Topic: The Ethereum Paradox - page 58. (Read 99876 times)

Where do you think most of the Ethereum mining is based? Mostly outside China? I think the Chinese has cheap electricity.

Right. That's not why Ethereum is indeterminate - within one single block things are fine. The problem is across multiple blocks - if execution is dependant on block order, orphans and re-orgs can cause big problems.

I'm not sure where commutativity applies here. Contracts call public methods of
other contracts, so it is an ordered sequence.


If there is not enough gas, EVM is supposed to roll back to the pre-execution state.
It is the responsibility of the caller script to take precautionary measures.

The price went down a bit, not sure though if there'll be another push or will it continue to go back to where it belong. I'm not seeing the reality in the price increase so there must be some group behind it.

Can Etherium price ever drop down to 1$?
Is still aprox 3 mio etherium need to be mined?

n00bs seem to be oblivious of the distinction:

This is another essence of my technological point which I have stated previously as follows:


Laymen let me attempt to explain this to you.

Putting Smart Contract data on a global block chain means that as those contracts interact, it is impossible to prove that the order that the contracts are run is commutative and that the contracts will halt.

This is well known because Turing Completeness (the ability to run any logic) requires unbounded recursion. This is the essence of the famous Halting Problem.

All you laymen need to know is that Ethereum and Nick Szabo propose that which is impossible. I told Charles Hoskinson this in Skype when he was contemplating forming Ethereum with Vitalik (I guess before it became a bigger thing with many others involved).

Ethereum responded by inventing gas, so that scripts would halt by failing once their gas is exhausted. This is horrific because it means the state machine is put into an indeterminate state. Indeterminism manifests as errors and chaotic machines that do random actions. On top of that, Vitalik recently admitted in one of the videos I watched that they know Ethereum violates commutativity (and they have no real solution).

WATCH IT BLOW UP FOLKS!

Nick "Satoshi" Szabo has just made another huge blunder by not realizing the above, as enet correctly points out. So please stop telling me Szabo is at Satoshi's level. Not even close.

It's interesting going somewhere like Ethereum Reddit.  It's a place full of professional software devs who should be able to figure out things discussed in this thread, but they honestly do not care one bit.  They aren't worried about the underlying aspects of Ethereum like it's consensus mechanism, scalability, or execution costs.  They think, hey, somebody else will fix that.  They have a laser beam focus and only care about what can be created inside the VM.  

Instead of being an Android developer, they want to be an Ethereum developer, imagining millions of different apps blasting off per second controlling every device in the world that uses a transistor.  Too bad the current state of crypto is attempting to figure out how to do the most primitive things imaginable in a reliable, secure way, like a time stamp.  These guys have skipped the basics and have gone straight to making video games on-chain.  Soon, I think Vitalik will catch Eth fever from his subjects and attempt to release Mortal Kombat Ethereum edition himself.

Another reason one might imagine that perhaps Vitalik could be corrupted to participate in the pump by emphasizing Casper vaporware and hiding the fact they were not close to solving the fundamental technological issues. And yet they were running out of money (but not now if they can sustain these higher prices for ETH and/or have sold a lot of ETH on this price rise ... in either case selling ETH to bag holders).

So one might imagine perhaps the insiders have cleverly realized they could control Vitalik so they would be able to cash out.

The professionals play these games very strategically. You bag holders have no chance against them (unless of course you sell early enough and get out the door before the rest of the bag holders). Note I am not short ETH, but I did play this game strategically also. I waited for ETH to reach a nosebleed price before I started to reveal the truth more aggressively. This is a warning to these professionals (hucksters) to not fuck with my coin when I release it.

Edit: I have just challenged Vitalik directly:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czx5jej

Edit#2: Vitalik admits they've been selling on the pump (in violation of escrow?). And note he mentions raising monthly budget so more money in their pockets (see how this works, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine!):

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30?context=3

I'm rather enjoying this actually.

Your problem will not be with me, but rather the community filing a legal case and the SEC action that might follow a case.

Just continue promoting ETH if you feel smug...

You can evaluate the claims much more easily. You don't have to be a genius, one can ask some basic questions and proceed from there. Sound reasoning is in short supply in this area, in any case.

• look at the code, it's open source. is it well documented, does it make sense, what do the changes look like, etc.
• read the references papers, etc.
• look at occurring transactions, number of "dapps", etc.

As far as I know there are no dapps in operation (perhaps some can correct with some actual data). Vitalik recently tweeted an example of the best use cases, and they are all no in production. I have yet to see someone demonstrate an actual practical use se, live in code. All the tutorials I've seen where about hypotheticals. And if you look at talks where they talk about the worlds operating system, it's the same. It is all theory. For example the most basic use case is registering a name. The DNS example was used always as the most simple. Yet it is most unlikely ethereum can replace DNS and its not used. The same with the claims about "web3", "IoT",... all claims about some magical future.

FWIW I received the whitepaper in December 2013 I read the paper for 10 minutes and concluded it will not work, based on the fundamental datastructure of a tree (GHOST trees). I've looked at the code but can't figure out what it does, and didn't spend much time on it. On the upside the project familiarised a lot of people about the concept of smart contracts. It's hard for me to see where the 400M$ valuation should come from, but as I remember Litecoin peaked at 500M$ so its not all that unusual.

I think it is much more productive to think things through without constant appeal to science fiction. What could these systems actually do, and how could they be useful? Then in terms of implementation that's more complex, but one hint here. Bitcoin implements a partial order of transactions and SC's need total order. It is not that hard to come up with some models of event ordering.

This is an interesting post, and shows more the direction, although I don't agree with NS on ethereum.
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

I haven't seen that quote in their marketing spiel. For sure, it is not a 'world computer' and any claim to the contrary is delusional; however, it does have very specific applications in programmable-actions-on-transaction-receipt. That does open a lot of doors for developers who might have otherwise needed to create their own blockchain.

I had monsterer on Ignore again because he posts nonsense always.

Yeah r0ach, the FUD is by definition coming from Ethereum since they promoted this as a general purpose scripting platform. I had made that same point previously because I grow weary of repeating myself.

I don't think that's even possible because their stated goal seems to be a general purpose "world computer".  To analyze anything like this, they would probably have to identify not one, but all of their target markets (killer apps) and compare the costs of doing it centralized vs price on Ethereum chain, then decide if there's any benefit from doing it decentralized at a likely higher markup.

The fact that they don't know A) who their target market actually is, or B) how much it can scale at all, makes that a very difficult analysis.

If you really think about it, assuming Ethereum doesn't burn to the ground, with it's limited load capacity you could likely only end up with one small industry using it.  One industry would likely find much higher value in it than others and dwarf them in the ability to pay.  At that point, there's no reason to have a general purpose "world computer" and Ethereum would probably turn into a transitional technology as a new chain is created specifically for that industry.  Or maybe 50 different Ethereum chains to run the lottery and ticket purchases in 50 different states.  I'm just slapping myself in the face trying to figure out how this thing is supposed to work at scale on a commercial level.

yeah the technobabble promotion of Casper without proper disclosure that it won't work. Vitalik has certainly been made aware of my logic. I even posted on his blog post.

The legal case is being documented here and now. Keep on digging YOUR grave (as you are now bringing yourself into culpability as a promoter).

Weren't you also a promoter of Dash? You like the jail time coming...

Liar. No such drama was posted. r0ach showed that Ethereum is obscuring the truth of the risk in disclaimers and X marks over words. Trickery.

Shut up, rOach! <--- because I'm invested

You are the one proclaiming it cannot scale because of this theory. Without knowing the increase in average verification costs, this is just FUD.