Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

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crispyambulance

Help?

I have no idea WTF is going on here. I've tried to search around for a clue but the more I read the more confusing it gets.

At first it seemed that Ethereum was a kind of cryptocurrency like bitcoin (something that people could "mine" and exchange), then something about "contracts" that don't require trust, then something about it being effectively "a computer" that never stops, an investment system investing in something no one ever actually names, some story about a hack that drains ether out of the system.

And now this story which has words like... "Governmental", "Rock-paper-scissors", "Casino", fees "stolen" because of constructor bug, "ponzi".

Even forgetting all the confusing jargon, I can't come up with a mental model that makes any sense at all. Is this just an elaborate puzzle game for geniuses? Or are people making and losing real money with this? By "money" I mean something that can be converted into actual US dollars right now and stored in a bank.

A few quick answers:

- Ethereum is a contracting language combined with a crypto currency; to run the contracting language requires miners to not only determine the solution to a puzzle (as in Bitcoin), but also to run code written by contract writers in a virtual machine[1]; the blockchain stores the results of these computations

There's a lot written on the DAO (just search HN), but a quick summary:

- A DAO is an autonomous organization that is self governing, with its by laws written into code - and often the potential to fork off if you disagreed with the majority decisions

- "The DAO" which caused the recent blow up was the first public iteration of this and was an investment fund meant to encourage apps on the blockchain, by letting others fund it and then vote on proposals to receive money

- "The DAO"had substantial flaws in how it was written, tested, and released

- This was very successful by funding metrics, but that is based on a highly speculative currency that had appreciated 30-40X in a few months (otherwise, it might have just been a few million dollar experiment)

- The flaws were pretty egregious (e.g., naming two functions essentially the same - and calling the wrong one, not putting in place proper mutexes) - and many on HN who worked on any mission critical code (e.g., finance, embedded systems) would be surprised at how quickly it was released without testing, community discussion, or a thoughtful rollout plan

- Yes, people are losing money in two ways 1) in "The DAO" itself, if the funds can't be recovered fully, 2) due to the price of Ethereum to Dollars/Euros which people own and trade (which has fallen 50% since "The DAO" issues, but that is still 10-15X up since late last year)

[1] Technically, Bitcoin miners also interpret contract code, but the language is more complex and limited - with the most popular Bitcoin contract to simply lock and unlock bitcoins

DAO also has connotations in software architecture which makes this more confusing. What does DAO stand for in this context?

Decentralized Autonomous Organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...

Who is the author of the DAO contract?

Slock.it, a startup interested in IOT and cryptocurrencies, authored the contract. See the gitblame of the main code here: https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blame/develop/DAO.sol (there are a few other libraries in the repo that have issues as well)

Start with https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper, I guess?

http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/ may be helpful.

The second link is the most clear resource I've seen thus far. Thanks!

IMO you understand perfectly.

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