kang

> Blockchains are pretty much just an append-only log

By this definition, ethereum is not a blockchain[0]

> they were the first decentralized answer to the double-spend problem

Physical reality is decentralised answer to double-spend problem (the gold molecules 'exist' in your hand, no centralised god manifested it but physics worked on universal matter in a decentralised manner). The 'problem' is created when we assumed centralised trust is even possible.

A blockchain is decentralised answer to double-spending a 'non-physically interactable' good(don't mean 'virtual' because POW is real).

[0]https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/9535/how-does-a...

If you are a web developer and looking into making useful products(not just to raise money) you should first look into public-key infrastructure applications. Once you have made your first PKI application you might find ethereum redundant and irrelevant even.

oracle is just a blockchain buzzword for api

The important lesson being don't secure the signal, hide it in the noise.

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)

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.

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).

How to add a new exchange to this? Which interface need to be implemented?

> The hypothetically optimal crypto system would be cheaper for merchants

Incorrect. Decentralization is always more expensive and slower than centralized system(both hypothetically optimal) due to extra sync cost.

Proof-of-stake has many problems like nothing-at-stake problem etc.

> if you name some of the more efficient alternatives to bitcoin, I'll tell you which problems they're failing to solve.

This. Nothing except prof-of-work generates inherent value. All those other proof-ofs are flawed.

Yes its coming.

When this goldrush started exchanges were the ones who made money so everyone wanted one.

Then came altcoins ...

Then ERC20 /ICOs...

Next up in 2018 - forks...

Peer-review is deeply flawed and in its current form merely an advertisement form. We should focus on formatting science in a way that accounts for merit based on reproducibility, falsifiability and paying for real-life usage for recipe invented. Problem is not all science work is technological application.

You know what is a great database with all those properties?

Your folder with git. There is nothing that you cant do with git that you can do with blockchains as a database.

About the BFT part, it fails the mention the very important part that it doesnt work without proof-of-work.

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So then when should we use p-o-w blockchains?

When you want to decentralize control - both, distribution & conflict resolution.

Reminded me of top unixporn post https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/2sz5xo/bspwmofxoc...

Lets keep the blockchain protocol in the mind for a second. Now, given that bitcoin is born due to some problem with banks that the creator felt, what can the banks do at best?

They can create a bank that cannot control printing of money by cryptographically publically proving the held amount and all transactions, backed by proof-of-work as a proof that they are revoking the rights to change their own books. How would such a bank look like?

It would look like BitcoinCash(currency)+Viabtc(interface of the bank)+Bitmain(guards)+this particular dev group(sales) all of them owned by JihanWu. This is a prelimn form of the ultimate bank of the future. Epitome of centralised money.

Will it succeed? Well for most people when they are asking this ques they are asking "will it rise in price?". Well I know there are shit ton of shitcoins that trade in the market, and this here is something that is the best form of something historically considered useful vs a group of people who are saying history was wrong and wanting decentralization but this group feels lost in this group noise of speculators.

I know and I deliberately put a google search query instead of a specific link, because I read all the google links and this cannot be done decentrally.

So manual then?

To reach the ethereum genesis block programatically, starting from an erc20 token I give you, you need that "need the contract code" part which is centralised.

The spades are the hardware ASIC and GPUs and also the platform that let you host and bootstrap a whole new mining field itself, like eth, waves etc

Please link me up, I have checked and tried more than 20 results and none of them tell why or work.

> "But while the operations of such currencies, based on blockchains, have been fully decentralized, the trust graph of these cryptocurrencies have remained entirely centralized. Everyone need to trust Bitcoin to transact in Bitcoin, and everyone needs to trust Ethereum to transact in Ethereum or assets issued on the Ethereum blockchain."

Given a string can you programatically determine whether it is bitcoin? (Starting from a string called 'genesis block', asking assumingly malicious nodes for more strings, doing some math you can reach the string in question.) (Note: You cannot do so with ERC tokens, an alarming thing to ponder[0])

Can you determine with high probability the "amount of work done" in producing the set over which you previously did math? (This amount acts as the amount of trust we lay behind it, which we determine on our own. We always await anyone who can provide more cumulative work done.)

Thus there is no trust graph with bitcoin atleast. (Apart from mining centralization, and users prone to upgrading, bitcoin is pretty close to decentralised and looks to improve in future with physical limits being reached with mining chips and people increasingly opting for immutable code alongwith the immutable chain it calculates on (once all aspects of fungibility like anonymity is solved, users might stop upgrading at all).)

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settle.network is just git.

All of private blockchains, federated sidechains, colored coins, so-called-smart-contracts-on-eth, premined coins, proof-of-stake coins, etc etc are just PKIs.

[0] https://www.google.co.in/search?q=how+to+check+if+a+token+is...

Its the use of hashcash as money, instead of making users see ads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

> A smart contract is simply an agreement between parties, written in codes and enforced by a third-party.

No, it is an agreement between parties enforced by cryptography, and no third party required.

> In the case of Ethereum, it is enforced by cryptography. No it is enforced by payment to the network, just like aws, but in a worst way, because code is executed wastefully, while still remaining at a central location.

What you are not understanding is that a smart contract is a protocol amongst people. You don't code it anywhere in the blockchain directly. It a a protocol that explains how, if each party runs code independently, assuming everyone as a criminal, still achieves its goal. For eg, multisig is a smart contract, which is a protocol where participants decide what code they'll run (signing) and the wallet layer that makes them meet is a separate layer altogether, not in the blockchain. Sometimes this layer may not even be required, for example in money-laundering or any of the 'hundis'.

No that just makes it distributed hosting, like aws.

So how is the initial peer discovery happening again? Isnt that part centralised problem? Any suggestions how to solve it?

I do not mean to discourage you but what you are building is not smart contracts but just a worse version of aws.

Smart contracts are these social protocols that are secured by cryptography and the calculation is done by the node themselves decentrally, everything remaining visible to the whole world. Unlike the current "smart contracts" in ethereum which implement the protocol centrally in a piece of code - the 'protocol' is not decentralised, only the hosting of it.

While it is still not clear that turing complete scripts in blockchains are even required, this is a clever ploy by ethereum to ride some hacker to a spot in devcon, by giving it out as a prize. Ethereum really understands marketing the tech sector.

No etc is not important because it is essentially a centralized mapping of a string of text to another, thats all.

1. the whole blockchain it is based on 2. root signatures in ENS

Yes, I am arguing it is centralised. Read about the centralised root signature system that is the way to add new TLDs to the system.

Also this is worse than the current system we have in the world because it wastes more energy in doing so!

It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.