The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin (for those who don't know, ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution) and the development ecosystem is much more vibrant and promising.
> The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin
Opinion
> ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution
Fact -- but double edged sword (my opinion, of course).
I have personally been skeptical of ETH for years as their team have been promising the moon for a variety of use cases.
For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law". This is in contrast to the line they were pushing for years that the code IS law. Then someone found a bug in the first major DAO and the code was quickly changed.
So much for that. If you think that is gonna be the last issue along these lines, I've got a bridge to sell you, too.
I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code.
There's no reason that smart contracts require Turing completeness (no real world program requires it, for that matter), and software theorem proving will be required for me to take smart contracts seriously. We need to be able to prove things about the contract execution for it to be safe to trust "code as contract".
Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so.
I think this is a great response, especially because I agree with the first part, and the second part gave me more to think about.
> I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code.
Absolutely! My premise is that with turing completeness comes more chances for shooting in the foot.
> Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so.
This is great insight. I think for me, personally, the problem I have is that it seems like there isn't much politics involved at all... a completely centralized and small group made a decision and the great majority of users followed right along (as we would expect them to).
This is not quite how it is (or was anyway) sold to people as a concept.
98% of all bytes and blackbytes will be distributed to
current Bitcoin holders who bother to prove their
Bitcoin balances during at least one of distribution
rounds.
and that
Then the number of bytes and blackbytes you receive in
each round will be proportional to the balance of your
Bitcoin address in the snapshot block of that round.
So the rich get richer, again. This is not "fair" in the sense that I thought they meant ;)
One of the cool things about Ethereum is that you can build your non-turing-complete contract software on Eth, and use Eth to check your NTC-Eth contracts. I can't think of anything stopping you from doing this right now. Maybe you or other people can weigh in on why it's not feasible?
The ETH language semantics aren't what I'd want for verification proofs, even restricted to a subset. It's possible there are conflicts between the execution model and what would be required for verified, secure contracts.
Similarly, Id want a proof-checked VM for the currency, which ETH is pretty far from supporting.
So verified-ETH would be a larger, more bug-prone project than starting from first principles, developing a language and VM in parallel. (Also, starting a new project gives a chance to change the economics and/or technology used; depending on your views, this might be a benefit.)
Yoichi Hirai has built a formal definition of the EVM in Coq which makes it possible to produce formal proofs of an Ethereum smart contract's correctness:
I either missed it or it didn't exist last time I looked in to ETH. (About a year ago, pre-DAO.)
Either way, this is a major component of what I'd like to see in smart contracts! (The other two major pieces being a verified VM that supports that spec, and a developer library of "standard" contract pieces -- I don't recall being impressed by directly coding for the EVM, and easy-to-use contracts require a library of "standard legalese".)
Most welcome! It was just released so you wouldn't have seen it last year. There was a major push toward more secure smart contacts, in particular using formal verification, after the DAO hack, and the efforts continue to this day.
I'm also afraid that 'smart contract' is sort of a misnomer. Where regular "social" contracts between people and entities define all sorts of relationships, the contracts that are put on a blockchain-serialized VM can only express relationships in terms of value transfers.
> For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law".
Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care.
Clearly the biggest blow to ETH is NOT the DAO fork. If ETH is not above bitcoin, then among all the reasons I can list, its decision to hard fork is not one of it (because if that is the case then ETC would have been the market leader).
> Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care.
I'm not sure how my view is distorted - it might be naive, I concede.
My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
I am calling your view of 'code is law' as a distorted view because it isn't that the other side doesn't think that code is law, it's just what do we consider 'the law' to be.
In my world view, if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties.
Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication.
Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain.
Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough. It wasn't a bounty contract. If that was known beforehand, then there is no way it would have accrued $150 million worth of ethers.
> My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that Ethereum is never going to succeed because they didn't honor the hacker's bounty?
The parent is saying that the entire point of Ethereum was to remove fuzzy human-world debates around things like "intent". If it doesn't, then what is the point? That they are decentralized? Who cares, and why?
I don't disagree that Ethereum should have forked, but that is a human response. If we can take human responses to these contracts, then they aren't any different than normal paper contracts.
Yes it was a human response. One totally within the rules of the protocol - that those using it chose to no longer use it in it's current state but they do chose a slightly modified one. Humans were always the ones responsible for the network as they are for bitcoin.
Ultimately a cryptocurrency, like many things, is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If people decide to stop using Old Etherium and switch to New Etherium that works the same and where everyone except the hacker get New Eth for their Old Eth, there is no way to stop them.
This is a good point - the implementation always matters. If the implementation changes, it doesn't matter what the original specification was, the new implementation is the new spec, if it gains mass adoption.
If a bug was discovered in bitcoin that robbed 80% of its users in some unexpected fashion, the network would probably hard fork too. All ETH did was basically a 51% attack by stakeholders in the network.
One lesson is not to trust ANY contract to be immutable if it manages an outsized chunk of network capital. Another is that Ethereum will beat its private competitors, since for contracts to be trustworthy they will need to run on the biggest and most diversified network there is.
Both BTC and ETH have been (generally) climbing lately; ETH especially. However, I feel (and I should be clear that this is all my own, anecdotal opinion) like -- even if it is superior -- BTC was "first to market" in a popularist sense and thus probably a better long-term bet. ETH is Betamax to BTC's VHS.
I personally equate it to DOS vs Android. The potential for ETH is massive... granted security concerns, scalability, POS are equally massive hurdles to overcome.
We haven't seen the last of this.