
Ethereum: what’s about to happen - llamataboot
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ndBAcD72sHJnH0GpWY0pe8_KhkSZHFNTqBAHGBmY9N8/edit
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kodablah
I like the idea of Ethereum but it does not solve distributed application
needs IMO. I fear it is not able to solve large-scale app problems considering
it only has the computation power of a "1999 phone", requires every to store
(or at least know about) all state, and requires everyone up to date to run
EVERY computation. For instance, take a distributed Reddit where posts can be
mappings, even by deferring the costs to the viewers in terms of small amounts
of wei per view, it surely wouldn't be enough to cover the expense of
centralized permanent store (I understand Whisper is coming but it isn't
permanent enough).

I see a couple of Ehtereum frameworks out there using things IPFS for storage.
Are there any plans for Ethereum to solve concerns about forcing everyone to
run all calculations or should it always be seen as a small DHT that you only
want to use when you have real auditability concerns?

~~~
drcode
This is probably the most cogent criticism that can be leveled against
ethereum right now- The performance constraints for ethereum dapps are pretty
extreme. There are indeed plans to solve the problem you describe (read posts
on blog.ethereum.org mentioning scalability) and these problems are _probably_
solvable, but a working system remains far off.

That said, I think ethereum dapps are going to be substantively different from
traditional apps people are used to- I think there's a lot of opportunity in
this type of system for people who don't take the mindset of "This system is
bad at running existing app X therefore it is bad for everything."

~~~
heliumcraft
I think criticism is valid in regards to TPS. But for storage it's misguided.
The blockchain is meant for consensus, storing reddit comments or cat pictures
is an expensive and inefficient misuse of the blockchain.

~~~
Hexayurt
Hashes in the blockchain, when necessary, and then markets which will sell you
a file when presented with the hash. Storage technology can be whatever.

That's the smart plan, I think. I really want to take a crack at those storage
markets in-browser, use a distributed hash table and WebRTC to pay people for
leaving a browser open and allowing us to store stuff on their hard drives!

~~~
ac29
36 cents will get you a gigabyte stored for a year with 99.999999999%
durability and 99.99% availability at S3, accessible at multiple gigabits per
second.

When gigabit class connections are pervasive, the idea of paying people to
store data in an open web browser is maybe feasible, but certainly not
profitable for any involved party.

Before then? I dont even see the point.

~~~
karalabe
Ethereum doesn't aim to store massive data within the blockchain itself.
Instead, we're building an additional component into the network, Swarm, which
essentially acts as a DHT/DFS. There are already experimental branches within
the main repos, they function, but probably at a POC state.

Furthermore, a 1Gbit DL/200Mbit UL link costs $13.70/month where I live, so I
think it it is already very much viable, but maybe the distribution will be
skewed towards more internet friendly countries :)

------
natrius
Here's another angle on Ethereum: I think it's going to put Walmart, Amazon,
Uber and Airbnb out of business.

Consider Amazon. They buy goods from manufacturers, then sell those goods to
consumers for higher prices and pocket (or spend) the profits. Pretty simple.
They provide a great service that makes it easier for people to buy and sell
stuff, and they get paid well to do it.

But what if all of Amazon's customers wanted to band together and cut out the
middleman? They could use their collective buying power to get the same prices
from manufacturers, but eliminate the profit and just pay lower prices. It's
possible, but it'd be hard to achieve. Who would run the system? How would
they make decisions? It's so hard that the customers would give up, finish
buying their disposable consumer goods, watch an episode of Humans and go to
sleep.

Or one of them could come up with a solution. "Hey y'all, I wrote the software
for a marketplace system to connect us all directly to manufacturers, but I
know you can't trust me to never take a cut if I run the system myself. So
instead, I'll run it on a global computer that no one controls. Programs on
the global computer can never change, and no one can fake their data. That
means the system will be out of my control and the rules are set in stone.
It's everyone's system."

That global computer is called Ethereum, and it lets us build new kinds of
software that can coordinate human interactions so powerfully that this guy's
solution just might work. You could build other kinds of apps on Ethereum too,
like voluntary social safety nets, apps that let your future smart appliances
talk to each other long after their manufacturer shuts down, or pretty much
the entire financial industry—all without any middlemen to charge you or
restrict your access.

If you know how to program, you should learn how to build apps on Ethereum.
And not just the code that runs directly on the global computer, but web apps
and mobile apps that you already know how to build, just with the global
computer as the backend instead of a private computer. I will help you get
started. (niran@niran.org)

Maybe I'm overly optimistic. That's a risk I'm willing to take. You should
too.

~~~
amckenna
I've heard this specific dream pitched before and while I think it's a great
idea it still doesn't solve the issues around shipping specifically. One of
the things Amazon does really really well is the logistics of shipping the
product to the customers and while a bunch of people coming together to buy
goods straight from the producer would cut out the profit taken by the
middleman it wouldn't help with getting the items to your door. Individual
manufacturers simply can't negotiate the contracts that Amazon has with UPS
and individual manufacturers don't have the the warehouses and the massive
infrastructure Amazon has. If a producer made 10,000 widgets and sent them out
to 10,000 people that is a lot more difficult than simply sending a pallet to
Amazon and having them sell the items and send them to the customers. They
aren't just some website that lets you buy things, there is an enormous
infrastructure that supports the commerce.

This is something you can get a better sense for when you back Kickstarter
projects and see just how much time is spent around packaging and shipping. It
is a huge task that a lot of inexperienced companies get totally swamped by.

Edit: I would also like to add that if we bought goods straight from the
manufacturer then we would have to deal with greater ship times as well. If
you're ordering something from a factory across the US it's going to take a
week to get to you. But if Amazon or another marketplace has already purchased
the item and stores it a day away from you or in the same city (knowing that
there is a chance someone like you is going to order one soon) then you can
get the item much faster. That convenience is something that really only a
logistics and warehousing middleman can do effectively and people pay for that
convenience.

Edit 2: I don't work for or am affiliated with Amazon.com - I just have seen
into the belly of the beast at a few online retailers and have good sense of
what goes on in there.

~~~
natrius
UPS is going out of business, too. UPS owns warehouses, trucks, and planes,
none of which are very defensible advantages. Like the companies I listed,
they're a network effect company. Those companies are going away because
bigger networks can be formed on the global computer by anyone who wants to
participate—warehouse owners, truck drivers, bike messengers, etc.

UPS gives Amazon a good deal because they push so much volume, and it's way
easier to sell to one company than it is to sell to millions of them. But the
global computer makes it feasible to directly connect every producer with
every consumer—it won't be hard to sell to millions of them. If a shipper
needs guaranteed future business, customers can band together and put a
contract for lower prices on the global computer that enforces a payment or
reputation penalty if a minimum spending limit isn't reached. Decentralization
gives everyone the economies of scale that once required the backing of a
megacorporation.

Most of the advantages of scale are reducible to middleman-free interactions
on the global computer.

------
Hexayurt
Hi, I'm the author of the piece, and the release coordinator for Ethereum. If
you have any questions about the launch, please ask me. You can watch the new
network stats here [https://stats.ethdev.com/](https://stats.ethdev.com/) or
download a client at [https://ethereum.org/](https://ethereum.org/) and get
involved!

~~~
sschueller
I get a certificate error when I visit the page from my Android phone.
[http://imgur.com/69AR8JG](http://imgur.com/69AR8JG)

~~~
Hexayurt
Thanks, I've passed that on to our web guys.

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j_s
I'm interested in more about the sustainability of this project: what's paying
the bills now, and what's going to ensure the bills are payed in the future?

Bitcoin survived long enough to become within a reasonable approximation of
self-sustaining... is Ethereum basically someone spending their early-adopter
Bitcoin collection as runway?

Edit: found this blogpost - [https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-
the-first-year...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/14/ethereum-the-first-
year/)

My TL,DR: Ethereum development is under a non-profit initially 'VC-
funded(-ish)' (with Bitcoin) vs. how Bitcoin itself was organically
'bootstrapped'.

~~~
drcode
The ethereum foundation was given a sizeable endowment of ether currency to
help advance development, as part of the launch. It will take 3-4 days before
we'll have any idea of the market price of ether, and I won't speculate, but
this will be a critical data point to answer your question.

~~~
j_s
Thanks!

My gut feeling is that the technology is sound, but it remains to be seen
whether or not enough of a community grows to sustain things like the
headcount behind the glitzy PR campaign.

I wish the Ethereum team great success in this endeavor; if nothing else it is
uncharted territory!

~~~
Hexayurt
We really do hope that there will be mass adoption, and that we can continue
to build out Metropolis (a web-browser that extends the security of the block
chain right the way through rich user apps) and Serenity (parallel
supercomputer performance from blockchains.)

But only the people can decide.

------
Strilanc
How much thought has gone into preventing underhanded [1] smart contracts? It
seems like, if this catches on, there could be large rewards for sneaking in
hard-to-notice "mistakes". And given how little attention people already pay
to EULAs...

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest)

~~~
drcode
The solidity programming language is expected to support embedded proofs in
the near future, so that contract developers can specify invariants that are
guaranteed to hold true if the contract compiles... so you'll be able to state
things like "No person other than the depositor in a bank will be able to
withdraw the money" and the compiler will generate a proof to verify this,
visible to any users of the contract.

(That said, this is an EXTREMELY ambitious feature and I'm mildly skeptical
that they'll be able to deliver it... but the team working on Solidity has put
out very good work so far...)

------
explorigin
Bitcoin's big push was to make central banks obsolete. It's a temporary
success, long-term failure because the blockchain grows infinitely. Soon only
big corps will be able to afford maintaining instances of the blockchain. The
more successful it is, the less it achieves its original goals.

Ethereum uses a blockchain and therefore has the same fault (although
democratization is not a stated goal of Ethereum). I'm sure it will be a
useful platform for some but the pre-mining thing leaves as bad a taste as all
other alt-coins that popped up. It's the big-business version of the digital
Ponzi scheme.

I'm still waiting on Maidsafe.

~~~
Hexayurt
Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions.

1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb
costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay
about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a
half.

2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then
shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the
storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions.

Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all
cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they
have a complete history.

And these are just the naive approaches. See
[https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-
pruning/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/) for a more
sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)

~~~
explorigin
Thanks for this response. I'm not liking things a little less.

~~~
Hexayurt
Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for
mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.

------
natch
This is good writing, although it doesn't fulfill the promise at the beginning
of explaining the blockchain. Very intrigued by Ethereum now.

~~~
Hexayurt
"by the end of this article, you’re going to understand blockchains well
enough to decide what they mean to your life."

I very deliberately didn't explain mining or blocks or consensus protocols
because, really, that's technical gubbins that fits between "BEGIN
TRANSACTION" and "COMMIT TRANSACTION" in an SQL database.

Unless your technical concerns are between those two statements, you don't
need to care about mining. That's where we've been going wrong explaining
blockchains so far.

~~~
natch
I already understand mining. I didn't need to learn about mining. It's just
looking for hashes with successively larger numbers of zeros at the ends as
the difficulty increases (or the other way around.. the difficulty increases
as the zeros do). But I wanted to understand the blockchain, which I didn't,
and still don't. Apparently it being distributed is important in some way, and
there is some mechanism by which it gets updated with records of recent
transactions (again nothing to do with mining) but I don't know the details,
and would like to. The promise was not fulfilled. But otherwise, great
article. BTW I have no database background but do know what a transaction is.

------
ubersync
Ethereum is getting a lot of heat for being "pre-mined". What stops someone
from running an alt-ethereum blockchain which is not pre-mined? AKA a non-pre-
mined Ethereum fork?

~~~
drcode
1\. It would be more prone to 51% attacks, unless they use a different mining
algorithm than the more popular chain

2\. The usefulness of contracts involving money is directly proportional to
the stability and aggregate value of the base currency, and a copycat will not
be able to match the official net on this measure.

3\. The grim trigger equillibrium would doom such a blockchain if it becomes
successful (look up on wikipedia)

4\. There would be no dev team to support ongoing development if it overtakes
the main net.

5\. Network effects

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calneva01
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting
it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!!

------
calneva01
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting
it. And I don't see value of ETHER listed anywhere!!!

------
calneva01
How do I unload this ETHEREUM crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting
it. And I don't see value of ETHER list anywhere!!!!

------
calneva01
How do I unload this ethereum crap. I just don't see any exchanges accepting
it. And I don't see value of ether list anywhere!!!!

------
yc1010
So how come Satoshi makes a brilliant breaktrough and released a really well
designed/coded opensource project (Bitcoin) to the world without asking anyone
for a cent, and then promptly disappearing (dead?) with all the coins he mined
at the beginning not moved despite now being worth billions.

Yet every day, yet another project such as Ethereum, Maidsafe, Storj,
OpenBazaar popup make grand promises via fancy websites and raise millions
worth of bitcoin and then ... ... nothing.

BTW #3 on >
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfunding_projects)

Please stop with all the promises and "crowdfunding" (which downright smells)
and actually deliver something.

~~~
Hexayurt
I think we have just delivered quite a lot: the network is up and running,
transactions enabled Monday or Tuesday, and the code is all FOSS and available
for download.

We have shipped.

~~~
yc1010
From what I gather one has to pay you (in bitcoin of course) to get ether to
even use the network.

Now once again contrast it to how Satoshi quietly created probably one of the
most important projects of the last decade without asking for a cent.

You do understand that the whole crowdfunding thing quite literally sends all
sorts of alarm bells rolling, especially since so many other project are doing
the same.

Now granted out of all the projects i listed above yours is the most promising
and the most ambitious, but once again the whole thing stinks.

~~~
Hexayurt
Programmers generally have to be hired and paid.

We do not know what Satoshi's financial arrangements were, and we do not know
if he mined early on in the network using accounts which are not publicly
associated with him.

I do not think your position is stable under close examination.

