Profile of Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Profile of Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum

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77 pointssangfroid49 comments

Would just like to point out that a) he's not autistic and b) he did not learn mandarin in a few months; have heard he's been practicing for years.

Eugh. Wow.

> In Miami, Buterin’s army was small, but already keenly aware of the importance of beatifying its leader. Joseph Lubin, one of the developers staying at the house, and one of the few people who seemed to understand Ethereum enough to decipher its potential, told me in an endearing, paternal tone that Buterin was a genius alien that had arrived on this planet to deliver the sacrosanct gift of decentralization. Nearby, Buterin was shuffling around on the grass, looking down at the ground, muttering to himself in preparation for a talk he would give to the Bitcoin elite the next day.

Are we writing software or starting a cult?

I agree the article is distasteful in its focus on personalitiy...

...but as someone who's deeply involved in this technology (and an unabashed believer in the ethereum technology stack) I personally consider Vitalik's combination of skills in systems architecture design, cryptocurrency protocol coding, and cryptoeconomic analysis to be unmatched by anyone else in the community.

I think the HN crowd tends to forget that most people are simply hardwired to be interested in stories about other people, rather than concepts (or things)[0]. It's the best way to disseminate ideas to the general public.

[0] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11031-011-9273-2

Most people are also pretty hardwired to suspect that someone regarded as an beatific genius with unearthly powers by his friends might just be a weirdo with a few savant-like abilities surrounded by sycophants though. Which might be a hugely unfair characterisation of Buterin, but the article is much less a story about how he came about to create something, or how people are starting to benefit from stuff he's done, and much more a collection of testimony from people throwing the word genius around rather liberally. I almost burst out laughing when the author put the bit about losing millions of dollars in parentheses, as if they were worried that giving it full paragraph status might damage the financial whizzkid narrative.

Digital currency is a cult.

Not an argument.

it's not an argument, it's an observation. I agree with him

Why is it a cult? What's your definition of a cult?

It's true. I'm inclined to vouch for this so any unfamiliar get a sense of the culture surrounding cryptocurrencies. There is a religiousness to digital currencies. They almost have to be this way, because their initial value depends on Ponzi-like marketing and proliferation is a very grass-roots effort.

This is absolutely true, but you shouldn't let the cults distract you from the valuable tools we now have to build software users control. Decentralized applications are the only way to keep users in control of their lives as software eats the world. Otherwise, the Facebooks and Ubers of the world will write the rules for how we interact as a society, and we will have to submit to their will or opt out of the value of large social and economic networks.

Digital Currencies have the fanaticism of cults but without the removal of freewill of participants.

Cults and Software go hand in hand. Don't be so terrified of cults if you're just getting into software - they're important in this industry. Very little of any import actually gets done without them ... and despite what you may think, the cult model is very useful when it comes to software development. Without a stable individual around which to rally, technology wheels spin and spin. However, with a cult figure making key decisions and acting as a centralized figure around which to rally, software development efforts - inherently group based - prosper.

No committee ever designed and delivered decent software systems. It takes the tall poppy to stick his head above the crop and survey the field before progress can be made.

And, before you downvote, consider the examples. There are many, many positive software cults in our world today.

"There are many, many positive software cults in our world today."

Care to name some? I don't believe cultivating religious fervor over anything and rejecting information that disconfirms or challenges your beliefs as a positive thing.

The Cult of Linus.

The Cult of RMS.

The Cult of Carmack.

The Cult of antirez.

The Cult of Pike.

Cult, definition:

... (religious definition skipped) ...

4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc. 5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.

Cult of DJB

Yup. Great example.

Peter Thiel on how to run your startup like a cult: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/

In the case of Ethereum, maybe a little of both.

The plan is to create an entirely new form of social organization. I'm not making any claims about the likelihood of success, but their vision is wholesale replacement of capitalism and democracy among other things.

There are some cultlike aspects to that. It is a form of abandonment of your friends and family. Since it's not yet realized, it requires some blind faith in Vitalik.

... in some ways every startup is cultlike though.

The decentralization vision does not require blind faith in Vitalik. The tools are already available. It's up to developers to pick them up and use them.

Solving the scalability problem and moving to proof-of-stake requires some faith in Vitalik, but that's only if you care about the value of ether, Ethereum's currency. I hold ether, but if Ethereum fails to solve these problems, someone else will solve them and I will be glad.

Personally, I have no desire to replace capitalism or democracy. But they are clearly broken. I intend to fix them, and I hope the decentralization community gains enough developers, designers, and economists to make it happen. We need your help.

And the scalability/PoS project has a team of several researchers. The official PoS lead is actually Vlad Zamfir.

To be clear, I love Ethereum and I think it will be a big part of the future.

But you seem to agree with me that there is some uncertainty there. We don't know if Ethereum will become the robust future-proof platform that it aspires to be. We also don't know if the problems it solves are really a critical part of the decentralized challenge or if it's bikeshedding. If you are making plans based on specific answers to those questions, your participation involves some degree of faith.

It sounds like you aren't personally relying on those answers, and you can afford to wait it out. That's great. For you it's just a neat technology then, not a cult.

I am impatient about social change, as my friends are in pain, so some faith would be required for me to invest time in the social vision of Ethereum today.

He was clearly joking.

Vitalik and his organization achieved a lot, Gavin deserves a mention as well as the guy who had the math behind ethereum. Nevertheless I don't see any killer apps coming out, so overall, its just another rerun of bitcoin.

Have you seen augur.net; i think it's pretty cool and definitely not practical using BTC.

I think Ethereum has the potential to be the BitTorrent to Bitcoin's Napster.

A lot of the killer Bitcoin apps (gambling, drugs, etc.) make it too easy for law enforcement or site operators to steal everyone's money due to their centralization. It's a long shot, but if Ethereum gets really big really fast it's going to be much, much harder to shut down these apps.

Maybe you can answer one persistent question I've had about Ethereum contracts. My understanding is that you can encode logic in the contract so that you and I can, for example, gamble on the outcome of the Superbowl and the contract ''knows'' to ask some trusted authority for the result of the game and then pay out accordingly. Isn't this only decentralized insofar as you and I both trust the trusted authority and that authority isn't ever compromised? Doesn't that authority become the point of attack for hackers? Such that if I lose the Superbowl bet but I can hack the ESPN API at the right point in time, then I can trigger the wrong payout on all contracts and there is no recourse.

It's my understanding that the Augur project solves this issue by decentralizing the reporting.

That is, individuals vote for which outcome is correct in proportion to their balance of 'reputation'. If an individual votes for the correct outcome (as determined by the majority of votes), they gain reputation, otherwise they lose it.

Reputation is valuable because it entitles voters to a share of the platform fees. Therefore there is a strong incentive to play fair in order to grow the platform and the value of one's reputation (similar to miners in Bitcoin).

https://augur.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/208857885-For-Re...

Sounds like somebody can dump in money to skew all the reputation scores.

As in buying a lot of REP and faking an outcome?

You could do that but the idea is that the hit to your REP value from screwing people over will be greater than any illicit profits you may gain.

Similar to why your drug dealer doesn't just point a gun at you, take your cash, and keep the drugs; he can make more money being an honest long-term dealer to you.

AFAIK, yes, that is an issue. But it's not like it's a completely new issue. Timely information alteration is a long-standing tradition commonly known as "conning", as in "conman" as in "confidence man".

Under one perspective, the root of blockchain technology is a rigorous way to determine consensus reality. Ethereum is then an evolution on top of that - giving a good way to process that consensus reality.

Theoretically, one could begin implementing sensors of actual reality - is it raining today? who won this sportsball event? - within the system.

The TL;DR is that: Yes, but a) that's not a new problem and b) that's why this is all still under development and experimental, and why other people in this discussion only advise entering this market as an enthusiast.

Employing a form of statistical threshold on the information that is gathered before making a decision could probably help resolve a lot of the potential for gaming the system.

That is insightful and is the concept of an 'oracle'. There is a spectrum of techniques to address having a trusted, tamperproof oracle... Some better than others, eg checking on multiple public sources and triangulating their results to more robust voting systems. I haven't run across one that is perfect, though. I believe this will get addressed over time.

That is a very comprehensive PR puff piece, but it's still very much PR. To be honest, more than anything it seems to be endless painstaking descriptions of Buterin's clothing, mannerisms, and eating habits.

True

No one needs ethereum. It's a penny stock scam that sells the cure to whatever ails you to any willing solutionist that's looking to get rich quick.

I agree there's a dearth of compelling, live applications on ethereum right now. However, the problem is caused primarily by the difficulty in developing robust decentralized autonomous systems, not in the lack of ideas or potential applications.

Wow, that's a lot of mixed metaphors for a single sentence.

You and ChrisDeRose have no regard for truth and certainly have no problem spreading FUD for your own gain. You don't truly care about crypto, decentralization nor freedom but only about counterparty and bitcoin going up for your own selfish gain. Hope you can sleep well at night.

He is Chris De Rose.

Yes he is :) Here are some of my chief complaints about Ethereum atm: http://www.coindesk.com/turing-complete-smart-contracts/ (There are others.)

No, I'm Chris Derose.

I'm not Chris Derose, but I play him on TV.

I don't care about anything. I hate myself.

If only we could attach the EVM to an even more convoluted metacoin.

It's generally good advice to stop buying and promoting cryptocurrencies as investments. If you're a developer, learn how to use these tools to make better software for users. If you're not a developer, keep your money in your pockets and participate in the decentralization movement as an enthusiast—it's impossible for us to build good software without early adopters who are willing to give it a try.

He's the uri geller of cryptocurrency

Its possible to disagree with someone without being rude. Whatever your criticisms are of another person, I hope you take some time and write them out rather than engaging in mudslinging.

Personal attacks are not welcome on Hacker News, nor are unsubstantive comments (of which you've unfortunately posted quite a few). Please (re)-read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11896138 and marked it off-topic.

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