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Comment by jamespitts | Hacker News Reader

Windows 1.0 had a vastly larger list of why it sucked. So did the early web, early versions of DOS, early hobbyist PCs, early microprocessors, heh, perhaps even von Neumann's IAS machine.

Use cases embody the most obvious value potential of a technology. If the various "it sucks" obstacles can be bridged, the value potential of the use cases gets realized.

So it follows that if the use cases are valid and highly valuable, and the problems can theoretically be bridged (at even a high cost), then there is very good chance that the problems will be addressed in the near future.

Well, addressed enough (pointing to Windows 3.1).

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If you were saying this about blockchains in general, then I'd agree that this is a baby step in some awesome engineering.

But I'm talking explicitly about Ethereum. In that case it is awful, bad, no good software. I'm comparing it to our other proof-of-concept that seems to work rather well and avoid all those pitfalls: Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has been in production for seven years. In its first year it wasn't nearly so polished.

I think checksumming of addresses was very early there, at least it was in late 2010 when I first used bitcoin. It is quite basic thing and easy to implement. It should help people avoid losses and possible problems caused by trivial mistakes.

They were hoping a name registration scheme would catch on and people would largely use that instead of using addresses directly. It hasn't happened so far, so now they've added checksums (using capitalization).

To clarify, "they" here means Ethereum. Ethereum has checksums.

In fairness, Windows 1.0 wasn't advertising itself as the future of finance or using the inability of third parties to intervene to retrospectively fix errors as its chief selling point.

BOOM! You called it. Further, an interpreter that works, basic checksumming/hashing for integrity of most important data... things like this are mandatory minimums for something like this. I mean, the academic prototypes I find being done by undergrads often have more than that. These people's game-changing platform doesn't have the basics that undergrads throw together in weeks using widely available libraries as building blocks?

Doesn't inspire confidence.

Undergrads don't start with a formal spec and develop four independent client implementations simultaneously in different programming languages.

No, they develop at least one with minimum, basic features their formal spec depends on. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then, they have four.

Alternatively, several of them develop several components in parallel with constant communication to keep them in sync and with a spec. These have the minimum, basic requirements.

Then, there's security-focused products that... going by your statement... start with a formal spec that ignores basic, integrity checks then develop four implementations simultaneously also missing basics. "Not a great plan." (Tony Stark)

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