

Ethereum - msvan
https://www.ethereum.org/

======
platz
1\. How does a smart contract learn about a "fact"? In a betting example, say
two individuals bet on a football game. How does the algo determine which team
won? The wired article on ethereum says "it will determine the winner by
looking up the score on the web". This seems like a bug fest waiting to
happen. What if the endpoints it wants to query are down? How to avoid people
trying to "fool" the algo by hacking the sites it's looking at for the
"facts"?

2\. How on earth do you intend to store everyone's data in a single
blockchain? This is like having _every_ application's database (not even the
one's you use yourself) on your computer.

*edit - starting to get some responses here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/21orz7/noob_questi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/21orz7/noob_questions_about_ethereum/)

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milesf
Spend 30 seconds on the site. Didn't get it. Move on.

If this is important, it will appear again on (HN|Reddit|etc) for me to take a
closer look.

Oh, and 30 seconds is a looooong time to spend on a site. I would guess people
spend no more than 5 to 10 seconds on a site before they decide to investigate
further or move on.

~~~
iancarroll
You couldn't take a minute to actually read it over?

It's not hard to understand. If you don't want to give new ideas the time of
day, don't click on it; and especially don't waste your precious time on
commenting about it.

~~~
milesf
Actually, it's because I think maybe there's something there that I commented
on it. I just didn't get it. The emerging norm for people with ideas is to
package them in a way that draws people in.

I'm guessing the majority of people on HN have some great idea that burning in
their gut. Hopefully they will realize the important of great marketing and
sales copy, because there are countless other ideas vying for our attention.

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binarymax
_Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about
anything: voting, ..._

So, just the other day, I was lamenting with my friend and we had a thought
experiment on whether it would be possible to use a bitcoin-like
network/blockchain to solve the identity problem for voting on the internet.

We had some rock solid ideas for lots of details, but got stuck on the
anonymous vote part. For example, everyone should be able to tell that I
actually voted, but not who I voted for.

Does anyone know how this could be accomplished?

This looks like a great project. Would be interested to see what they meant
when they listed voting as their first example.

~~~
tlrobinson
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-
end_auditable_voting_sys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-
end_auditable_voting_systems)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption)

------
BenderV
I follow Ethereum for a while now, it's really impressive the vision of the
founders. Especially Vitalik Buterin. He have the technical abilities, the
media power (he is a co-founder of the Bitcoin Magazine), and the vision (he
anticipate long-term effect).

The team is growing rapidly, with impressive new members. The community as
well.

~~~
lun4r
This thing is going to be huge. I'll be following too, with lots of interest.
Hard to wrap my head around it, though..

------
Joeboy
I'm kind of appalled by all the comments complaining that people don't
understand Ethereum after spending a very short amount of time on the site. If
you think it looks interesting, investigate further. If not, move on. Not
being able to understand something after 30s doesn't mean that thing has no
value.

~~~
powera
Why are there so many comments complaining this is confusing, and so few
explaining what it actually does?

------
a124556
"a revolutionary new platform for applications"

That didn't tell me anything.

~~~
Joeboy
...you know there's more information if you scroll down?

~~~
OutThisLife
Scrolled down. Read everything. Still don't see the purpose.

~~~
dubcanada
I'm with you, I read everything and still have no idea what it is.

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bsg75
Unfortunately the first thing I notice is the fancy animation at the top of
the page stutters when loading, and causes my browser to use far more CPU than
this type of page should.

~~~
rabbyte
Why is that unfortunate if you know it has nothing to do with what they're
building?

~~~
eragnew
Because presentation of the idea matters.

~~~
rabbyte
Sure but context also matters. If they were building something for web or
everyday consumers, maybe I would agree. There are plenty of useful platforms
and tools that belong to not-so-great site designs (ie:
[http://curl.haxx.se/](http://curl.haxx.se/) ). Seems silly to have that weigh
in on the idea at all but maybe that's just me.

~~~
bsg75
> If they were building something for web or everyday consumers...

Exactly, first impressions matter. If it were a consumer product, than the
flashy decoration would have a purpose in marketing terms.

------
jetblackio
Come on guys, there's a video right on the front page. It's only a couple of
minutes. It explains very well what Ethereum is. I almost always prefer that
the site be self-explanatory in just a few seconds as well, but if you're not
very familiar with Bitcoin, it would be a wall of text to explain what this
product is. In this case, I think a video was definitely the way to go.

On another note, this looks like an awesome project. I wonder what
implications this could have in net neutrality.

------
bengotow
What lost me were the code examples for things like "name registration." Take
this line for example:

contract.storage[tx.data[0]] = tx.data[1]

They could have at least used a named local variable for "tx.data[0]" to give
some context. What the hell is this doing?

~~~
tlrobinson
This is literally just storing a key/value pair in a map. i.e. Registering a
name. It's not complicated, and that's the point (it takes a few lines of code
to recreate "Namecoin" on Ethereum)

~~~
Joeboy
So it might be clearer to say

    
    
      name = tx.data[0]
      value = tx.data[1]
      contract.storage[name] = value

------
kristofferR
Wired has a great article about it here:
[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/ethereum/](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/ethereum/)

------
skybrian
The problem with generic abstractions for doing anything is that it's hard to
tell how well they will work for doing specific things. Okay, so maybe you
could build something like DNS on it. Does it actually work well for that in
practice? How do you know? Similarly for any other application that they
briefly mentioned.

You only need one "killer app" to prove an abstraction, but you do need one,
and it should be front and center.

------
Joeboy
Ok, after watching the intro video I'm thinking Etherium is kind of like a P2P
automated trading platform. Which seems like it would put a _lot_ of
responsibility on coders. If your automated trading bot is losing you
billions, you can just flick the off switch. If your code is running on a
million strangers' computers, not so much.

It will be interesting to find out how this pans out. Possibly in the Chinese
proverb sense.

------
joyofdata
"Almost immediately, Freitas started building a more secure and robust
alternative to Twitter, making use of code from two other massively successful
online projects: bitcoin and BitTorrent."

[[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/twister/](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/twister/)]

Seems to be related to the idea behind Twister.

------
wesley
You may also want to check out [http://nxtcrypto.org](http://nxtcrypto.org)
which is also working on turing complete functionality. They're working on a
decentralized exchange at the moment, testable at [http://nxtra.org/nxt-
client](http://nxtra.org/nxt-client)

They do not have the marketing skills of ethereum tho..

------
z3phyr
Can someone explain in short what is it and what it does? It 'looks' exciting,
but in excitement I cannot understand its full purpose.

~~~
kylebrown
The vision is that its a new platform for implementing crypto "contracts". The
most basic contract is a simple send transaction. Multi-sig (m-of-n) addresses
are another type of contract. Decentralized lotteries (think satoshidice 2.0)
are another, and so on. In bitcoin, such contracts are implemented in "bitcoin
script" \- an assembly-like programming language with opcodes such as PUSH,
POP, and CHECKSIG. So currently, if you want to write a bitcoin contract, you
would have to hand-write it in this assembly language.

Ethereum is a vision to provide a higher-level language for implementing
contracts - ECLL (Ethereum C-Like Language) - which compiles down to the
assembly-like opcode instructions of "ethereum script". It will supposedly
also have more flexible ways to store data/state (in bitcoin script, a
contract's state is encoded as spendable or unspendable inputs and outputs).

In bitcoin, the central abstraction is the transaction: tx inputs and outputs
are your memory address references. In ethereum, the central abstraction is
the higher-level contract: your inputs and outputs are variables, and the ECCL
compiler does the memory management and assembly opcodes.

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markbnj
I think I _sort_ of got it. Still confused over what "ether" is paying for:
computing cycles? Bandwidth? Trust?

~~~
tlrobinson
Yes. The computing resources required to run the network (bandwidth,
computation, storage)

