Ethereum is starting to
get my attention.
This is an extremely serious threat to be #1 or #2. I don't know if they can pull it all together.
I will studying and thinking more...
Anonymint shilling for Ethereum, now hell has frozen over.
"
We're aiming for either a turing complete PoW algo, or a randomized hash function every thousand nonces. The algo has not been decided on yet. We are also considering PoW/PoS hybrid." - July 23, 2014
For all intents and purposes, it is currently a completely vaporware money grab.
Hey guys I agree about the IPO metrics being silly (in terms of buy small, grow big, but maybe they work as a centralized distribution mechanism?) and I wrote similar criticism at the thread I linked to.
But then I took another look at it from the standpoint of technology and potential market size.
1. A programmable blockchain has 100s more applications than Bitcoin alone. This could be what is required to increase adoption by 10 or 100 fold.
2. Vitalik Buterin seems quite capable at least from reading a few of his blog posts. Yet I will say that when Charles H. asked me to look at Vitalik's Dagger Pow CPU-only algorithm several months ago, I told him it could be trivially defeated with parallelism in the same memory footprint and now Vitalik admits it ("shared memory"). So it appears to me he might be very intelligent yet unable to actually choose correct designs and "get 'er done".
The concept of what Ethereum wants to achieve is extremely powerful and could really change the world immensely. Any one agree or disagree?
A ("the") fundamental problem is that Turing-complete insures viruses will appear and mess up the state (i.e. on the block chain).
I don't see any solution from them yet on this fundamental issue.
Yet I am thinking about a potential decentralized solution and so if I can think of it, they may be able to too.
I agree of course they are selling vaporware in many respects.
Probably will end up being a failure, but there is huge latent potential also (difficult to totally dismiss).
Comments? Thoughts?
P.S. I am very sleepy, so please excuse if this post is lame.
Add: I haven't looked in detail at the other smart contract coins, e.g. CounterParty, BitShares. Do they offer Turing-complete scripting?