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Comment by Acrobatic_Road | Hacker News Reader

We already have this. It's called WBTC and TBTC. Turns out it's way easier to port Bitcoin to Ethereum than to rebuild Ethereum on Bitcoin.

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I'd argue the inverse.

It's easier to build more complex things on top of simpler primitives than vice versa. So a simpler base layer (say TCP/IP for the internet) opens the doors to more complex things on top (say http or JavaScript).

You don't want a Solidity bug (and there are many) to mess with the supply or ownership of Bitcoin. The limited/simple scripting language is there for a reason. It's easy to add complexity and more functionality at Bitcoin base layer: the decision to not do it is the hard (but in my view the right) choice.

I get you have a product to push, but I think we all know that's not true.

> Turns out it's way easier to port Bitcoin to Ethereum than to rebuild Ethereum on Bitcoin.

Technically that might be the case but in the real world you have network effects, inertia, and all kinds of other reason why it might be desirable to go in the other direction.

The ease has to be examined from the perspective of the system as a whole and not just the one component.

Stacks doesn't inherit Bitcoin's network effects except for mining security. No existing Bitcoin wallets or exchanges can make Stacks transactions, while many Ethereum wallets are flexible enough to support arbitrary tokens or smart contracts.

> except for mining security where did you see that? I don't think their security model has any connection with Bitcoin mining. They are not merged-mining with bitcoin

I believe they're using checkpoints similar to the security service that komodo was offering to other chains.

The system selects one of a set of competing miners to produce the next block via a VRF whose state is recorded to Bitcoin OP_RETURNs. There is at most one Stacks block per Bitcoin block, and the probability of winning is proportional to the relative amount of BTC burnt or transferred.

The system's design is well-documented via the SIP process. See https://github.com/stacksgov/sips (you'll want to read SIP-001 and SIP-007 in particular).

Right now the average transaction on the bitcoin chain is almost $15. That's double the cost of the hard drive space to store the entire blockchain (if you really want to).

No sane person would build on top of bitcoin or use anything built on top of bitcoin. It was taken over then redesigned to be a disaster and now it is.

You are exactly right. The Bitcoin Core GitHub repo was hijacked years ago by Greg Maxwell's and Adam Back's Blockstream.

Until more people understand the history of Bitcoin Core (BTC) they will continue to be confused about the high fees and slow confirmation times.

[1] https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...

edit: looks like you are getting downvoted too for telling the truth about Bitcoin Core.

The Bitcoin Core (BTC) market is pushed forward only by fraud (Tether) and lies (censorship of BitcoinTalk and r/Bitcoin).

The Bitcoin Core project was hijacked and socially engineered away from the lead developers many years ago by Adam Back's Blockstream. Today it is a Ponzi scheme designed to push people onto their "second layer" solutions to "solve" the problems they themselves introduced.

Any hard evidence you can point to?

This isn't actually controversial for anyone who got interested in bitcoin before Gavin Andreesan was kicked out and /r/bitcoin was taken over and heavily propagandized.

https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...

Evidence that Tether is a fraud [1] and that BitcoinTalk and r/Bitcoin censor[2]? Yes, there is endless evidence of both. Funny that the truth about Bitcoin get downvoted so hard here, I thought HN liked to be objective about Crypto.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/160905/tether-cryptocurrency...

[2] https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite...

The problem with Ethereum is that if the guys in power do not like what is going on in their blockchain, they fork and rewrite history.

Oh for the love of science, GIVE IT A REST.

ETC exists, if you don’t like ETH go use ETC, the community voted with their wallets, ETH won, give it a bone already

>the community voted with their wallets, ETH won, give it a bone already

Isn't this the exact problem? That the blockchain isn't actually immutable and community will step in to revert transactions?

It happened when Ethereum was less than a year old. The hack exploited a vulnerability that was arguably systemic, since it also existed in a lot of the sample code on ethereum.org.

When Bitcoin was a little more than a year old, it reverted five hours of transactions after a bug exploit.

Both blockchains have matured since then and don't do that anymore. An Ethereum cofounder's company lost over $100M in ETH, and the community refused its requests to restore funds with a fork.

Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a systemic network risk. Since the DAO fiasco we've had a number of high profile incidents and the community has rejected stepping in (look at the failure of EIP 999). I'm not sure if there's presently anything on Ethereum, that should it fail, would be as bad as the DAO failure. Maybe MakerDAO?

>Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a systemic network risk.

that sounds awfully like the justification for bank bailouts.

I think they meant more system technical risk than financial. as in, a change to prevent bypassing private key checks, or minting quadrillions of BTC / ETH beyond the issuance schedule.

If they didn't go forward with the DAO fork, I'm not sure Ethereum would even exist today.

Blockchain is just the tech to get consensus, consensus built by a community can change and does not have to be immutable.

So no, not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.

Why bother with an "immutable" ledger then? Why not just have people vote on what the current state of the network?

How do you get people to vote in a way that actually decentralized and trustless? IOW, how do you build consensus about what the total vote count is?

I mean, no? There are two cryptocurrencies, ETH and ETC, and apparently most people think it's fine to revert a transaction for the reason ETH reverted it. The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.

>The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.

But if all we cared about is the "right" thing to be done at the end, why bother with smart contracts? Why not use the courts?

I'm not the right person to ask, as I don't believe that there's a way to somehow make software bug-free enough to deal with huge amounts of money for an indefinite amount of time. However, it seems that enough people think that "do the right thing automatically unless someone steals millions, in which case revert it" is a good compromise.

Smart contracts are defense in depth on top of the courts. Neither is perfectly foolproof.

If you want to move fast and break things, choose ETH.

If you want to move slow and never break things, choose ETC.

One of the best features of cryptocurrency is that other people cannot simply vote to take your money away.

Well the true genius of Eth was making choosing the fork the default option. So no, there isn't evidence that the community intended to accept the fork.

The default option was chosen by community vote. http://v1.carbonvote.com/

I think there is no point in "giving it a rest".

If there is a decision to be made between two specific blockchains, it is important to point out that one of them is not trustworthy.

All blockchains are secured by trust in the developers. Proof of work is merely a way to buy their token from a power company. All of the problems with have with online contention, will manifest in blockchain for this reason.

You have pretty selective memory: https://coincodex.com/article/3669/the-184-billion-btc-bug-t...

Fundamentally blockchains are about consensus, they have a mechanism to obtain consensus programatically but this programatic consensus can always be overriden if the participants decided to run a different version of the software. To be noted that the guys "in power" are the miners, the developers can only put forward a new version of the rules but the miners decide what they want to run.

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