
Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum, Talks Bitcoin’s Most Ambitious Successor - dcawrey
https://medium.com/zapchain-magazine/vitalik-buterin-creator-of-ethereum-talks-bitcoin-s-most-ambitious-successor-f2c0e19364fe
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Hermel
Ethereum is not shooting for the moon, they are shooting for alpha centauri. I
hope they succeed, but I'm skeptical whether the world is ready.

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na85
Looks like they've updated/changed their whitepapers. A few months ago their
literature was chock-full of statements like "engendering positive disruption"
which made me wonder how anyone takes this project seriously.

Is it possible this is a serious project and not a pump-and-dump?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I'm not sure... I think there's quite a bit of genuine development. But at the
end of the day, it appears anything you can build on ethereum you can build on
bitcoin.

Beyond that they did this huge crowd funding which was quite strange, not
through investments or donations (ownership or charity/support), but rather
through selling ethers, which is a bit like an API selling an access token.
Only the ethers sold for upwards of $15-20 million as far as I remember, while
not having any real value, and not being necessary in large volumes for
developers to work with. They said it wasn't an investment, yet sold it as
such. Nobody got any ownership, yet people didn't give them $15 million+ out
of charity or support, either. They also had this strange scheme where the
price continued going up, again, as if it was an investment that was 'on sale'
and if you didn't buy now, it'd only become more expensive, in the span of
like a few weeks while whatever you were supposed to buy (ethers) didn't go up
in value, and in fact, remained non-existent as you couldn't use them as it my
next point: vaporware.

Sot the fact it's still vaporware (can change, but factually speaking its
vaporware today) and the fact that nothing ethereum does can't be done on
existing platforms, which unlike ethereum actually exist, work, are used by
large companies and has network effects, and the focus on Vitalik being some
brilliant 20 year old next Zuckerberg, it's very much reminiscent of pump &
dump.

We'll have to see. They've got the money, the team, a paper, and some promises
for a 2015 launch. So we should know soon enough. I've got modest hope, but
I'm not terribly excited.

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brayton
Do we know how much of the $13M they have left?

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bachback
raised = 18m$

assets left = 7.5m$

expense = 4m$

trading losses = 6.5m

It's an insane amount of money to burn through, without releasing anything of
utility so far. I had to deal with several people from that team and they are
scammers. Idea itself is interesting, but not workable.

~~~
0x8D3A
Scammers isn't the least of it. The system they have designed and executed is
ludicrously insecure and falls to even the most basic of flaws. It's unlikely
that it will ever be able to achieve consensus given the endless stream of
crashes and logic errors, like being able to send yourself a negative balance
(thus, infinite money) or crashing every node in the network by sending a
block header with a nonce of zero. The sheer quantity of security bugs and
undefined behavior in the _two_ clients attempting to act in bit-for-bit
identical ways in two different languages is quite alarming.

[https://github.com/ethereum/go-
ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9...](https://github.com/ethereum/go-
ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=label%3Avuln+)

I'd bet against it ever getting to try it's consensus given that their launch
is now going to be completely centralized (ie, it can't stand up on it's own
let alone with malicious attackers, so it's going to be remotely controlled by
the developers for now). Will they ever remove the crutch and risk everything
crumbling? Seems very doubtful.

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bachback
Right. It's not really a block-chain, but a block-tree (whatever that is
supposed to be).

I suspect to make smart contracts work, one needs a different time-
stamping/incentive system altogether (non-blockchain), but haven't seen any
progress in that direction.

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DennisP
For more information on the block tree see the GHOST protocol paper, which
predates Ethereum. It does collapse into a linear chain for all but the most
recent blocks.

[http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf)

~~~
bachback
I know that paper. The authors have no background in distributed systems and
use math to prove absurd things. If you look at the core proposed algorithm,
it's not even a P2P algorithm.

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DennisP
Eh? It's P2P just like Bitcoin. The only difference is how forks are resolved.

Bitcoin nodes choose the longest chain they see. Another way to put that is:
at any forking point, Bitcoin nodes choose the block with the longest chain
after it.

GHOST nodes choose the block with the most total computation after it (which
may include additional branches).

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natrius
Don't confuse Ethereum for a currency that competes with Bitcoin. It's
different. It's a decentralized, consensus-driven database that anyone can
use. Anything that required a trustworthy middleman or counterparty can be
replaced by this database where no one can forge entries or take unpredictable
actions.

Ethereum and systems like it make it easier for humans to interact with each
other, and it will be a core part of the story of our era.

~~~
zzalpha
_it will be a core part of the story of our era._

ROFL, wow... that's not grandiose at all.

It's a database. On the internet. I'm gonna go out on a limb and bet at least
a few billion folks on the planet likely won't see their lives change much any
time soon because Etherium was conceived.

Edit: Ahh. Zapchain again. Now I get it.

Times like this I wish there was a way to filter my Hacker News RSS feed to
cull out posts from particular users or sources...

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aianus
A few billion folks live the same life now as they did before the computer was
invented. Does that make the computer an insignificant part of our era?

~~~
zzalpha
What? That's not at all true. Just because a person doesn't, themselves, own a
computer, doesn't mean their lives aren't touched by their existence.

As the first example that springs to mind: computers have enabled access to
telecommunications infrastructure (think cell phones), which have utterly
transformed the lives of many of the world's poorest.

But a pipedream consensus database running on the internet? Colour me
skeptical that it's going to utterly transform the world the way the computer
has.

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MCRed
It's an alt coin, it's pre-mined and because of that it cannot be a successor
to Bitcoin which was not pre-mined. (Though Satoshi mined a little bit, that
bitcoin has been left out of circulation.)

For alt-coins pre-mining generally means its a scam.

They are proposing a whole bunch of next generation functionality, which if
they pull it off may overcome the unfairness of pre-mining and make them all
super rich.

But it's super ambitious and isn't yet clear that it will even be possible to
do what they want to do, and if they do it will take years to establish the
trust necessary to use it for its intended purpose.

Choosing to pre-mine means anyone who does due diligence won't be trusting
them for quite awhile.

I think this is still a lot of hype (And this article is just adding to it)
without substance.

I think the way bitcoin was done was correct-- no hype and just a release of
code.

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imaginenore
You are factually wrong. Only one third of Ether is premined.

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/04/10/the-issuance-model-
in-e...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/04/10/the-issuance-model-in-ethereum/)

~~~
chm
What one usually means by "pre-mining" is the allocation of a certain quantity
of resources/value (in this case ether) _before_ the genesis block. So in this
regard he was right.

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xnull6guest
Yeah... we need decentralization, but I can't tell Ethereum apart from any of
the other many proponents who have claimed to have invented that system and
technology. If we were to apply a tech adaptation of Aaronson's red flags for
outrageous math claims to Ethereum
([http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458))
I'm convinced we'd walk away immediately.

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drcode
Well, I know of four systems that try to solve this problem: Codius,
Counterparty, Ethereum, and Bithalo (in a limited sense.) I think all of the
developers for each system would agree 100% that the other three have
successfully solved the core problems, as well.

Nobody is making any extrordinary claims that they have some sort of magical
technology that others can't duplicate (and all of them except bithalo are
open source, making duplication easy.) The only question is which platform
will be first to deliver an experience that will attract main stream users, in
terms of stability and functionality.

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RustyRussell
Compulsory reference: [http://intheoreum.org/](http://intheoreum.org/)

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spectrum1234
No idea this was coming in 2015. Can't wait!!!

