Ethereum Solidity Available in Microsoft Visual Studio [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum Solidity Available in Microsoft Visual Studio [pdf]

consensys.net

95 pointsConsenSys30 comments

Reading Bitcointalk.org it seems there are the "shills" who support Ethereum and everyone else who sees it as just another alt-coin. Between the zealots and haters it is hard for me to decide if there is some validity to the price of ETH. Reading the Ethereum website they don't see themselves as a currency.

I think the Distributed Apps (dApps) are a good innovation and I can see where they would be useful beyond smart contracts. For example the Horse stud program someone came up with. Typically proprietary information sold at a high price, open sourced and distributed with the blockchain. It remains to be seen though if Bitcoin can implement distributed apps using a side chain or some tech.

Microsoft is behind Ethereum so, maybe it will actually take off and be the next big thing. First as I understand they implemented the blockchain in Azure cloud and now the language in Visual Studio.

I'm really curious if anyone has any real insight into whether Ethereum will take off or be pushed aside by Bitcoin. I personally have found it impossible to wade through the information out there to get a feeling one way or the other.

Hi, I'm one of the co-founders and core devs of Ethereum.

Ethereum wasn't build/implemented for or on Azure. Microsoft showed support for Ethereum by offering BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) and have now adopted our in-house programming language Solidity within VS. Solidity is our higher level smart contract language that can compile down to EVM byte code (EVM - Ethereum Virtual Machine).

I can't tell you whether Ethereum will take of or not, to me it already has. Consider me highly biased being the original author of Ethereum's most used implementation :-)

To get a good feel of Ethereum and the community; take stroll through our community reddit [1], github client repo [2], solidity language [3] and some more documentation [4].

Warning: 2 & 3 are for our technical enthusiasts, 4 is very interesting. Enjoy! :-)

- [1] http://reddit.com/r/ethereum - [2] https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum - [3] https://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ - [4] https://ethereum-homestead.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

I'm interested in contributing to geth. Are there any materials out there on how to run the tests?

Edit: I see the makefile target, although I can't get it to run on windows using my gitbash bash shell.

We're making use of the standard Go tools + Godep and as such with any Go version below 1.6 you can run the tests with "godep go test ./...", anything above 1.5 with "go test ./...".

Good luck!

thanks a lot!

Thanks for the reply!

The key reasons that drew me to Ethereum and keep me interested are:

a) I get excited about smart contracts, they're what I hoped Bitcoin would offer years ago. The idea of a DAO, controlled entirely on-chain, is IMHO groundbreaking. Solidity is a simple language, and it's ridiculously easy to write and publish basic dApps over ipfs. Most of the downsides (need for oracles for instance) apply to all blockchains.

b) The planned implementation of light clients and usage of events, would mean ethereum network access could be embedded into virtually any app.

c) The sharding plan for scaling seems solid enough, and the team behind Ethereum has proven themselves capable, dedicated, and open with communication.

d) Bitcoin development is a mess and I don't see it improving much. The offchain efforts all look like rent seeking to me (aka RSK will take 20% in perpetuity). None of them are viable today, but I can write Ethereum apps now.

e) Ethereum may get out executed in the future, but I don't see anything in the landscape right now that will do it.

> Most of the downsides (need for oracles for instance) apply to all blockchains.

This is the part that kills all good uses for Etherium (and other blockchain apps) as far as I can tell. If you are relying on oracles then you are not 'running on the blockchain' any more so why even bother at all? What are you gaining with Ethereum that you can't already do without it?

I just don't see a use case that 'regular' people would be interested in. All the apps currently on Ethereum are only used by other Ethereum fans. For someone outside of the bubble there's no compelling reason to become users.

An iPhone still needs communication hardware and a screen to function as a phone, you can't just make an iPhone entirely out of software.

So why bother supporting software on an iPhone at all? We should just keep using phones like the ones made in the 1950s that relied entirely on electrical components and no microchip. What does a person placing a phone call on an iPhone gain by running "software" that they couldn't already do without it?

Those who believe a phone should run software are on a fool's errand. All the software will do in the end is just activate the physical communications hardware anyway- there is just no point in it.

I've been following the project since last summer. Since it wasn't released yet and it was obviously a HUGE upfront time investment to learn the ecosystem, I decided to wait until it was actually released to invest the time to learn it.

I think a lot of the cryptocurrency speculation at this point is...speculation. Eth differs from bitcoin in the sense that it gets its value from it's utility as a regulator of computation, whereas with bitcoin the value is derived from its unique ability to convey value in a (almost) instant, provable, and irreversible way. True price discovery of Eth is long way away.

The utility of the platform remains to be seen. The complexity of the virtual machine, language (solidity), and tool chain remains a huge barrier to entry for all but the most ardent true believers. I'll give the devs a lot of credit as they seem to be working very hard to make a tool chain that is much more user friendly.

My personal opinion is that the EVM (ethereum virtual machine) will excel at providing microservice-like backends to apps for features that benefit from the trustless and/or irreversible aspects of blockchain tech.

IMO the limitation of Ethereum is how many general purpose apps _need_ decentralized and trustless functionality to the point where it is worth the upfront investment of learning a [at the moment] very complex system? Is there a natural ceiling to use cases for such tech? I don't know.

They may not publicly announce ETH as a currency, and may not even intend for it to become one, but they pre-mined the blockchain to give themselves a big chunk in advance, so they do expect ETH to be valuable and exchangeable in the future.

"pre-mine" is a 2013 term. The correct term now, is "ICO" Initial Coin Offering. What you are suggesting is that the core devs were greedy in their setup of the coin. This is far from the truth and you can read online all about how the Ethereum crowd sale (ICO) took place. It was regarded at the time to be the #2 largest crowd sale in the world, raising some $18 Million dollars. The most impressive thing is that the Ethereum leaders have been extremely transparent from even before the crowd sale launch. Some investors ended up with even more coins than the founder of Ethereum as a result of the crowd sale, and there were upwards of an estimated 9,000 investors.

With that said, it is true that Ethereum doesn't advertise itself as a crypto currency, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few years down the road it will be worth more than bitcoin, or that Ethers (the coins) are used as crypto currency.

I don't see how pre-mine suggests greed. It's just a statement of fact. I'm not interested in using politically correct terminology in any field, especially tech and business.

You are reflecting your own biases in assuming I meant anything negative with my comment.

When you fail to recognize the biases of the culture you communicating to you are failing to communicate. Saying it's just a statement of fact and you aren't interested in using politically correct terminology just means you aren't interested in being understood.

You may wish you could communicate while disregarding how your words will be perceived. But that says more about your willingness to be understood than it says about the other person.

Premine implies a system that rewards a winner but for the creator to run that system (mine) by themselves in secret before anyone else gets to (pre). It's a way to take a supposedly "fair" coin and rig it - giving most of the value to the creator. For extra shadiness they mine into many different accounts and hide the connection.

Whereas an ICO should be algorithmic. There should just be something in the rules where some number of coins are given to a creator's wallet at the start. Everyone can see it and it's a feature of the design. You can price it in.

I'm sorry but this is just propaganda from people launching new alt-coins. There is essentially no difference

In fact I've never heard of a coin that was pre-mined in a sneaky way. This term was always used to describe a coin that had pre-allocations before the genesis block. People didn't like that, so this new term "ICO" is Orwellian double speak to get people to think differently about dumping their money into a pre-mined alt-coin. It's a professional sounding word for the same thing.

One of the reasons so many people avoid and have a hard time grasping the financial industry is precisely because of the obscurification of the langauge surrounding it, and I will not participate in that charade.

> In fact I've never heard of a coin that was pre-mined in a sneaky way.

Yes you have. People complain about Bitcoin for that. It's a flexible term.

> so this new term "ICO" is Orwellian double speak

If someone just uses the new term, yeah. But if there's an actual algorithmic difference...

> to get people to think differently about dumping their money into a pre-mined alt-coin.

When you buy stock at an IPO you know not all of it is up for sale and that the "value" was set by fiat.

> I will not participate in that charade.

Sorry we're oppressing you. Fight the power.

Sure there's a difference. A well-publicized presale is open to anyone who wants to risk the investment. A developer'a premine only benefits the developer.

I don't really see an economic difference between putting money into a presale, and putting money into hardware and electricity for early mining.

I wouldn't put much stock in the price. Much of the original ETH was distributed in a pre-sale so there are some people out there sitting a load of it they paid pennies for. Those are probably the zealots they have a really strong incentive to pump the price. ETH itself is interesting because it is focused on things like smart contracts and they down play the currency aspect of it.

One smart thing Ethereum did was endow it's dev organization with a large share of ETH so the project will be self financing if it is successful. Bitcoin has the problem right now where some of the Bitcoin companies are trying to kill it so they can make money off their proprietary solutions and they are employing all the devs.

With Bitcoin, the "penny people" already had a couple of chances to cash out, broadly speaking. Maybe someone will estimate, by studying the BTC transactions, how many ETH people would cash out at various price levels, given the past behavior of BTC, given an equal increase in value. So maybe 30% of early adopters sell off after a 10000x increase, and then you could try to predict when people will start to dump ETH, ceteris paribus.

The way BTC was distributed initially was very different than how ETH was distributed. No BTC was ever given out that wasn't earned through mining. ETH on the other hand sold a large amount of ETH in a pre-sale. Literally all people did to get it was give money to the project's developers and they were allocated some ETH.

If you are mining you have probably invested a lot in equipment, time, and other costs to get the coins you get. With ETH there was literally no investment of anything except money.

I think eth the coin isn't a great speculative investment right now, but the technology is cool. One of the things I like about it is that it's GPU mineable. So if you want to play around with it, it's actually possible to get some for 'free', unlike with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is also GPU mineable.

Yes but you won't make any money. The fastest GPU you can buy right now will mine maybe 50c worth of bitcoin in the next 12 months if you run it 24/7.

Among other things Ethereum is enabling, DAOs and crowd funding is very interesting and already here today. digix.io raised 5.5 mil in 14 hrs this morning! Compare that to pitching multiple VCs and negotiating terms sheets. On the other side, anyone can participate and you need not be a reputed VC to get in. Slock.it will be next. I think they will set a new record.

What is the legal status of funding your company / venture in this way?

good question but I don't have a good answer. this might help - https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/473vu9/slockit_th...

Ethereum itself was crowd funded and they registered the foundation in Switzerland mainly for legal reasons. The status in US is unclear atm.

and digix is registered in Singapore again for legal/regulation reasons

I'm the guy who created the Swarm platform, Swarm fund and Harvard conference on cryptoequity. The rough conclusions of $100k+ of legal research was that product tokens are highly likely to be regulated as securities in the US but that cooperatively governed organizations are likely to be regulated as partnerships. Notice all the "likely" aspects as this depends either on a clear ruling from the SEC or case law, neither of which exist.

This uncertainty made me withdraw from hosting crowdsales until some precedent was established (I did however, setup two funds that can take positions in crowdsales).

For what it's worth Swarm was a proto-DAO launched on the Bitcoin blockchain in an attempt to do roughly the same thing on the Ethereum blockchain once Ethereum was ready.

So, there press release announces that the Ethereum co-founders will attend the conference.

Looking through: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016?sort=status&dire... there doesn't appear to be any sessions mentioning "Ethereum", "blockchain", or "consensys"

To me this collaboration seems to be nothing more than Consensys using tools provided by Microsoft.

Ethereum is just a scam trying to use Bitcoin hype

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