications...). So with crypto currency projects it is even more so because the users don't care about the exchange rate of the coin. A user would just buy the coin or hold it pay with it and consume the product if the service provided by coin / DAC is money transfer. Now maintainance and security is even more an issue with a complicated project like ethereum!
Please hit me with arguments!

Your concern about the need for "urgent updates" to secure your turing-complete money illustrates how "Crypto 2.0" may actually be a step backwards.  If money requires "customer support," then we have bigger problem than not being able to write scripts with for() loops. If you need to worry about "bugs" that could cost you all your wealth then maybe the protocol is too complex.  Think of all the vulnerabilities with Java...

And finally, if you don't need to worry about "urgent updates", "bugs" and "customer support" then it doesn't really matter if you wait a month or six for the clone to integrate the latest upgrade from the devs.

But this brings up another point.  Many people erroneously think the value of bitcoin comes primarily from its "features."  In my opinion, a large part of its value comes from the fact that it has been endlessly beaten-up since 2009 and remained resilient--bitcoin has in fact grown by leaps and bounds in spite the world's efforts to thwart it.

Bitcoin is powerful because it is simple and robust.  

[Adrian-x]

It seems the IPO investors have the least power in every case.  Perhaps I am missing something, but I cannot think of a scenario where the incentive of the economic majority remains aligned with the original IPO chain (except the case where no one really cares b/c the coin doesn't appear to have a future).  

I think you are correct, I think they have a saying for it: A fool and his money are soon parted. The IPO investors are most at risk.

[Adrian-x]

@l4p7 Red Hat's business is support of open source code. Ethereum, makes it's revenue by selling money to business which motivates the open source community to support the open code.

[foodies123]

wether or not the bitcoin distrbution is fair is irrelevant what's relevant is that the big guns in btc will also be the big guns in aetherum ... not ... good.

[jtimon]

I don't think giving them to current or past bitcoin owners is a very interesting distribution mechanism and honestly I don't think it's fair. In Freicoin we're researching alternative distribution mechanisms different from mining subsidy but this one doesn't look very good to me.

Apart from that, the fork itself it's interesting since ethereum is distribtued as free software and aethereum developers and users don't need to pay anything to ethereum developers or "investors"/speculators.
One could argue that ethereum is somehow protected by the network effect of being the first, but aethereum could be launched just about the same day or even earlier.
The fact is that the ethereum team is trying to monetize so called "intellectual property" (property should only apply to scarce goods and not infinitely reproducible ideas) the wrong way and aethereum shows us this.

If no one has done this before with ripple.com or mastercoin, for example, maybe it's because no one saw their designs as particularly brilliant. For example, ripple.com has several design flaws that wouldn't be there if they had read Ryan Fugger's 2 phase commit protocol with more attention. mastercoin repeats some of the mistakes like having "accounts" for which transactions need to be serialized and I doubt they've even tried to support ripple-like transitive transactions (atomic trades involving an arbitrary number of different assets).
I think starting from scratch is an unnecessary luxury that fragments development and duplicates costs, that's why we take the opposite approach with Freimarkets, designed as a set of extensions on top of bitcoin design/code. And although I doubt about the need of some ethereum's constructs like agents (I believe any functionality that can be provided by so called DACs can also be provided by "regular" smart contracts if the scripting language is powerful enough), I respect it as another technical approach.
So maybe it was interesting enough to be forked and clearly see that so called "pre-mining" is not a good funding model and you actually need to convince future users (individuals, businesses and/or other organizations) to fund it without promising any other return that the software itself.

As a suggestion, I would also get rid of the "anti-ASIC" bullshit (any software algorithm has infinite hardware equivalents and one is simply going to be more efficient, period) and just merge mine SHA256 with bitcoin, or at the very least, merged mine Scrypt with Litecoin. It's just getting a little more security for free (no, although namecoin is more secure than it would be alone is NOT as secure as Bitcoin, simply because it's reward is smaller and it's cheaper to reverse its history). There's no reason not to do it.
Having the same set of features that ethereum but with better security could actually turn the network effect in favor of aethereum and against ethereum.

[dafqok]

... unfair

private interests destroying public goods. Nothing new, and crypto tech won't save us, can it? If not, Adam's heralded message of 'can't be evil' is rather inflated.

[jtimon]

... unfair

private interests destroying public goods. Nothing new, and crypto tech won't save us, can it? If not, Adam's heralded message of 'can't be evil' is rather inflated.

I think "can't be evil" means more like "I shouldn't even be able to steal or lose your coins", which is different from "miner's subsidy is going to magically turn into a less wasteful thing".
In any case, I'm just saying that distributing aethereum's seigniorage to old btc users instead of directly to pow is not an improvement, at least miners are providing security.
So I think you actually answered to the less interesting part of my most (not a surprise given that you've only quoted exactly the part that had moral connotations in it).

[crimealone]

people who own thousands of btc would become whales of this coin. I think if you make the distribution proportional, there is no different from the others distribution methods except these whales even don't need to invest....

[Vitalik Buterin]

people who own thousands of btc would become whales of this coin. I think if you make the distribution proportional, there is no different from the others distribution methods except these whales even don't need to invest....

Agreed. The only truly "fair" coin is one that gives X per person per year forever. And, before you ask, yes it is one of our major interests to get at least a few of those launched as sub-currencies on ethereum, and you're free to create forks of each one on aethereum which are distributed via proof of ownership of the corresponding ethereum sub-currency at block N. With Merkle Patricia state trees, we even make "proof of subcurrency ownership at block N" trivial for you.

[Nxtblg]

The only truly "fair" coin is one that gives X per person per year forever.

What, no bonus coins for crypto Stakhanovites?

[provenceday]

nice i like it!

[mami]

Since Ethereum is vaporware, how is forking their code going to produce anything useful?

[rpietila]

Why is this SCAM getting so many view? I WARN all the noobs again, this scam will suck hard earned money out of your pockets and give it to bitcoin bagholders. STAY AWAY!

Now, the bank is MORTALLY WOUNDED. Watch out. They employ as many trolls as required to let the truth in Adrian-x's message not be distributed:

donate funds back to their users.

Yeah, that's sure to happen.

This project is dead before it even begins.

Agree with your sinister comment in bold. This will be an exchanges nightmare. All exchanges running fractional reserves will be tested if there customers withdraw there BTC. It's an opportunity for exchanges to prove holdings, and grow.

It is actuality the EFT's that have the advantage here not so much exchanges.
Ultimately Wall St. Will control Bitcoin price with derivatives and futures. This idea allows the innovators to control the demand for Bitcoin by doing innovation, and rocking the derivative boat.

If the idea is good the Bitcoin price will not be set by Wall St. like it is with gold, silver and everything else, it will be set by lots of individuals wanting control of there Bitcoin, shorting EFT's and buying actual coin.

This is more interesting than anything that I have studied in 6 months, at least. Red emphasis by me. It forever destroys the attempt to control Bitcoin by banks' evil schemes concerning the (expansion of the) money supply. How?

Anybody, no matter who, whether he holds bitcoins or not, has the opportunity to make spinoffs from Bitcoin blockchain.

If the people who deposit their bitcoins to central depositories, demand these spinoffs "in specie", the central depository has to own the corresponding number of bitcoins. If they refuse to handle spinoffs at all, they are subject to bank run. Game over.

[slapper]

Yah banks are bad. Your only solution is to buy Bitcoins from used-bitcoin salesmen and hopefully make them rich instead of evil bankers.

Newsflash: Newbies are not falling for this libertarian jingoistic gate keeping of used-bitcoin salesmen.

We all like p2p crypto technology concept and still love Bitcoin, but no need to keep shoving BTC down our throat. The idea is for society to come up with something different from Napster(Bitcoin) so most are on a better footing.

[rpietila]

Yah banks are bad. Your only solution is to buy Bitcoins from used-bitcoin salesmen and hopefully make them rich instead of evil bankers.

Newsflash: Newbies are not falling for this libertarian jingoistic gate keeping of used-bitcoin salesmen.

We all like p2p crypto technology concept and still love Bitcoin, but no need to keep shoving BTC down our throat. The idea is for society to come up with something different from Napster(Bitcoin) so most are on a better footing.

Now, the bank is MORTALLY WOUNDED. Watch out. They employ as many trolls as required to let the truth in Adrian-x's message not be distributed (2 msgs back).

[Ragz]

Biggest problem I see is that Exchanges would have an overwhelming control of said coins.....whenever you are putting money on an exchange they are putting coins in their wallet, then after all your trading they cash you out of the same wallet....at any point in time how much BTC do you think is on all the exchanges all together?  I mean sure I get a little bit cause I own some BTC as well but the winners are exchanges and the filthy rich, good idea but would fail imo due to who would be getting the coins