Ethereum Development Reality Check | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum Development Reality Check

bitcoinist.net

31 pointsryanstr7 comments

I have the top post in the reddit thread this is based on[1], and I don't endorse the spin of this article.

> smart contract programming is complex and at the moment is lacking functionality

I disagree. Smart contract programming in the Solidity language[2] is already remarkably simple, and there are great tools like Truffle[3] that provide you all the necessary scaffolding for rapid iteration.

While it's certainly true that there are challenges and limitations in smart contract programming, as I discuss in my reddit post, that's not the same as "lacking functionality". There are many things that are already easy to do, and the limitations are because we're working at the cutting edge of technologies that are still being actively researched.

> Homomorphic Encryption

This is a nonsense red herring. It would be cool if someday we had homomorphic encryption, but it's not going to be ready on any relevant timeline, and the "lack" of it is absolutely not a problem for Ethereum.

> Once the transition to Proof of Stake occurs, however, will the Ether coins have to be re-issued?

What? Of course not.

This article is trying very hard to turn a discussion of future research directions into FUD. 0/10.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4945us/can_we_hav... [2] http://ethereum.github.io/solidity/ [3] https://github.com/ConsenSys/truffle

What I'd like to hear is a really good example of a contract where Ethereum would be an obvious improvement on doing the same thing without Ethereum. The examples I've seen so far seem to work as long as nothing is disputed by the parties, and then either default to favouring one party or other, or fall back to human adjudication. Which doesn't seem particularly better than what we can do without Ethereum.

However it does look cool and I'm open to the idea it makes sense somewhere, but I'd be interested to know where that somewhere is.

I'm in the same boat. I Want To Believe. But I haven't seen a convincing example yet.

Agreed - It doesn't seem that these are anything near legal contracts. I would like to see a less misleading word than 'contract.' A contract is a 'meeting of minds' and requires considerations from both parties. What we have are distributed programs that require signatures that run on a blockchain. Pretty sweet, but someone trying to sell it as more than that may be guilty of unauthorized practice of law.

There are fundamental problems with smart contracts over public blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Can they be solved?

* No guarantee of transaction execution

* Turing-complete smart contracts are slow

* Scaling is a moonshot

* Oracles break the trust model

* Public blockchains struggle to stay decentralized

More here:

https://makebitcoingreatagain.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/5-cha...

yes, lots of issues to be resolved but the team and community is making great progress instead of stuck in disagreements. check out this Casper progress at 57:00 http://blog.synereo.com/2016/03/06/Synereo-Update/

I am amazed at this open contribution and collaboration.

By the way, if you have some presale ether and you think the price might be a little frothy, Kraken makes it super easy to sweep your presale wallet. I recently did this and had bitcoin on its way to my Circle account within an hour.

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