
Status – A Mobile Ethereum OS - state
https://status.im/
======
jonathanstrange
I hate to sound so critical, it sure looks like an interesting project, but
could developers of such applications/websites _please_ stop putting
everything on their web page in marketing speech? Why do so many FOSS
developers imitate the worst aspects of the proprietary, commercial software
world?

I looked at the feature descriptions and they are full of meaningless
buzzwords like "crowd sourced wisdom". So you've lost a potential user.
K.I.S.S.

~~~
johnnydoebk
>> marketing speech

>> FOSS developers

I don't think it has something to do with FOSS but rather with blockchain
developers. Most projects have nice landing pages but very vague messages.

~~~
VMG
Agreed. While you're not paying for using the product by buying a software
license, you're often required to buy tokens (get it?) in order to use the
product. The developers benefit from the increase in token price, because they
often own a lot of those tokens.

Not that this is necessarily unethical, but it's good to know the incentives
behind this.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
wouldn't that be considered illegal market manipulation if they were somehow
doing the same thing with US currency?

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bschwindHN
This app uses re-natal, a wrapper of React Native for ClojureScript. It also
uses a ClojureScript framework called "re-frame" for data flow and "reagent"
for wrapping React.

It's a pleasure to work with (most of the time, there are hiccups here and
there) and you can develop for iOS and Android simultaneously. I highly
recommend checking it out.

[https://github.com/drapanjanas/re-natal](https://github.com/drapanjanas/re-
natal)

[https://github.com/status-im/status-react/](https://github.com/status-
im/status-react/)

~~~
mej10
Seconded! re-frame/reagent/re-natal are great. Really fun to use.

------
LeoPanthera
Remarkably similar to Token from Coinbase, which launched just yesterday:
[https://www.tokenbrowser.com](https://www.tokenbrowser.com) (and which is
available in the iOS app store)

~~~
carlbennetts
Coinbase are nice people, and I hope Token is a success. If you'd like to
compare the two products please do check out the tech stack - Status is
completely decentralized, so doesn't rely on any centralised servers :)

~~~
px43
Is status.im using whisper for messaging? Is there end to end crypto between
users?

------
ganwar
You can find a comprehensive list of dapps here:
[http://dapps.ethercasts.com](http://dapps.ethercasts.com)

Developer activity in Ethereum is increasing at a very fast pace. This is only
supposed to accelerate after the upcoming metropolis upgrade hard fork.

------
adamrezich
I haven't followed Ethereum since the whole DAO debacle. I was very excited
about the technology but the way the whole hard fork/Ethereum Classic thing
was handled really turned me off. Has progress been made on formally verifying
contracts or anything like that? And why aren't more people bothered by the
whole hard fork thing?

~~~
LeoPanthera
I think the current Bitcoin situation is really showing that rapid, organized
hard forks when problems occur is an extremely good thing. Bitcoin is
currently frozen in time, since there are two major competing clients, and
neither dare make any incompatible changes for fear of creating a fork, and
right now neither has a majority.

A decentralized cryptocurrency is a lovely ideal, but in the dirty real world,
Ethereum and its ilk will win out.

~~~
JeremyBanks
The problem is not with forking to develop the protocol. Certainly, that is a
good thing, and BitCoin's inability to do so is a serious issue.

The problem is forking _to undo a specific transaction_. That should never
happen. The fact that so many people over-invested in a risky experimental
project that they felt they had to sabotage the protocol to protect themselves
reflects very poorly on the community.

~~~
flashmob
Technically, no transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to new rules set
in the future. The users of the new version also had a choice if they wanted
to support the fork or not, the majority went with the fork.

This is a screenshot of the choice everyone was asked when starting up their
wallet:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Et...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Ethereum-
Wallet_and_Mist_Beta_with_Hard_Fork_choice_0.8.1.png/1113px-Ethereum-
Wallet_and_Mist_Beta_with_Hard_Fork_choice_0.8.1.png)

Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a
blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and
successfully hardfork to Proof of Stake (PoS) mining in the future.

~~~
baobabKoodaa
Nice whitewashing. While you are technically correct that no transactions were
undone, in practice a theft was (largely) reverted. You are also
misrepresenting "users' choice" with regards to supporting the fork. If you
make a transaction and everyone moves onto a different chain in order to
effectively cancel your transaction, that's censorship of transactions.
Censorship was a good choice in this case, but let's not pretend it's
something it wasn't.

~~~
splintercell
> If you make a transaction and everyone moves onto a different chain in order
> to effectively cancel your transaction, that's censorship of transactions.

If you don't like what NYT says, and you cancel your subscription and
subscribe to WSJ (and let's just say that millions of people do the same
thing, possibly due to some event), have you effectively censored NYT then?

The fact is, censorship has a meaning, and the way you're using the language,
abuses that. We didn't censor Ubuntu when because of their unity decision lots
of people moved to Linux Mint or to other distros.

We didn't censor Digg when it lost a huge traffic to Reddit after the v3
changes.

Uber wasn't censored when after the controversial immigration changes by
Trump, people started to delete uber app and ride Lyft.

Censorship is when an organization forces your speech from all effective
expression.

Will ETC be invoking censorship when they hard fork to eliminate the upcoming
Ice Age baked into the Ethereum protocol?

~~~
adamrezich
Your analogy breaks down because we don't trade newspapers as currency, we
consume them for information.

~~~
splintercell
And until 2016 nobody used the phrase 'censorship of transactions'.

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kkapelon
Worst name ever. It will be very hard for people to search about this (not to
mention the SEO problems)

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ksahin
Amazing project, and great landing page btw. It seems the Ethereum ecosystem
is becomming more and more mature, that's great !

~~~
bshimmin
I actually thought this was a Stripe product when I first saw the landing page
- and I mean that as a compliment, because Stripe's web pages are always
beautiful. (My only slight criticism of this one is that the bits which load
in progressively as you scroll down have slightly too much of a delay.)

------
mmjaa
This looks great, but the only thing stopping me from integrating something
like this into my apps is the fact that there isn't any native (Objective-C)
client/library support, so far.

Its one thing to have a prototype built with JS. Its another thing entirely to
integrate into apps which use native technologies.

------
Ethcoin
Whenever there is an article on crypto currencies, I see a subset of accounts
come out of the woodwork to praise them.

Whether you've invested in Ethereum should be mentioned.

------
fiatjaf
Man, this is a great idea.

EDIT: Hey, you can actually download it right now if you join the beta.

~~~
carlbennetts
Thanks so much for trying it out! We're also completely open source so
contributors are most welcome
([https://wiki.status.im/contributing/development/introduction...](https://wiki.status.im/contributing/development/introduction/))
- also feel free to come say Hi on our Slack
([http://slack.status.im/](http://slack.status.im/)), we're friendly people :)

------
marclave
Great idea, and the landing page is incredibly beautiful. Well done.

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k0mplex
But what's it for?

~~~
coolspot
web3

~~~
beaner
Could they call it anything less self-explanatory?

~~~
robomc
Well, the other option is to explain how it's like existing methods of
delivering online functionality, but decentralised - a thing that nobody
really values - plus also incredibly slow, fairly complex, and you have to pay
for everything that happens, and also the entire ecosystem is centred around a
volatile speculation-rife currency and an approach to financial transactions
which has been full of real and significant security problems - including the
theft of millions of dollars from the flagship implementation right under the
noses of many of the core devs, despite paying corrupt levels of money to
other core boosters of the platform for completely hopeless security
reviews...

~~~
cookiecaper
Totally with you here. The blockchain is an awesome experiment and prototype
of what a good decentralized, verifiable system could look like, but it has
several significant flaws, some of which are obvious even in the limited
context of a worldwide ledger (bitcoin).

In particular, throwing away 47 zetaflops/s of computing power (the current
compute power of the bitcoin network [0]) and all of the electricity required
to generate it in order to verify the transactions of the tiny quantity of
people currently using bitcoin is obscene, and the mechanism that encourages
this should be recognized as the unscalable disaster that it is. Basing "Web
3.0" on such mechanisms is, frankly, a ridiculous proposition.

And all of this "decentralization" is thrown out the window by virtually
everyone, because to store a full copy of the blockchain on your local disk,
you need -- let's see --

    
    
        $ du -sh /mnt/apps_syn/dot_bitcoin/
        118G    /mnt/apps_syn/dot_bitcoin/
    

120 gigabytes of space. So you end up just trusting Coinbase or whoever you
have your wallet from anyway, no different than trusting your bank.

If Coinbase had an Ethereum moment, they could fork the chain that all of
their wallets use, and with their MtGox-like domination of the market, any
resistance to their fork would seriously damage Bitcoin overall. I imagine
most miners would go along with it because they don't want their btc to drop
to 0.

Consider also that there is virtually no transparency into the actual miner
operations. The biggest miners are behind "pools" \-- relays -- and though the
idea is that pools are made up of tens of thousands of independently-
controlled computers, I suspect that if we could see through to which machines
were _actually_ doing most of the work, bitcoin would suddenly seem a lot less
"decentralized".

This is not to mention that miners behind pools are totally at the pool's
mercy, or that 5 pools hold over 50% of the network's hashrate, and that these
pool operators have been in one room together to decide on blockchain policy
(re blocksize, which miners are incentivized to oppose, since smaller
blocksize == higher transaction fees). That is little different than big banks
meeting under the auspices of the Federal Reserve to control monetary policy.

It's very sad that people saw bitcoin and thought it was a good idea to expand
its flawed model out, instead of accepting it for the forward-thinking
prototype it was and thinking about how to improve it before jumping all in.

[0] per [https://bitcoinwatch.com](https://bitcoinwatch.com)

~~~
mbrock
I work full time on Ethereum development, and I don't have any kind of
maximalistic opinions about decentralization, the evils of banks, or whatever.

It's just a very interesting technology with a really great momentum. But
everything is flawed under the sun. There is no perfect technology that can
completely decentralize authority with no resource demands.

Or maybe Satoshi's reincarnation will come and deliver a new mind-blowing
concept that makes blockchains completely deprecated. That would be pretty
cool. But until then, you know.

By the way, Ethereum's roadmap includes switching away from proof of work
towards proof of stake, which doesn't waste electricity. This model has been
used successfully, for example by Bitshares.

It also includes a light client protocol so mobile nodes don't need much disk
space or processing power.

[As always, Hacker News is full of critics...]

~~~
cookiecaper
This isn't a nitpick about how the blockchain isn't perfect. IPv4 is
imperfect, HTTP is imperfect, etc. The blockchain is ill-conceived and
impractical.

At this point, I only check in on the bitcoin community casually, so I'm not
familiar with proof of stake, but I'm glad to hear work is underway to resolve
that glaring issue in Ethereum. I'll definitely read up on it. Thanks for the
pointer.

>[As always, Hacker News is full of critics...]

Indeed. We come here to discuss, which will involve some criticism. Working on
Ethereum is not really an indictment, so don't worry. :)

~~~
mbrock
That's what I mean, you're not familiar with what's happening, yet you
comfortably dismiss the whole idea of blockchain as ill-conceived and
impractical.

So both of your major criticisms are being actively addressed by very smart
people who plan to have them solved in the near to medium term future.

Does that in any way change your view of blockchain? Maybe it could possibly
work? Or, no, it's just a hopeless dumb idea that will surely crash?

~~~
cookiecaper
>That's what I mean, you're not familiar with what's happening, yet you
comfortably dismiss the whole idea of blockchain as ill-conceived and
impractical.

It's not "the blockchain" anymore if they've changed the fundamental
mechanisms of its operation (e.g., eliminating miners, which the sibling
commenter indicated as a goal).

It may be _a_ blockchain, if we want to use "blockchain" as a generic
descriptor for a chain of cryptographic signatures, or a blockchain-inspired /
blockchain-derived concept, but "the" blockchain, as in the blockchain concept
developed for use with bitcoin, is fundamentally dependent on mining for its
validity. Change that, and it's not really "blockchain" anymore, at least not
as used in the current vernacular. And that's fine -- bitcoin quickly outgrew
its britches and needs revision.

>So both of your major criticisms are being actively addressed by very smart
people who plan to have them solved in the near to medium term future.

Yes, that's awesome. I'm glad that some people are now deciding that these
issues deserve a response instead of continuing headlong into the hype abyss.
Why should this mean that people can't complain? If I hadn't, I wouldn't have
known that Ethereum is working on a solution. :)

>Does that in any way change your view of blockchain? Maybe it could possibly
work? Or, no, it's just a hopeless dumb idea that will surely crash?

Again, I haven't reviewed it yet, but sure, changing the mechanisms of
operation could potentially make a thing called "blockchain" workable. "A rose
by any other name..." and all that.

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gorkemyurt
Is the intention here to run mini react-native apps (Dapps?) within a bigger
app (status app itself)?

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floflo79
So awesome to see these dapps get to the next level!

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woodandsteel
People have been using daps for a while now. Could someone explain what this
allows you to do that you couldn't do before?

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coolspot
If Apple would allow this in AppStore, it would be uuuge.

~~~
neilalexander
Near enough this exact idea is in the App Store in the form of another app
called "Token".

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Jabanga
Does Status use SPV?

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ptrinh
Nice one from Singapore ;-)

