
Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer - hunglee2
http://www.svds.com/ethereum-the-rise-of-the-world-computer/#.Vs3MJboMMl0.facebook
======
Uptrenda
Crypto has come a long way since Ethereum was first conceived and what was
impossible only a few months ago is now 100% practical. Today there are A LOT
of new techniques that allow us to largely implement decentralized autonomous
applications on any blockchain (no matter how limited) - a fact I feel often
gets missed out in all of the Ethereum hype.

If you have a lot a techniques like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic
computations, multi-party computation, indistinishability (sic) obfuscation
(not quite practical yet), and various threshold schemes - you will quickly
realize we could basically already do everything that Ethereum was designed
for from the start. In fact - a lot of the new crypto techniques make it
possible to scale DAC applications even better than what blockchains would
allow since you can implement a lot of crypto-application protocols outside of
the blockchain and keep only the hash-locked payments on the chain (which I
honestly think is preferable.)

It just seems to me like Vitalik largely invented Ethereum because he didn't
want to bother messing around with all the crypto-hacking that's required to
implement self-enforcing, autonomous contracts (which is half the fun.) My
biggest problem with this is people act like this isn't possible with Bitcoin
when we had working smart contracts (and special coins for smart contracts)
before Ethereum even existed. Interestingly enough - there's even ways to make
the answer to any computable problem the keys to unlock a Bitcoin payment
which means if you structure your crypto-protocol right you can essentially
implement any self-paying, and self-running corporation as a never-ending
complex chain of future problems.

(I would speculate that it's even possible to build a universal turning
machine on top of any bitcoin-style blockchain that can compute any problem
off-chain and allow these computations to be proven and self-enforcing but
that is a topic for future research.)

~~~
whypeoplepeople
There were tons of techniques to preserve home-made foods - canning, vacuum
drying, salt curing, fermentation, etc. - and then someone invented the
fridge. What is widely adopted?

As an average developer, I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code
in Ethereum. I have no idea in earth how to even start writing those things on
classic blockchains, let alone prove they work as I expect.

~~~
repomies69
> I can launch a smart contract with 20 lines of code in Ethereum.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting for the first smart contract that is actually
useful for something.

~~~
anonbanker
Never heard about Arcade City[0]?

0\. [https://arcade.city/](https://arcade.city/)

------
kang
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987142)

Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin.

Is it advantageous if a DSL is turing complete? It is not that bitcoin 'cannot
have' a turing complete script but that it is unsafe & there is no need to do
so. Turing completeness can be applied on an upper abstraction.

There is nothing that ethereum can do that bitcoin cannot! The proof of it is
RootStock which is ethereum implementation using bitcoin.

Ethereum is full of buzzwords and the key one of them is DApps. Here [0] is
how to build a dapp using bitcoin. Basically you can tell me any application
of ethereum and I'll tell you how you can do it with bitcoin. Skynet type
input requiring applications can't be done inherently by either ether or
bitcoin but can be done by both using third-party oracles.

Then are bitcoin & ethereum equivalent. No, they key is origin of money.
Bitcoin is mined, ether was sold.

The recent rise in price has attracted all kinds of attention but talk to any
of the core-devs and they'll tell you that Vitalik used to come up with
complicated explanations which they spent time studying and responding & then
he'd come back with something even more complicated until they stopped caring.

[0] [http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-
crowd...](http://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-
crowdfunding/)

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> Give me any ethereum use-case & I'll tell you how to do it with bitcoin.

Is this your opinion because you truly believe it or because you have a horse
in the bitcoin race? I'm not saying that Ethereum is superior to bitcoin but
at least from a brief look over it, it seems to make quite a bit of sense.
Whereas my experience with bitcoin is that it's an incredibly hacky and
questionable system that primarily survives because of the collective
investment into it, not on its technical merit.

~~~
jarsin
Yep ethereum has been out for what 6 months and look at all of development on
top of it already. BTC has tons of VC money and I see nothing interesting
beyond a few regulated exchanges.

But oh ya we are all suppose to believe BTC can do all of this but apparently
nobody really knows how. It's really just a bunch of people that think BTC is
special because it was first, but it lost it's first mover advantage.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/43fm3w/the_core_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/43fm3w/the_core_value_proposition_of_ethereum_is_synergy/)

[http://dapps.ethercasts.com/](http://dapps.ethercasts.com/)

~~~
kang
Please give me an ethereum use case & I'll try to tell you how you can do it
with bitcoin.

I have previously answered a few use cases here
[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10846788)]

~~~
splintercell
Last week I built an dapp called 'GameOfTrolls', it is an attempt recreate the
/r/GameOfTrolls subreddit which was banned by reddit. The idea was to make a
game out of trolling people(as in just lying and making up stories).

I did it in one week, it uses Oraclize.it (which I believe is also available
for bitcoin, so that's nice), and I am sure it can be built on bitcoin too,
but the biggest problem remains this:

* While doing development in Solidity, and using HTML/CSS/JS for client, I am able to rapidly build a dapp.

* Writing the code in a higher level programming language created for the purpose of blockchain apps, allow me to think at a higher level abstraction.

* Training people to write in Solidity is far easier than training them to write in C/C++.

* Faster and rapid dapp development(RDD) will unlease a new age in blockchain innovation, and if you have been in tech for a while, you know that 'crack up boom' of innovation we see when Rapid application development became possible.

Case in point, Augur. Paul Sztorc has been doing development of Truthcoin for
far longer than Augur people and even has funding from Roger Ver, but Augur
has managed to rally a lot more people around it by delivering working
prototype sooner than later, and now they're already in Beta, targetting 2016
election.

Look, I love bitcoin and I was one of the earliest adopters of bitcoin (2009
Dec era). But I have been a software developer for far longer than that, and I
can tell you, bitcoin's code is not made to make the things we desire to make
now.

BTW, here is an argument against Ethereum. Any app built on it, will be
inherently slow because of the price they'll pay for building it in a higher
level abstraction platform. This means, that Augur will eventually hit
performance wall, at which point, every successful Ethereum app will have to
be developed in C/C++ and natively to get more performance.

~~~
DennisP
Generally agree, app development is great. Regarding your last point, apps in
Ethereum run on Ethereum's specialized VM. Every opcode has its own
transaction fee. There's no way to write an Ethereum app in C++.

~~~
splintercell
"by Ethereum app in c++" I mean writing that logic in C++, of course it won't
run on Ethereum network anymore after that point.

~~~
DennisP
Ah makes sense, sorry for my confusion.

------
teraflop
The article is pretty light on technical details. Does Ethereum suffer from
the same design limitation as Bitcoin, where every operation must be verified
by every node? If so, I have a really hard time believing it will scale. Look
how much difficulty the Bitcoin network is having with just a couple of
transactions per second.

~~~
crazydoggers
One key difference with Bitcoin is that, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has an
account based architecture. In other words, you have an account that is
credited or debited, and you then have a current balance for that account. If
you need to get your balance or send ether, you just look up a single number.

Bitcoin on the other hand uses an "Unspent Transaction Output" architecture.
Basically your balance is made up of all of the credits and debits (inputs and
outputs) you've made with that account. So sending bitcoins requires
referencing "unspent outputs".. which may be lots and lots of different
transactions.

That's one difference, and there are others, such as the time taken to confirm
blocks (current block time on ethereum is 16s). But there are still lots of
scalability issues to be addressed, which are actively being worked on.

Vitalik Buterin has a great couple of posts on some of the issues:

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-
part-1-buil...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-
part-1-building-top/)

edit: Not sure why this was getting downvoted. Just to clarify, in case it
seemed like I wasn't answering the parent. The points above are one of the
ways in which "every operation must be verified by every node" is less costly
on Ethereum. Obviously if it takes less compute time per transaction, you can
scale to larger numbers of transactions per second. Ethereum has already
passed Bitcoin in this regard, and has hit at least 8 transactions per seconds
at one point, while Bitcoin's ceiling is 7 transactions per second. In
addition, prior to launch I believe they managed to push the test network up
to 25 transactions per second.

~~~
Anonobread
But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain".

VISA does 56,000 tps.

So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain.
The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than
Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you
suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer?

And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethereum: "everything
goes on the blockchain". You're telling me after 18 months of debate, the best
you've got to say about that is: "an account based architecture"?

What is it about widgets fully encapsulated in a blockchain-native smart
contract on Ethereum that makes it so much more scaleable than a similar
widget on Bitcoin's blockchain?

~~~
nickpsecurity
"VISA does 56,000 tps."

That's what I keep telling them. The whole of credit processing and banking...
even the Fed... runs on centralized, transactional architectures with
redundant datacenters and optionally redundant checks from mutually-
distrusting parties. What people want to do can be built on a highly-
efficient, log-based system with distributed checking run by a foundation (or
international collaboration) in a neutral country. It would be simpler, more
secure, use less energy, faster, and so on. Additionally, we can choose what
level of detail we want in reporting or auditing to reduce data overload.

These blockchain models want everything to go on a blockchain whose
operational hurdles even they can't agree on. It's like this subfield of IT is
ignoring simple solutions to simple problems while pushing complex solutions
with complex problems.

So, I add to your own question: what is it about a smart contract on Bitcoin
or Ethereum that couldn't be done with a signed email or website document
optionally run through a few cryptographic notaries? The latter is not only
simpler and more efficient: it's in use commercially with many courts already
approving of concepts and some implementations.

~~~
Anonobread
Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough
Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money
subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That
whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment
gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills.

Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners
take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real
game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.

~~~
jgalt212
> diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin

Even if that were true, that would necessarily be a bad thing in the interests
of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I take it you meant to word that as "wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing." As
in, diversion would be good to avoid monoculture risks.

------
bshanks
The way i think about Ethereum is that it's a cloud computing platform upon
which the whole world can see which program the server is running. The
usefulness of this is that if you want to run a computing service that
administers something of great value to others (such as a vote-counting
service or a property registry), other people might be suspicious that you
will use your administrative access to the server to corrupt the system. With
Ethereum, the service provider doesn't have any admin access (and neither do
the people upon whose hardware the program is ultimately running on); the
cloud computer just runs the program you upload, and everyone can see what
program that is.

In addition, it runs your service robustly, and preserves the entire history
of the computation forever. The downside is that these transparency and
robustness features make the service a lot more expensive than ordinary cloud
computing, as well as more difficult to program on.

It doesn't really have much to do with Bitcoin or currency (except that (a)
like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses blockchain technology to achieve these things; but
that's an implementation detail (b) a Bitcoin clone is one of the many things
you could build as an Ethereum application (c) for technical reasons you buy
Ethereum server time via purchasing server-time-credits called "Ether").

As a project, Ethereum is very technically ambitious (they are not just
working on a cloud computing platform, but also trying to advance blockchain
technology in general, eg developing a new proof-of-stake algorithm, and eg
developing a way to not have to replicate computations on every node on the
network). They are trying to do a lot of new things at once, which is risky
(but awesome).

------
Animats
This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football
betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into
the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on
phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the
typical football fan.

Possible YC startup.

~~~
repomies69
If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you
use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? I would bet my
ass off that the end-users (gamblers) don't give a crap whether it is on
blockchain or not, they just want it to be easy, quick and possibly cheap. And
of course trustable. And by latter I don't mean "mathematical proof"
trustable, they want brand that they know to trust.

~~~
jarsin
> they want brand that they know to trust.

like fulltilt or leehman brothers!

~~~
repomies69
You have to take in account that for every failed banks there is something
like 20 banks that have worked good enough. For full tilt, there has been many
gambling services that haven't failed yet.

When using banking services, you have a risk of a bank run. How big that risk
is? How much work are you willing to do, or how much money are you willing to
spend to migitate that risk?

------
shanehoban
I get spammed daily on Reddit from bots supporting Ethereum (currency) - so
the name causes hatred for me already.

~~~
aakilfernandes
Side note: Ethereum is the technology, ether is the currency.

------
joshuakarjala
Have built a demo app with Ethereum in November. The tooling was ok, but not
amazing.

IMO one of the main problems is that you need trusted inputs for most
"interesting" or "valuable" computations.

~~~
pipermerriam
Developing on the platform right now is akin to writing software to run on a
VM that has no operating system. The services that are being written right now
can be thought of as the operating system (foundation) that everything that
will come next is built on. To do the really interesting stuff you have to
first build all of the really low level tooling to support it.

There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with
decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a few
years away. Complex applications like those are going to require significant
base infrastructure that just doesn't exist yet.

The "Trusted" inputs problem is complex and I don't believe there will be a
single solution. Some applications will be fine using trusted oracles. Others
will need a more trustless model which is going to require on-chain reputation
systems which in-turn is going to require some level of identity/anti-sybil
system.

~~~
repomies69
> There's a lot of talk about replacing Uber/AirBnB/Facebook/etc with
> decentralized applications but I believe those things are still at least a
> few years away.

At least a few years? LOL. I would give it 20 years.

------
iamthepieman
i see a browser plugin/app like "Cloud to Butt"[0]

that detects phrases like "I would bet my ass off" or "I bet you that" or "I
wager" and converts them to a prediction market link - creating the market if
it doesn't exist or just linking to it if it does.

[0][https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-
plus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-
plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en)

------
contingencies
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the missing piece for the crypto-
anarchist spiritual lineage of fintech to take off is a business-level
transaction protocol (and associated open source server) that is generic
enough to embrace all of the different settlement mechanisms and transaction
types out there, as well as incorporating an adequately comprehensible means
of markup for risk models. Not "send <amount_of_bitcoin_portions> to <bitcoin
address>", but rather "invoice X for service Y settle by datetime Z, available
modes of settlement ABC, after which service Y (or good G) will be rendered.
policies for various types of transaction failures are DEF. proposing node's
risk model: R.".

The idea is not to supplant Bitcoin/Ethereum but in fact to give them more
market share by enabling them to be considered on a properly equal, pragmatic
basis with conventional financial services or assets. This would encourage
their selection (automatically or otherwise) versus some defined risk model
(temporal, legal, etc.), over conventional financial services or assets.

Things that come for free or almost for free when you adopt dynamic financial
routing include settlement path redundancy, multi-path settlement, RFQs/bids,
multi-hop routing, financial system reliability, etc. Something like real
world aware IPv4, for money. I've already suggested an endpoint identification
scheme - [https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-
proposa...](https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-
proposals/iiban) \- which is the native account identifier at Kraken.

If anyone would be keen to work in this direction, I started
[https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-
proposa...](https://sites.google.com/a/ifex-project.org/wiki/our-
proposals/ifex) years ago, but had to give it up due to competing concerns.

I'm ready to jump in again but don't want to go solo.

------
LAMike
Is there a "Hello World" version of a DAC?

What is the simplest contract I can make? And do I need a 3rd party oracle to
confirm anything?

~~~
drcode
It would look something like:

contract Hello { string greeting; function setName(string name) {
greeting="Hello "+name; } }

The solidity compiler will automatically produce a "getter" function to
retrieve the greeting.

~~~
csarva
It will only be exposed automatically if you mark it public, i.e., 'string
public greeting'

------
dudeonthenet
I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in
the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question:

When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global,
decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware
architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the
basic, atomic unit of computation that the network (or other blockchain
technologies) can perform. If we think of regular computers, then no matter in
which language an application ( i dislike the word 'app' :) is written in,
eventually we end up talking about the x86 instruction set, the microcode that
makes up each instruction, and, finally, the actual transistors logic that run
them.

I somehow feel this is important to ask because we have to take into account
the energy efficiency of computation. For example, if we think about the x86
ADD instruction, there is an approximately fixed amount of energy it
dissipates when it is performed. ( This is a pretty interesting subject in
intself:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle)
)

What would be an equivalent ADD instruction or other basic unit of computation
on the Ethereum computer and how expensive would it be? If it involves one or
several distributed blockchain operations, then it seems to me that this model
would be neither energy efficient, nor performant, especially if we take into
account the _distributed_ factor, which means that such an operation would be
very costly since getting one bit of information from one end to the other
requires an arbitrary number of routers along its path, and those consume
energy to operate.

So I guess what I'm trying to ask is if this is practical in any useful way.

~~~
alexfisher
Check-out the Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction set by reviewing Gavin's
Yellow Paper. It start on page 22:

[http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf](http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf)

~~~
dudeonthenet
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look

------
roymurdock
What are the costs like for building resource intensive apps on ethereum?
Would be interested in comparing with centralized compute providers.

~~~
replies_to_all
A lot more expensive. There will be no comparison in cost, or at least that is
the wrong comparison to be making.

~~~
roymurdock
I'm not sure if I'm reading ethereum right, but it sounds a lot like mesh
computing, where a user can bid for unused cycles on a bunch of networked
computers, or one "world computer" if you agree with the author's
characterization.

If that is correct, then ethereum and Amazon spot instances could be
interchangeable - low availability, but potentially lower cost due to the
bidding process if there is a lot of excess compute power on the network.

~~~
aakilfernandes
Sorry, thats not correct. The only person who gets compensated for performing
computations are the miners. Everyone else performs computation so they can
have an up-to-date blockchain, but are not compensated.

Ethereum is the most expensive computational environment you can imagine.
However, it is also the highest trust. Its not for computationally-limited
(gaming/data analysis) its for trust-limited (financial applications/privacy)

There is an effort to build a computation market on top of Ethereum, but the
computation happens off the chain.

[https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-
market](https://github.com/pipermerriam/ethereum-computation-market)

~~~
roymurdock
For some reason I thought Ethereum was different than a flavored blockchain,
but I guess it's just the branding/dev ecosystem that is different.

------
t0mk
I wonder to what extent is the price rise a bubble, and to what extent it's
valuation of the potential.

~~~
davidgerard
It was a pump'n'dump. Lots and lots of people on the Reddit bitcoin-related
subs reported PM spam about Ethereum, for instance.

~~~
vonklaus
Pump and dump the way you phrased it, seems to auggest the entire thing is a
pump and dump scheme.

Either way, the price fluctuates woldly as people try to do this scheme, but
the company raised $15m and appears to be actively developing the tech. So
whether it works(it appears promising) or not, they seem to be svidly trying

~~~
davidgerard
I'm speaking specifically of the price rise then fall in the last couple of
weeks.

The fundraiser, of course, was a pre-mined altcoin.

~~~
vonklaus
Interesting take. To summarize, you believe that speculators manipulate
markets and prices decouple from value because self interested parties force
it to communicate information incorrectly?

Also, you point out that the announcement of the intention to premine ether
ended up leading to the Ethereum project implementing a plan to premine ether
and sell it at a known and predetermined rate?

Riveting conclusion, surprised more people aren't talking about this.

I for one don't buy into the "conspiracy theory" that our society is built on
debt, and monetary and fiscal policy have been managed poorly such that
capital can not be incentivized to loan. Instead, rates will penalize banks
for _not_ lending, as economists try to force staples like food and oil up to
introduce inflation into the system as they have lost control on spending as
well as flooring rate levels thus losing both measures to fix the problem.

If that were true, it would be bad.

 _All above was obvious satire_

------
vamur
One issue with Ethereum is that smart contracts are expensive and must run on
every node. These days a VPS with 2GB RAM costs $4 so Ethereum would not be
competitive even in short term.

Another issue is the blockchain size which is already 8GB and growing faster
than the Bitcoin blockchain.

~~~
drcode
Ethereum smart contracts have abilities far beyond a VPS, particularly around
security, reliability, and trustlessness guarantees- Whether you think those
abilities have value and justify a new platform is a separate question, but
the argument that "this is like a VPS" is a misunderstanding of what ethereum
is offering with its technology.

The large blockchain size, on the other hand, is a legitimate problem with
ethereum (as with all blockchain systems.) Hopefully the devs will be able to
solve this problem- They are hard at work on a potential solution as we speak.

~~~
vamur
Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no
useful or popular dapps. This would mean that for most applications
trustlessness is not very useful. And for those apps where it would be
generally useful, such as exchanges, betting. etc, the expensive nature of gas
would mean that operating on Ethereum would be cost prohibitive and they would
lose to their centralized competitors. And how is Ethereum is more secure than
a properly setup VPS?

~~~
drcode
> Ethereum has been out for 7 months already and so far there have been no
> useful or popular dapps.

I think that's a valid criticism- I, too, am a bit disappointed that there are
few contracts yet with obvious utility.

However, as someone deep in the community and talking to lots of people, it
seems there's going to be tons of interesting dapps deployed in the next 6
months. Hopefully there will be a "killer dapp" among them.

> And how is Ethereum is more secure than a properly setup VPS?

If I store money on your VPS-based app, how can I be assured you can't steal
it from me? If I use a feature on your VPS, how can I be sure you won't
disable it tomorrow? Ethereum can provide these sorts of guarantees.

------
happywolf
Need somebody to shed lights on this: my understanding is Ethereum started
with pre-farmed ethers and opened for sale in bitcoins.

My two questions:

1) Any info on how many ethers the founders/founding company had farmed and
holding in vault?

2) If Ethereum takes off (financially), and these early members start to dump
the ethers for cash, will it crash the Ethereum economy?

Bitcoin could have exactly the same issue, but I feel the difference is most
people then wasn't sure if crypto currency would fly, and it is fair to reward
on the risk for those who trusted and held bitcoins.

Ethereum sounds like a more refined and polished business endeavour, and I
feel it gets too much hype lately.

------
jcfrei
I've dabbled with the dev tools ethereum provided for a while and I can't
imagine that the computations ethereum does will ever be fast enough for a
general purpose, distributed computation platform. If I had to wager on yet
another cryptocurrency™ I'd bet on Zcash
([https://github.com/zcash/zcash](https://github.com/zcash/zcash)). They
promise a real differentiator for cryptocurrencies with their zero-knowledge
proofs.

~~~
pipermerriam
Have you read up on the proposals and information on plans for Proof-of-Stake
(Casper) and Scaling/Concurrency via sharding? Both of those are directed at
fixing the "fast enough" problem.

------
repomies69
"The Ethereum network is a distributed economy like Bitcoin, except it is
much, much more powerful. The essential difference is that Ethereum is
programmable. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to program a whole new
currency like Bitcoin."

AFAIK it takes 5 minutes to fork Bitcoin and create a new altcoin. Why would I
use ethereum for my altcoin instead of doing a new altcoin?

~~~
eco
They don't mean fork ethereum and create a new currency. They mean create a
new currency running on the ethereum platform. A bitcoin fork means you have
to build up a group of miners sufficiently large and diverse enough that
everyone trusts it. Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust
that ethereum has.

Here is the tutorial about creating your own coin on ethereum. It's pretty
short and interesting:
[https://www.ethereum.org/token](https://www.ethereum.org/token)

People like to think of ether as another cryptocurrency like bitcoin but the
ethereum currency is intended to be more like a commodity that is used to fuel
the platform that runs all sorts of stuff (including currencies).

~~~
repomies69
I know what they mean.

> A bitcoin fork means you have to build up a group of miners sufficiently
> large and diverse enough that everyone trusts it.

Of course, you need miners. However the mining is the easy part, otherwise you
need marketing, use cases, etc, for the currency to get any traction. I think
an altcoin working on top of the ethereum blockchain would not be as
convincing as invidual altcoin.

However of course if we are speaking about some other kind of asset, it might
make sense to do it on ethereum.

> Making a currency on ethereum means it inherits the trust that ethereum has.

No. Maybe mining security or something, but trust? Why would anyone use these
crappy in-ethereum tokens, when you can just use ether itself. Or bitcoin.

You can make tokens as well inside bitcoin via colored coins and similar
methods. They haven't gained much traction, I doubt that they will inside
ethereum.

~~~
eterpstra
Tokens created on Ethereum can have very niche use cases. Digix has tokens
that are pegged to a gram of gold sitting in a warehouse. Augur uses tokens to
track user reputation. Free My Vunk uses tokens as currency to buy and sell
items in video games.

The developers can focus entirely on their business use case for the currency
(and the marketing) without the need to create an entirely new cryptocurrency.

------
nikkwong
I'm still not getting this. Let's say I have a node server that can serve up
some sort of front end application. How would something like that run on
etherium? Are a number of computers in the network going to get a copy of my
source code copied onto them so they can 'distribute' it effectively? That
doesn't seem very practical to me.

~~~
drcode
> That doesn't seem very practical to me.

Ethereum has the highest uptime of any computing platform ever developed. It's
probably something like 99.99999% uptime (assuming a 0.00001% yearly chance
that the earth is destroyed in a given year from a giant asteroid impact)

What would be a "practical" way of getting the same results with your node
server?

------
na85
Has it been six months since the last Ethereum post already?

Is Ethereum still "engendering positive disruption"? I see they've updated
their site to make it more approachable and read less like proecdurally-
generated Venture Capitalist jargon. That's nice.

I see they've added a javascript environment. Yuck.

~~~
mbilker
They had the javascript environment for awhile now.

------
l_beka_l
Awesome Ethereum [https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-
ethereum](https://github.com/btomashvili/awesome-ethereum)

------
ilaksh
We need something like Ethereum or Bitcoin but built on a common platform such
as web assembly which is an AST supporting multiple programming languages,
with semantic versioning and an npm-like registry. This way it can evolve
easily.

~~~
jbpetersen
We're only one transpiler away from that.

------
harryf
Does Ethereum provide any solution to the [ever growing
Blckchain]([https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-
size](https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size)) ?

~~~
eco
Yes. See Vitalik's post from last year about State Tree Pruning:

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-
pruning/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/)

------
tluyben2
I built a PoC for a social benefits platform on this a while ago. It was not
ideal; mostly tasks that needed to be guaranteed to run at certain times was a
pain. Because of several of those issues the project was cancelled.

~~~
jbpetersen
Were you using Ethereum Alarm Clock? If you were then I'd be curious to hear
about issues with it and if not then taking a second shot at your PoC could be
worthwhile.

------
powera
I still don't understand how anyone can believe that paying ten to a hundred
times as much for algorithmically provable trust or whatever will get any
market traction ever.

~~~
jnpn
There are many services in this world which require a trusted intermediary
between users. The fees these services charge are _not_ a function of compute
cycles. They are, however, often a function of pricing power derived from
competition (or lack thereof). Where decentralized computation is less
expensive than the fees charged by incumbents in the trusted intermediary
business, there is the opportunity for a new entrant to leverage the tech to
profit on the spread.

------
camelNotation
Actually, you can turn it off in every way that counts as long as you turn off
the Internet, which is entirely possible.

------
rodrigo-mx
Let's everybody use our home electricity so that big companies save big money
managing their big data!﻿

------
fiatjaf
So this thing is live yet? I thought they were having problems with the
algorithms and so on.

~~~
aakilfernandes
Its technically in the "frontier" stage, which means that its in "beta" of
sorts. There are lots of developers working on Ethereum dapps and it is more
than useable, however consumers should be aware there may be loss-causing bugs
around.

------
ck2
Heated my apartment two winters ago with litecoin and dogecoin mining.

Too late for ether.

------
srameshc
What happened overnight ? Why am I seeing so much ethereum this morning ?

~~~
aakilfernandes
I often notice HN topics come in groups. I think its because people read about
a topic, get interested, do some research, and then start submitting articles
they find.

------
repomies69
Are there examples of in/use DAPPS?

~~~
httpagent
Augur, a decentralized prediction market, is the biggest anticipated release
on the horizon.

------
kefka
Unfortunately, I'm trying to obtain a small amount of ethereum currency to
experiment with this..

And I just killed my thread doing 1M hashes a sec, because I found out that
6MHash/sec = 5 Eth/month on average.

I'll spend my time learning other things, mainly because this is inaccessible
to me.

~~~
cjm
You can buy the Ether on an exchange.

~~~
kefka
I was hoping for a roughly low barrier of entry, rather than try to figure out
who will trade USB for ETH, as I have no BTC.

In all honesty, I'm looking at distributed applications as well, which from
what I read Ethereum says it does and doesn't do. It's a bit fast and loose
from what I read about, about Ethereum's capabilities.

I'll go back to my experimenting with TOR and how it might be possible to make
your own distributed applications within the Hidden Services. That's free to
use, and as low bar as I can think of. (Add machine, shows up as HS.)

~~~
crazydoggers
As other posters have mentioned, you can download the Mist client and test
things on the testnet.

And you don't have to mine, you can get free testnet ethereum via the wei
faucet:

[https://zerogox.com/ethereum/wei_faucet](https://zerogox.com/ethereum/wei_faucet)

Gas prices to run code on ethereum are fractions of ethereum, so even a small
amount will get you pretty far.

