Topic: Turing complete language vs non-Turing complete (Ethereum vs Bitcoin) - page 4. (Read 34758 times)

Obviously crypto can't really prove anything about the real world.  That doesn't make "crypto-law" systems useless though.  It just means you have to have some kind of trusted authority to at least certify what happened in the real world, and then the "crypto-law" system can do the rest.

So using your example, if you have a trusted delivery guy Dave who certifies that he received 1 kg cocaine from Alice and delivered it to Bob, then his signature would unlock terms of the contract as-written (payment or whatever).  He could sign that the shipment was damaged in transit and that would unlock some kind of insurance payment.

Turing completeness is the least of problems with these kinds of proposals.

quoting from http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf


This is deeply confused and misreads the original authors. why do laws exist in the first place? people don't enact their own laws at will. say Alice contracts with Bob to ship 1 kilogram of cocaine from Peru to New York City. how would ethereum enforce that contract? it's nice to speculate about a crypto-law system in 2100, but this hardly solves problems in the real world. in the world that exists, we have laws and nation states, global trade agreements, transportation systems, stock exchanges, insurance companies and many other social artifacts.

Early work on smart contracts has been done by Szabo [1997] and Miller [1997]. Around the 1990s it became clear that algorithmic enforcement of agreements could become a signicant force in human cooperation. Though no specific system was proposed to implement such a system, it was proposed that the future of law would be heavily affected by such systems. In this light, Ethereum may be seen as a general implementation of such a crypto-law system

Im with you on this.  'Turing Complete' seems to be some sort of totem to attract investors.

What I'm not hearing is the obvious problem here- to compute a balance or verify a chain I need to compute several million little C programs with potentially infinite loops?  perhaps several billion?  

It's a huge problem and the various rantings I'm hearing lately about magical 'turing complete' tx scripts don't even begin to address this basic problem.  The current scripting language has limits on execution time and processing requirements.  If you put limits on infinite loops, then its not turing complete.

see: The Halting Problem, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

there's no 'grey goo' nightmare scenarios here, the scare is that I can put a TX in the block chain(perhaps several thousand) that potentially use all the processor resources of a node.  This seems to be yet another episode of the centralization story.

-bm

Here is the paper: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper

well, in an ethereum contract you simply broadcast the data of your private agreements to the whole world. neat.

what has he actually implemented? the only thing this shows is that is that cryptocurrencies are currently going nowhere, when such drivel can get so much attention. so I ask: where is the source code that does all these magical things? smarts contracts, DAC, ... all of this is simply nonsense the way it is described. and this has little to do with Turing complete languages.

I think my biggest concern/question mark with Ethereum is that nobody has shown that the limitation on implementing cool stuff inside Bitcoin is script. Script is limited, but even so, most of our ideas never even get close to pushing the boundaries.

For smart contracts to work one really wants external inputs from the world. For example weather derivatives are an interesting example, say:

Theoretically Bitcoin is controlled by the "economic majority", i.e. if you're BitStamp or BitPay or some other very important player in the economy then what ruleset you choose to run matters more than if you're just a guy with some bitcoins on a phone. In practice we've never had a doomsday scenario where there's a deep disagreement over how Bitcoin should operate, so nobody knows if the "economic majority" concept actually matters or how it would work in practice.

Re: Bitcoin fees, yes the plan is to make them float. I'm hoping that fees will eventually fall if we do that, but it's going to be hard work because lots of major transaction emitters today heavily overbid for no real reason (like Mt Gox) and getting them to use more rational fee policies will take time.

Ugh. Cryptocurrency. or at least Bitcoin at a minimum—  is _NOT_ about "democratic consensus" cue the trope about democracy is wolves voting to have the sheep for supper. Democratic consensus is a terrible way to handle things, but sometimes its the best available of all possible terrible ways to handle things, but that doesn't make it good. Ideally people could operate on a purely consensual basis and never be coerced just because someone amassed superior numbers.  "Democracy" is particularly intolerable, however, when voting power isn't tied to people-with-shared-interests but is instead tied to spending (as it must be in a POW blockchain consensus).

In Bitcoin the rules of the system are fixed in the software and autonomously enforced by everyone, without reference to any consensus. No simple majority of users or miners can change them, they are as immune to a majority tyranny as anything we know how to make. Sadly the whole system can't work on this alone, since there is no known decenteralized way to autonomously decide transaction order, but it is only in narrow-as-we-can make it way that we compromise on that.

You do not make your proposals look good when you justify them with such vulgar misunderstandings of the structure and motivations that enable Bitcoin to be (possibly!) viable.