Ethereum Homestead release
blog.ethereum.org
blog.ethereum.org
I am not interested in hooking it up to the global networks just providing a way for people to earn points for running workshops, cleaning and doing maintenance that they can spend as time on the laser cutter or 3D printer or similar (which we currently charge for).
Then you can turn your hackspace into a DAO
So if you want to issue tokens for your hackspace, it would be nice if they existed on a public blockchain so that users could trade then and see their balance at any time - no need to worry about server uptime or vulnerabilities.
Here are a couple of tutorials to make your own altcoin in a few minutes:
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~baisang/LearnCoin.pdf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2ylzCBr...
Another choice is PoS; one of the tutorials I listed is for a PoS coin. Yet another choice is instamining/pre-mining.
But more directly to you post: forking an altcoin would be a terrible idea for this person's usecase. Do so not only requires more work (creating and deploying clients) but also is completely insecure as such an altcoin would have no mining power behind it.
Creating a token on an existing blockchain, like Ethereum, would be a much better idea since the clients would already exist and the network would be much more secure. Moreover tokens on the Ethereum blockchain are light-client friendly and have access to smart-contract functinality.
The security that you mention is surely a good thing but rather an overkill in a hackspace environment. If he was purely behind mining power then he should rather start a sidechain based on litecoin.
I find it amusing that you take technical criticism so personally that you target me commenting on just a couple of ethereum post with your ad hominems. Coming to the point, I will argue based on technical viewpoints because this is HN & rather have you keep it clean too please.
> ethereum is not a technology
By definition is a technology a case could be made whether it is a protocol or simply an extension of an existing one. I understand what you are saying here, and once again to some extent, I agree.
However what does "easier" mean. Obviously they used blockchain technology so by definition, blockchain can do anything ethereum can do and it is likely bitcoin can or will be able to as well.
Ethereum is the first company to provide a widespread platform that is secure, easy to use, well documented and designed to build distributed apps and smart contracts. If we assume it works the way it is intended, it is important technology.
Bitcoin is the first implementation and to my knowledge, the designer itself worked on it personally. It also has a cap of coins produced.
I am not looking at the numbers, but commerce on the internet is near 10% in america and i think 4% now.
Just haphazard napkin calculations would mean that if the world accepted bitcoin at a similar rate it would be too concentrated, valuable and need too much mining to work.
Amzn did the first sale in 94.
There is ~5-6 trillion in the world.
Sonewhere between 5-10 percent of all transactions are online.
If we assume adoption to occor similar to this, that would mean 5-10 percent of the economy becomes bitcoin. I think a trajectory like this is possible.
Bitcoin was designed as a currency and ethereum was designed as an energy product.
All coins are priced in bitcoin because you can not buy most directly. Soeculators must buy bitcoin and convert it into something else.
Bitcoin will be much more of a wealth store and peg than the underlying consumable resource used in decentralized application (directly).
So that is why ethereum is important. It is an easy cheap way to allow high throughput access to a distributed database.
It would be annoying if ethereum failed to meet expectations. If bitcoin does not, it will certainly diminish ALL coins and slow blockchain develoment years (or be catastrophic if already widespread)
So yes, ethereum could or could not be a cool hackerspace token. Either way the technology is amazing in blockchain, mining, etc so it would be a good project
I'm happy to see that Ethereum encourages multiple implementations, I'm curious how they managed to achieve this given that Bitcoin seems to have had so much trouble doing the same.
Parity is actually not one of those three but was only recently created by Gavin Wood after he recently left EthDev. Gavin Wood was one of the principal authors of the C++ client.
He shared some of his thoughts on using Rust for the new client here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/44y9vv/announcing...
Bitcoin's problem is that a tiny number of people managed to convince key players that they are irreplaceable "experts", despite having repeatedly proven that they aren't experts at all (go check out the Bitcoin forums today to see the wailing of users due to the giant tx backlog).
This isn't something Ethereum has any solution for. If Vitalik stepped back and after a few years some random developers had managed to manipulate the Ethereum community into doing something stupid, having 3 implementations instead of 1 wouldn't save them.
Case in point is the March 2013 bitcoin fork. Ethereum is not as battle tested yet.
That is, on an average machine, how long does it take to mine a block, and how much processing/storage do we get with that block? Do we need to mine a complete block before we can get any work done?
My concern is that if I want to build an app with a simple message bus and a small amount of transactional state, each client might need to mine for a prohibitive amount of time before it can actually start participating in the network.