Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

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My 2 cents:

I started and (briefly) ran the sole Ethereum-focused meetup in the Atlanta area. I shut down shop due to lack of interest in the meetup. ATL has a pretty decent crypto scene. Bitpay and Storj are located here and the local Bitcoin meetup has ~500 members.

IMO Ethereum's problem is complexity and a lack of anyone in the inner circle who has the skills or desire to bring the complexity down to a place where the cost/benefit begins to makes sense (from a developer's standpoint).

Decentralization and trustless-ness are better means than they are ends. The platform's learning curve is steep and long. Outside of fintech and a few other niche applications, it hardly seems worth hiking up that curve just to say "yeah, but we're decentralized."

I understand ETh is an experiment and I commend the core dev team for putting in so much hard work, but a platform is only as good as what people build with it. Unless they get some people in the inner circle who can focus on evangelizing the tech to regular devs (not just crypto-enthusiasts) it will fail.

EDIT: let me clarify when I say the core team lack skills, I'm clearly not talking about technical skills. I'm talk about API design and marketing to developers. I know we're not supposed to comment on down voting but at least comment something saying what you disagree with. I don't feel like I am being un-constructive or unnecessarily harsh or combative with my comment.

I've been working in the Ethereum space for a year and a half, so I know my perspective is warped, but I really don't think the learning curve is that bad any more. Solidity isn't a very complicated language and has decent documentation[0], and Truffle[1] and TestRPC[2] can get you writing automated tests against a simulated blockchain more or less instantly.

It's still relatively early days, and there is a lot more work to do in making this stuff as friendly as possible, but progress has been pretty rapid.

[0] http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [1] https://github.com/ConsenSys/truffle [2] https://github.com/ethereumjs/testrpc

I specifically mentioned the platform, not solidity. It's pretty hard to be proficient with solidity if you are ignorant of the many abstractions, rules and constraints of the ethereum platform as the language is (intentionally) very tightly coupled to the smart contract abstraction and it's low level nature make it imperative that one understands a great deal about the protocol (bit lengths of various classes of data for example) before you can really get up and running.

Anything becomes easy if you look at it long enough. The major issue ethereum is going to have is making a case that there's a real-world value add relative to centralized, traditional architecture before many people will be willing to stare at it long enough for the easiness to set in.

I mostly disagree. You definitely need to know the basic abstractions and concepts, like blocks, transactions, and addresses. But they're not particularly harder than concepts like inheritance or pointers, and way easier than something like monads.

I can't think of any reason you'd need to know "bit lengths of various classes of data" for normal development.

> The major issue ethereum is going to have is making a case that there's a real-world value add relative to centralized, traditional architecture before many people will be willing to stare at it long enough for the easiness to set in.

I definitely agree with that.

I generally agree with those sentiments, and I've been working lately on some developer education on gotchas and best practices for devs using solidity, in particular.

There is a huge need for a focused consumer and developer-oriented rework on the marketing and ui side for ethereum. It's very, very confusing, even for highly technical people.

That said, things are much easier to work with than a year ago. Communication people would still help a lot.

On the plus side, the community is really great. People are nice, and motivated. There is a huge amount of pending work to get Ethereum ready for real prime time, and people do seem to be kicking in.

I've been trying to follow things pretty closely too, and to me it looks like that is (partially) the next step. Disclosure: I'm definitely a supporter, and think it's a cool project.

Right now it seems like the big things are building out the network and tools, to make the next stage easier. Their release schedule states that the next major release (what they call Metropolis) will happen when they have 1.0 stable release of the native wallet/browser. A couple of IDEs are also in the works, built to work with developing smart contracts for Ethereum. Even Microsoft has added Solidity (essentially a DSL for Ethereum, for those who don't know) support to the latest preview of Visual Studio.

Also, from everything I've been seeing so far is that the dev community forming around Ethereum is very passionate and is grow faster than most expected. If it continues at this pace, and the tools continue to improve with it, Ethereum could continue to become a very robust platform.

All this said, things could still not work out and the project could fail. I would hope it doesn't, because it really is a cool experiment thus far.

I co-founded and ran the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup for some time. There was lots of interest right after the whitepaper up through the crowdsale, then a waning of interest in the details, and now resurgence of interest. Like the Bitcoin meetups there does seem to be some correlation between price of the asset and number of attendees but that is unavoidable IMHO.

As far as marketing, Tual was the community lead for a bit and he left to do the DAO which has broken crowdfunding records so I don't think you can say he's been unsuccessful. As to the ultimate success of the developer ecosystem, I'm not sure but I used to track metrics like github stars quite rigorously and Ethereum was doing better than any other crypto project.

That runs counter to what I have been hearing/reading. AFAIK the dev community is the fastest growing in the cryptocurrency space.

With respect, I don't think that's saying much. ETH is pretty much the only crypto platform [anyone has ever heard of] specifically built to support on-chain app development so they kind of win "the fastest growing" category by default, don't they?

Did any of them produce a killer app though

I think when Mist is officially released you will see a lot of Dapps that will come out and will make using Ethereum fun and easy... Here is a sneak preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qghBWznAvoM&index=5&list=PLx...

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