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Comment by kang | Hacker News Reader

"solid track record"

Can you name one thing he built/invented that does anything? Beyond collecting bitcoin.

Speaking of which, Ethereum is not really novel either. Bitcoin includes its own VM which has opcodes that allow smart contracts too... just most of them are disabled because the reference implementation had bugs at the time Satoshi abandoned the project, and the development process is currently so calcified and politicized that development has essentially ground to a halt.

The concept of memory-hardness is not really novel either, see: bcrypt/scrypt.

Vitalk was originally a bitcoin developer who proposed extending the op codes to make a more general purpose computer, and only started Ethereum after he encountered resistance to the idea. I don’t think anyone was claiming bitcoin wasn’t prior work.

Can you cite any evidence at all that he actually proposed new op codes? I've heard this claim many times, but never seen any evidence to back it up.

What opcodes does Ethereum support that Bitcoin does not support, or could not be implemented using Bitcoin's opcodes?

You've got everything that looks essential to me: add/sub, mul/div, logical and/or, bitwise, string, crypto, etc.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script#Opcodes

No disagreement that the Bitcoin development process is broken as fuck though.

Bitcoin specifically avoids loops and recursion. The codes you included allow basic contracts, but bitcoin scripts are guaranteed to halt. Its a conscious decision, and I'm not sure its a bad choice for the project.

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