
Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment - cookscar
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/business/dealbook/ethereum-bitcoin-digital-currency.html?hp=1
======
flunhat
What is the advantage in creating an Ethereum smart contract over a regular
contract in our legal system (using a lawyer and some pen and paper)?

If code has bugs (and sufficiently complex code will _always, always, always_
have bugs) you simply have to suffer the consequences (sorry for your loss) or
the entire community can choose to execute a hard fork and rewrite history
(see DAO). If a vanilla legal contract has some typos or even some semantic
differences that lead to ridiculous outcomes, lawyers and judges will hash it
out. People, not computers, make the final decisions in our legal system, so
human errors are mostly tolerated. If I sneak a clause into a contract saying
that the other party must pay me their entire salary every year, it would be
voided in an instant. Not so if placed in a "smart" contract.

Perhaps you could say that Ethereum is better than our legal system because
it's decentralized. But I don't think it's enough to say something is better
simply because it's decentralized. Why should I be afraid of a centralized
legal system? We elect politicians, who choose judges (who have to be
confirmed by legislative bodies whose members we also elect). Sure, it's not
perfect, but it's hardly the tyrannical system that would make me turn to the
bug-ridden wild west of Ethereum smart contracts.

I think the only reasonable argument in favor of Ethereum contracts is that
they are easier to create (less friction, don't need to hire a lawyer, etc),
but that's hardly a _good_ thing. Real life contracts are expensive for a
reason, not because Rothschild & Co. have some other nefarious plans. You need
lawyers to write good contracts and think through their consequences, as well
as reasonable, human judges to decide issues when they arise. Ethereum, to me,
seems a purely ideological creation, not one rooted in actual _needs_ that
people have. Sure, it's decentralized and immutable (unless a contract hurts
the wrong people, lol) but did anyone really want that (except for those with
ideological reasons, i.e. libertarians)?

Not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to hear a strong opposing
viewpoint on this.

~~~
jurandom
I think the term "smart contract" is a misnomer. Sure, you could write a code
similar to one I use: Store money and confirm that I am alive every year (by
means of me sending a transaction to the contract). If I don't send this
transaction, all money is released to my daughters account. This looks like a
standard contract.

Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the
backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem
is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole
universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit
under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and
paper" umbrella.

~~~
gus_massa
How much money does the contract have? If it has enough money, it's an
interesting target for a cyberattack.

Let's hope we have to wait a long time until you die. Can one of you daughter
change her receiving address meanwhile? Can you change it? (Perhaps someone
stole her laptop with the wallet.)

Did you (1) write the code, or (2) copied it from ethereum.stackexchange or
(3) use a webpage that writes the smartcontract for you?

Are you sure the contract has no bugs??? Can someone else change the her
receiving address?

(1) If you write the code, probably nobody else review it. Let's hope it has
no bugs or it's small enough to be unnoticed.

(3) If many people are using the same code, and someone finds a bug it can be
used to steal the money from all the contracts. So you get hopefully more code
review from the creator and users, but also more unwanted code review.

(2) If you just copied the code from a forum or something, you can have the
best or the worst case of the previous scenarios, I'm not sure.

One "feature" of Bitcoin is that the programming language is so horrible that
nobody tries to write code in it. So you have a few types of standard
transactions (send money, post a message burning a small amount of bitcoins,
¿multisignature wallets?, ¿¿escrow service??) but all (most) of them are
extremely straightforward and extremely carefully reviewed.

------
segmondy
Unlike stocks which are regulated and you are not suppose to promote if you
already own some. There is no such thing for crypto currency. I always view
every article promoting digital currency like a pump and dump scheme.

~~~
curiousgal
As a third world citizen, Bitocin is godsent to me, never have I been able to
purchase stuff online and pay for books and services like a normal 21st
century human being. the feeling of being connected in that way to the rest of
the world is priceless and I owe it all to Bitcoin.

~~~
skybrian
What bookstores do you buy from that accept bitcoin?

~~~
diego
You can buy gift cards for lots of major retailers with bitcoin. You can even
buy from amazon via purse.io.

~~~
ufo
Everything I have ever read about purse.io indicates that the gift cards there
are purchased with stolen credit card details.

------
RichardHeart
1\. Ethereum will always have more consensus failures than bitcoin. It has a
larger attack surface, and competing implementations. 2\. Ethereum will always
be more risky because they abuse the "default option" power over apathetic
nodes. Thus any regulator can just have them make aml/kyc/sec reg a
requirement and bye bye efficiency. 3\. Ethereum was always have more down
time than bitcoin, check out 2017 for instance. (see point 1.) 4\. Ethereum
has 3x less reddit users, a couple x less twitter mentions, a few x less
wallets, a few x less press, a few x less years of testing, less hardware
wallets, less adoption in nearly every way. 5\. Ethereum tricks devs into
loser far more money with "smart" contracts that have bugs, than bitcoin does
with accidentally sending change to the miner instead of to a new address. 6\.
Smart contracts will always be dumb as long as you have to trust a signal from
the real, non digital world (oracle problem.) If you have to trust anyway,
then just let the oracle do it all. 7\. There's nearly no demand for the gas
you're supposed to buy with ETH to make ETH valuable at all, unless you like
it's speculative platform utility. Gambling on gambling. 8\. Their blockchain
is bloated grows faster than many users can download it. It's transactions per
a second is maybe 3x bitcoins. It's very likely sharding and other solutions
will not "work" if you care about immutability/trustlessness. 9\. Ethereum is
more centralized, more risky, down more often, and always will be.

------
willitpamp573
Ethereum is an obvious ponzi pump and dump scam.

I like how they frame the DAO hack as an opportunity for growth rather than a
gross display of incompetence followed by a breaking of the original promise
of immutability of the platform, which is what it was.

~~~
empath75
I think it's more accurately described as a platform for Ponzi schemes and
pump and dump scams.

~~~
Angostura
PAAS?

------
censoredforlife
No it is not, and as far as crypto is concerned - mainstream media is almost
always wrong. This really reads like PR for vitalik.

Eth is great as a developer platform, and it can/does have a future. However,
btc will remain the true king because of its decentralized nature.

~~~
computerwizard
Ethereum has over 4.5x as many full nodes as Bitcoin, how is it more
decentralized?

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
Bitcoin also only has one client with one development team whereas Ethereum
has multiple clients with multiple development teams. Tell me more about that
legendary Bitcoin decentralization.

~~~
censoredforlife
Having one or more clients doesn't mean much. Eth is organizationally
centralized because of the eth foundation. It literally has a dear leader
(vitalik), and no different from crypto issued by, say, the fed.

The entire point of crypto is that it tries to solve the problem with existing
currency (fiat), which is too tightly controlled by a few individuals.

~~~
vzcx
Is this actually solved by bitcoin? Is this actually solvable? I feel we're
butting up against the Iron Law of Oligarchy, here.

What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will
have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because
of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central
roof to solve the proof-of-work.

There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before
merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their
size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But
ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real
power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.

