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Comment by kang | Hacker News Reader

Naval does a much better job of explaining what the tech is about : https://startupboy.com/2014/04/01/the-fifth-protocol/

However, OP nor Naval, really understand the protocol, or wouldn't be supporting non-blockchain things like ethereum (there is nothing that you can do with ethereum but not with git).

>One of these developers, Vitalik Buterin, was frustrated by Bitcoin’s immobilism

I am amazed at how HN is selling a promo story invented for media by ethereum as a company. Digging IRC logs would reveal how Vitalik convoluted each aspect of the tech(and was often wrong)to the point that the devs stopped caring and let him be. Even technically, I have answered this on HN and other places numerous times - tell me one thing you can build with ethereum but not with bitcoin? (On the opposite, ethereum can't do money - mutable chain).

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Reading old logs may also reveal something about the project Vitalik had before getting involved with Ethereum: Selling access to his quantum computer ... for mining Bitcoins.

Strange how the PR puff pieces around Ethereum never seem to mention this project. Amazing also how the quantum computer seems to disappear as the pre-mined coins were sold off.

It was even weirder than that. He believed he could gain an edge on bitcoin mining by simulating a quantum computer with a conventional computer.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/

That is a charitable interpretation. Had he truly believed in the concept himself, why did he feel the need to hunt down millions of old dollars from "investors"?

You mean he realized the quantum computing idea wasn't going to work, so he moved on to a different idea?

Bitcoin is slow as hell. So you can do an order of magnitude more with Ethereum than Bitcoin.

Technically, decentralized system will be always slower than centralized one. Its a good thing its slow. 1 hour blocks are even safer (and effectively we do convert blocktime to an hour by waiting for 6 confirmations).

So no, you can't "do" more, only be more noisy.

    > Technically, decentralized system will be
    > always slower than centralized one.

This is not a reasonable response to the parent: bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class. Ethereum is an equivalent system and faster. (Others are much faster still)

There are application where speed matters. For example, to sort things out while all the lawyers are in a room.

Ethereum slowed to a crawl as soon as people started trading kittens on it. And I remember seeing transaction fees in the hundreds of dollars when popular ICOs were happening. Which probably didn't help you if you were stuck on one of the exchanges which simply turned Ethereum processing off in times of high load.

Not inspiring confidence in the statement that it is faster than other systems. Compared to Bitcoin it is off by a constant factor, and constant factors aren't really what we're interested in here.

Storing an economy in a fully replicated global ledger has its limitations, there's no getting around that.

I am not saying that speed doesn't matter; trade-off though is security. If there are lawyers to sort thing out, then you don't need crypto.

>bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class

that class being decentralised proof-of-work, it is no slower than it is more secure than those class-members. (And among class members of equal 'speed' it is most secure)

The catch is that the Ethereum nodes are, I think, if anything even more resource-hungry than Bitcoin for an equivalent transaction load. So while right now Ethereum is processing substantially more transactions per second than Bitcoin, this demands an awful lot of resources from every node - not just disk space and CPU time, but IOPS and bandwidth too.

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