Etherplay: Play Skill Games on Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Etherplay: Play Skill Games on Ethereum

etherplay.io

78 pointsbpierre85 comments

Naysayers are missing the point of this (admittedly very simple) proof of concept: a few developers wanted to make a game that allowed money pooling and tournament payouts.

So they made it.

Without any work getting payment processing, banking, a gaming attorney, and so on. This is such a significant competitive advantage for a small team that it changes the landscape of the possible -- the typical costs in time and money of those parts of the game would vastly dominate the development costs of an asteroids remix. In this case, probably most of the work was put into the game itself, not the Solidity/ETH side.

Time will tell if they did a good job. You could have said the same thing about the DAO before that collapsed.

"Oh, they made an investment platform without any of the hassle of traditional investment platforms". Then someone found a bug, and poof it's all up in smoke.

The danger of ethereum right now is that it's really easy to get something incorrect and broken operating at full capacity on the network. It's really hard to write secure programs, and when money is on the line there's a juicy bounty for anyone who finds a mistake.

It seems like a significant competitve advantage but I don't think any serious product, idea, etc should be developing on ethereum while compiler bugs are still regularly being discovered, and while best practices are still regularly being updated.

Could the early web have been developed into what it became with a "wait for it to work risk-free" mentality?

Yes, the DAO was a reliable repository for 100s of $M, until it turned out that it wasn't. This case isn't the first thing to go wrong in tech, and should not be an endless source of FUD for the platform. Pets.com and eToys and so many other web sites financially collapsed. Microsoft Windows was vulnerable. 1B Yahoo user accounts were hacked. A Tesla crashed, a SpaceX rocket blew up, and who knows, maybe some people will die in a hyperloop accident eventually.

The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward.

Could the early web have been developed if the technological requirements had been that no user ever see a 404? Web technology could be developed as freely and ad-hoc as it was because it was good enough for it to 'mostly work' most of the time in the beginning. When we're dealing with a technology that transfers money, then it's being developed to function under an enormous pressure that will exploit any weakness immediately, and cause it to fail critically if any exists. In that regard it's more like building a rocket than building a photo sharing site.

> The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward.

Just look at the success story of Sand Hill Exchange!

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-b...

As Matt Levine puts it:

> Or maybe it is a story about the interaction of the tech and financial industries. Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future. My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatory problems. The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it's that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits. The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated. Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting. The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do. Now they've learned -- no thanks to me! -- that, in finance, it's not so simple.

The thing about finance is, there's been literally no scheme, no way to cut corners, that hasn't been tried and probably regulated against. And the SEC isn't there to harsh your mellow, they'd love you to do well. They're there because every regulation has an actual scam/disaster that caused it to be there.

Bitcoin has frequently been noted to be an iterative exploration of why each and every financial regulation exists. There is only old ground to be broken here, and by crikey cryptos are going to break it. Again.

>Time will tell if they did a good job. You could have said the same thing about the DAO before that collapsed.

You missed his point. He said it's a good proof of concept. Not that it's a good final product.

Without a gaming attorney, chances are high that you will need a criminal attorney later.

I was involved in exploring using Bitcoin in online tournament payouts for various arcade games and board games and spoke with an experienced lawyer.

The US is a patchwork of state laws on gambling, payout structures, differing definition of game, chance, whether it is a lottery, whether it's considered fair, etc etc, the conditions are a dense briar and at any time any attroney general of any of the states can decide you're in violation of state law and ruin your life.

Be extremely careful, do not attach your real name to this project, or be sure to never step foot in the US, the laws this is violating can easily land you in prison for decades.

How do taxes work here?

I imagine they weren't very concerned about following gaming tax rules. That certainly wasn't near the top of the list for the people who made ethereum. Their whole point was to move away from traditional dispute resolution and governance mechanisms. No comment as to my feelings on the matter, but that's how it is.

This is what I mean by Ethereum is a solution looking for a problem. What possible use case here that should be adopted by the gaming industry? So the top score is immutable and verified by multiple 3rd party miners? Help me understand because I never get a good answer.

Ethereum, MaidSafe, etc.. are trying to be a solution to a specific problem: how to create a trustless decentralized internet (and perhaps even society), one that does not require centralized structures like it does now.

It's not quite there yet, and there is a long way to go, but at least there is some progress.

> trustless decentralized internet

That is the solution. What is the problem? I understand the problem they want to solve but I don't think that is truly the problem. I drank the kool-aid for over a year before I realized that the theoretical and practical realities are incompatible.

A truly trustless decentralized ledger is for the most part useless since as soon as you need to interact outside of the system (like change real world goods). Registering ownership on Ethereum and being trustless cannot coincide as ownership is a societal construct backed by governments and consensus. If I register stock on ethereum, I still need trust in the societal agreement outside of ethereum. Only transactions are trustlessm, but it is still very very far from clear that trustless transactions actually mean something without trustless assets that can be run on a truly trustless network.

I think this is evidenced by the fact that there are no compelling real world use cases for ethereum. There has been a huge downturn in turnouts at ethereum events and mindshare coinciding with the DAO attack after they shot themselves in the foot by doing the manual rollback which showed you still need trust in the network that runs the "trustless" system thus there is no such thing as a trustless system.

Yes it is still young, but I don't believe the theoretical case of having a trustless system (ethereum) interact with a trustful system (human society) while still being trustless is solved or even possible.

As soon as trust enters into the equation at any level the entire premise of ethereum is worthless moot. Could there be a narrow domain of applications that can use a "minimal trust network"? Yes. But that is different from being truly trustless.

Trust is a feature not a bug. Are there situations where you want less trust? Absolutely. But you are shifting the trust to another agent, not getting rid of it completely. Ethereum can exist, but it won't transform society and replace governements like everyone was hoping to ~9 months ago.

Well.. for starters there is certaintly value in a decentralized infrastructure (just ask wikileaks or someone living in a dictatorship) as well as other interesting projects such as makerdao, golem, etc..

I'm not sure what downturn you've seen since ethereums devcon this year had over 700 participants attending despite being in China, and there is another conference next month this time in europe, so if anything it keeps growing.

The DAO was too much, too soon. you say "they" which I'm not sure who you mean, but please note that ppl behind the DAO are not the same as the Ethereum foundation, consensys, reuters, deloitte, santander, etc.. let's not conflate one group and their mistakes with the entire Ethereum comunity.

As for oracles, they are an interesting problem to solve. Note that not every project would necessary require outside interaction (such as a decentralized DNS), sometimes there are creative solutiosn to do certain things externally (http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/), and there are ways to verify the validity of the data a oracle is providing, as an example you can watch this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pDUobV8geI

I feel exactly the way you do. I was initially seduced by Ethereum. So much so I actually read the white paper...all of it and started an Eth meetup. After a few meetings of being the only skeptic in the room, I realized the community's problem is not the tech - it's the community. The cryptocurrency world (at least the one I encountered) is a huge echo chamber filled with people who genuinely believe they are smarter than everyone else. It also only attracts a certain type of person so there is little diversity of thought. For example, there are basically 0 people in that world that think it's necessary to dumb UX down (like hiding crazy hash addresses and not denominating things to 13 decimal places) so it can be used by non-technical folks.

Eth's problem is exactly what you said: it's a solution desperately in search of a problem. I believe there are legitimate reasons to displace decentralized systems, but the market just isn't there yet. The value add just isn't there for anyone but a specific kind of nerd.

Actually the Ethereum Name Service was launched recently. It's been in the works for quite a while, but took some time while they worked out a way to dissuade name squatters. The idea from early on was that most people would mostly use names instead of raw addresses.

The fact that things are a bit raw and technical right now is a function of the whole system being less than two years old, and still rapidly changing. But it's already at a point where an Ethereum app can have a nice web UI, and all you need to use it is a Chrome plugin and a little ether.

Same boat here. I co-founded a few Ethereum related meetups, including the Silicon Valley one. I think one of the big problems here is that a lot of the "business thinking" type folks are pushed to the side, as well as some brilliant but non-standard tech minds.

I notice that a few times when various people (including myself) raised critical feedback we were marginalized. I know a few brilliant people who were kicked out of various Ethereum related stack channels for non-conformity, for example.

OK, fine, here is a usecase.

What about online gambling? With a trustless system, you can now prove that the game is fair, and isn't going to up and steal your money.

Gambling is frequently thought of as a "shady" business where trust matters a lot.

There is no interaction with real world goods. (the exchanges handle that).

Yes, a completely fair game for either "games of chance", or "games of robots skill". That's great for your poker-playing bot, but not for human endeavors (except bot programming).

Ether can provide some measure of server/network-side honesty, but makes no guarantees about what happens on the client side. So you must assume that all the other clients are super-powered bot-enhanced adversaries, or you need some way to trust and verify the client-side behavior of your peers.

The robots have come for oru jobs, and now they have come for our play.

I meant more like blackjack where you are playing against the house.

The vast majority of gambling is not poker. It is slot machines or blackjack.

Client side stuff wouldn't matter for gambling Vs the house stuff (which is what most gambling is!!)

Pardon my moralizing, but I strain to find a situation where someone's life is improved by easier access to slot machines or blackjack games, even provably fair ones.

How do you prove the gamling is fair? I know little about Ethereum, but how can you make the outcomes of games verifiable? Either you use a RNG, in which case the house can use some RNG biased in their favor, or the program in completely deterministic, in which case the player can compute in advance the permutation of the cards and play perfectly.

Here's an example: Let's say you have a card game with N players playing off a 52-card deck. Since log_2(52!) is less than 226, then you can randomly shuffle a deck of 52 cards with, say, 512 random bits.

The dealer picks a random 512-bit number, X_0, and publishes a hash of X_0 to the players.

Each of the N players, picks another random 512-bit number and publishes it. These are X_1, X_2, ..., X_N.

The dealer xors X_0 through X_N to get a random seed to shuffle and deal out the deck.

At the end, the dealer publishes X_0 so the players can verify the dealer wasn't cheating.

There are different ways, one is simply to do it in the blockchain itself , which is completly transparent so you know exactly what is going on, however this suffers from the flaw that the miners could potentially manipulate it (if the incentive is high enough), some proposals include doing a type of DAO in which participants commit a random value (hashed and revealed later). There are also approaches like the one used by satoshi dice https://www.satoshidice.com/provably-fair/?stage=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provably_fair

> how to create a trustless decentralized internet

what evidence of demand is there? what compelling need is there for existing infrastructures to uproot their investments for some elusive buzzword?

Remember what happened to wikileaks.org ? A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. How do you create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible. You might not care but this is a problem that a lot of ppl do care about. By the end of this year with the release of swarm and ethereum naming system it will be possible to run a completly decentralized (no servers), uncensorable, 100% uptime website.

that's not a widespread problem held by many nor evidence of consumers demand. Like you said, it's a problem considered by a few but outside of that there's very little reason to use ethereum.

go ahead and downvote my critical views on Ethereum, I'm already used to it from /r/ethereum pumpers. But I'm taking away that there's no good rationale for adopting Ethereum or blockchain technology other than very micro and esoteric niches.

You are entitled to your opinion and naturally not everyone cares about the same problems. If you don't see an use for Ethereum (at least not yet) then just don't use it.

Btw, you used the word 'pumpers', I really couldn't care less about the price. I hate the whole market thing. Bitcoin/Ether could be $10K or $1 for all I care.

Also, I actually agree 100% that there is no good rationale for adopting Ethereum & blockcahin technology as it is right now as there is so much more to do until it's actually practical.

There is a huge, glaring problem in the internet right now: it is very hard to accept and make payments. If your site wants to monetarily interact with users, it requires going through the arduous process of hooking up to the banking system, which is least painfully done by becoming dependent on a single large payment processor (who could always cut you off, freeze your funds, charge exorbitant fees, etc). It can involve storing customer bank details, or requiring customers to register with your third party payment processor. Totally byzantine and frictionful for the age of the internet.

From what I can tell the Ethereum component is confined to the entry fee and payout currency. This helps solve one of the biggest issues with skill based cash gaming, since there is much less friction when it comes to spending a cryptocurrency vs cash dollars, and people view it as more disposable/ephemeral.

I doubt the game involves miner verification.

Edit: Read the linked blog post. "Provably Fair" since there's a verifier that takes the seed and user inputs and replays the game to find the score. Depending how it's implemented this could introduce new issues and holes. Most importantly it makes the verifier a rate limiting step and puts an upper limit on the complexity of games. Interesting stuff.

"Provably fair" gambling with that sort of guarantee has been standard in the Bitcoin world for a few years now.

Of course, the ethically-challenged are endlessly creative, so there are cons you can do with that too - e.g., biasing any numbers the player didn't grab the hash for: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=948965.0

In my experience (I could be wrong) most provably fair bitcoin gambling games don't require user interaction. It's just a seed that has a deterministic output. This type of provably fair is a different beast, as far as I can see.

Arcade style games will not work. As soon as there is value to be gained, someone will quickly write a bot to simulate player inputs and play a perfect game.

Isn't that the point of Economics2.0, we should assume that the devs have read Accelerando and are investing heavily in lobster as we speak.

They'll work fine for the purpose of extracting ether (== money) from unsuspecting rubes.

They posted this article that provides more information, I should have posted it instead. Maybe the HN mods can change it?

https://medium.com/@etherplay/what-is-etherplay-d51424674931

I fail to see what's the point of ethereum/blockchain here. The proof of score must be given by the server (otherwise how would you prevent the score fabrication after the fact?), then owners of the service can always fabricate couple of nice high-scores for themselves.

It seems they are using a (verifiable) oracle to verify the proof due to gas costs. A good alternative to this is to use something like a computation market http://www.ethereum-computation-market.com/

Feels like just an experiment with this new technology. Maybe over time they can improve and upgrade to make scores more verifiable.

I cofounded a startup based around a similar idea. We were (attempting) to make an API that mobile game developers could plug into their games to add skill based cash tournaments.

Mine was called Foosler. There were a couple others - Cashplay and Skillz.

Shut 'er down after a couple years of hard work and lessons learned. It's a hard business to make work. Good luck to Etherplay :)

Were the problems primarily regulatory?

Problems:

1. It was my cofounder and I's first startup and we lacked marketing skills

2. Most causal players perceive that for a given game, there are many people out there way better than them, so they didn't want to risk any money

3. Mobile game developers are quite happy playing the freemium lottery

4. Google changed their ToS and our stuff was written in Java

5. Startup newbies make bad decisions

Hrm...apparently the "proof" that the game was played is the combination of the player's input record plus the need to submit the proof immediately after the game ends (so that the timestamp of the commit is within a few seconds of when the game would have ended according to the input).

Disregarding writing bots to play the game, the first cheat that comes to mind is locally speeding the game up 25%, building up an ever-growing rewind buffer, and then giving the cheating player a "back up a few seconds" button to undo some input at the cost of their buffer.

I have often thought about trying to build something similar to this for a while using either Bitcoin or Ethereum. Although I have been discouraged by laws against online gambling in most US states.

Does anyone know if this sidesteps gambling laws somehow? Or is this based in a jurisdiction that doesn't have laws against online gambling?

I don't know about the laws in the US but in Sweden it's not classified as gambling if it's skill based.

It is the same in the US. In fact, that's how fantasy sports sites can operate legally in the US.

I'm not sure I understand how fantasy sports sites or anything like that are anymore "skill-based" than say poker or blackjack, I guess those are legal under this definition as well?

I wanted to try playing the game (EtherSpace), so I added the MetaMask extension to Chrome. I noticed the account is initiliazed with 1.000 ETH on the Ropsten Test Network. However, the game requires you to play on the Main Ethereum Network for a price of 0.01467 ETH. Sadly, I have no ETH on this network.

25% rake is too high. Game should be playable in "fun mode".

Agreed. Necessary if people are going to risk money. Give them the ability to practice.

what's the minimum bet? 25% of 0.01p isn't bad

I suppose it's a step up from "honest Ponzis". https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract...

serious question, why do you hate crypto (bitcoin, ethereum, etc..) so much? I see your username in a lot of places, from hacker news to wikipedia, always doing your best to criticize or stop these sort of technologies. I don't understand this obsession. I don't like say... angular.. but I don't go around trying to sabotage or bad mouth the project as I prefer to spend time on more productive things.

I'm a Bitcoin enthusiast, yet the whole crypto-ecosystem is ridden with crooks and frauds trying to make money of suckers. Altcoins that are obvious scams, services that have "accidental" bugs and loose your money, services that get "hacked", and so on. As a rule of thumb everything in cryptofin should be considered a scam before proven otherwise.

It's quite rare for angular-like libraries to try to steal money of their users.

Instead of calling him out over his "obsession," please try to respond to his argument. Is he wrong? Is he making incorrect assertions? I am genuinely curious. I don't know a lot about cryptography, blockchains, bitcoins, etc. I try to take everything with a grain of salt, but seeing two knowledgeable people civilly discussing the merits of these things would be interesting. Calling someone out for "being obsessed" isn't.

To use your angular analogy, if someone went around criticizing angular everywhere, I'd like to see a discussion between that person and a pro-angular guy. Because I guarantee there are smart people and good points to be made on both sides of that argument.

Well I'm sure someone has engaged him before so I don't think I would be particulary productive. Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses, regarless it's also very easy to criticize something and far more interesting to find solutions, you can critize the current decentralization tech much like you could easily criticize and dimiss this internet thing in 1984. I was just genuinely curious about his motivations. My example with angular is that even though I really don't like it, I wouldnt want to waste time criticizing it or stopping people who want to advance it.

>Seeing his page there are serious problems or misunderstandings with some of the sources he uses

Such as?

for e.g the article claiming "100 bugs per 1000" takes a crapy contract and considers refactors as bugs, critizes well known things to take into account, and generally exagerates. Another example, is the infamous 'solar exploit' article (since then slightly modified due to criticism), which is written by someone with a financial interest against ethereum (due to owning a startup with a competing product) essentially makes a claim equivalent to saying the internet is broken because you can do this in nodejs http://i.imgur.com/QGofSuo.jpg

Cryptocurrency advocates have, in the past, aggressively promoted the currencies with not just over-hyped arrogance and refusal to acknowledge reasonable criticism, but also tying it to a politically confrontational ideas that would be very damaging to society if they were actually successful. This has produced a lot of anti-advocates.

Etherum combines un-upgradeable code with a lack of formal verification systems. As a result, the only way an exploit could be fixed in one of its largest and most heavily promoted use cases (the "DAO") was to fork the currency. Both forks are still trading, although one at greatly diminished value.

Fwiw, the Ethereum Foundation has someone working full-time on formal verification systems, and the online solidity compiler has a partial implementation of formal verification for smart contract sourcecode.

Aside from that, the DAO disaster has made people realize they need to build backup plans into their contracts. Maybe you can't change sourcecode at will, but you can add emergency shutdown mechanisms, predefined paths for upgrading code via systems of modular contracts, etc. There's a tradeoff vs. trusting the admin, but for now it seems like a good one in many cases.

It's those fat Goldman Sachs paydays.

No, here you go, actual reasons:

* Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a fractal scam at every level. When phrases along the lines of "a whole new form of money" and "the old rules don’t apply any more" start going around, people get gullible and the ethically-challenged get creative.

* Every cryptocurrency I’ve seen is a disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level – “proof of work” in particular is literally wasted to secure a distributed thing that should not be distributed, and which naturally recentralises anyway. (4 miners do 50% and 7 miners do 75% of Bitcoin, and 75% of hashing power is about to be in a single building.)

* Cryptocurrency advocates are frequently both strident and delusional about technology, economics, human nature and computer science itself.

* Bitcoin ideology, which has carried through to its descendants, is based on John Birch Society and Eustace Mullins conspiracy theories about central bankers, based on economic ideas which are most generously described as "not even wrong".

* Cryptocurrency advocates want a dot-com payday, where you get rich for free, only without even the step where you build an enterprise that does something that's useful to someone.

* Cryptocurrency advocates are almost universally either scammers, suckers or - best of all - suckers who think they're the scammer. Sorry, "early adopter". Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker" in the pump'n'dump. A "trustless" currency seems to attract people who absolutely cannot be trusted.

* Blockchains only approximately solve the problems they claim to (coordinating information amongst actors who distrust each other), and the approximation breaks down as they recentralise.

* Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies, insofar as those count as a use case.

* Literally everything about smart contracts is bad. The DAO (and the fallout from the DAO, i.e. smart contracts are inviolate until the moment the whales might lose money) should have conclusively buried the idea and I'm still amazed it didn't.

* Everything about cryptocurrencies is, in practice, a bad idea for pretty much anyone to be involved in, and warning people off it is a public service.

* I feel like it.

Thank you for your reply.

Personally I despise the currency aspect and 'get-rich-quick' types that plague the space. However, not everyone is into blockchain tech for those reasons. I personally I got into Bitcoin and later Ethereum due to what happened to wikileaks.org A few calls from a senator and the domain was taken away and amazon shutdown their servers. I have been fascinated ever since on how to create an internet in which this sort of censorship is nearly impossible, and while Ethereum is not quite there, it's making progress torwards it, specially the upcoming release of its domain system and decentralized storage.

WikiLeaks being cut off struck me as a powerful use case for Bitcoin too.

The "decentralised storage" - do you mean IPFS? So far it looks a lot like BitTorrent entirely on magnet: links, but not as good.

By decentralized storage I mean ipfs, ethereums own swarm( https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/15/swarm-alpha-public-pilo... ), maidsafe, storj, etc..

IPFS is quite popular in the Ethereum comunity (since swarm was delayed), it does need an incentivation layer which they will be implementing soon last I checked. I have no ilusions that all these techs will need to be battletested and might even have flaws, but they are a step in the right direction.

I'd call myself an enthusiast and would disagree on a few things, can agree the hype and scams are out of control. Seems like there's an ICO every 2 weeks, selling unfinished products with little demonstrated purpose other than adding a blockchain to something. There's a deep misunderstanding in some parts of the community about what a distributed ledger is good at doing.

Some counter-points though:

>Pretty much everyone who got in after about 2012 is playing the role of "sucker"

BTC was $20 in 2013 and under $400 at the start of 2016.

>Blockchains have no use cases outside cryptocurrencies

>disastrous waste of resources and effort at every level

Immutable peer-to-peer ledgers have numerous use-cases, currency was the low hanging fruit. Put an Ubuntu iso checksum or your PGP key into the blockchain, its there for everyone to see, uncensorable and immutable, now compare that to hosting the checksum on the same server as the iso.

All the computing resources in the world can't change the bitcoin blockchain, so while the energy usage claim has some merit, the thermodynamics of undoing all that hashing provides the security in a trustless environment. And people won't use Bitcoin if its unsecure. On top of that miners have concentrated in places where energy is cheap and plentiful, the big ones strike deals with electricity providers to soak up excess transient electricity from renewables at very cheap prices.

>Immutable peer-to-peer ledgers have numerous use-cases

And that's why we have git. The only good bit is the Merkle trees, which were invented in 1979.

("Why yes, Mr Buzzwordsusceptible Uppermgt, we've been using blockchain technologies for years! Even before Bitcoin was invented!" i.e. git has Merkle trees in)

Seriously, I've been looking into "business blockchain". There are zero use cases except for the Merkle trees. I commend to you this blog post from the R3 project:

https://www.r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-d...

It details why every aspect of Bitcoin and its clones was designed to do the opposite of what financial services want. The punchline is that R3 Corda, their "blockchain" product, does not in its default configuration ... contain a blockchain.

> And that's why we have git. The only good bit is the Merkle trees, which were invented in 1979.

Explain this. How can git and merkle trees create an immutable peer-to-peer ledger? How can a peer, given ledgers A and B, know which one is fake and which is real?

Not with Bitcoin or Ethereum, given the centralisation of mining. (I flatly do not believe all the pools are actually operated centrally.) Even the approximate solution becomes less useful as the currency recentralises.

In literally all financial and legal regulations, the ultimate answer is "at some point you have to trust someone". This doesn't work out perfectly either (far from it), but it's an approximation that's proven more robust and usable for real world purposes than literally wasting electricity computing hashes.

That's not an answer. You implied that git and merkle trees can be used for p2p immutable ledgers. You have yet to show how that can happen.

> In literally all financial and legal regulations, the ultimate answer is "at some point you have to trust someone". This doesn't work out perfectly either (far from it), but it's an approximation that's proven more robust and usable for real world purposes than literally wasting electricity computing hashes.

That doesn't prove anything. The existing infrastructure has had thousands of years of a head start. Bitcoin has only existed for 6 years and ethereum only for 2. How can you expect this new technology to develop that quickly? The internet itself was started over 35 years ago and its potential still is yet to be determined, much less realized.

Also, there are a lot of PoS currencies that don't use computation power to secure their blockchain. What is your rationale for dismissing them?

PoW's had six years to fail to overcome objections that were raised literally in 2008 in response to the white paper.

PoS has no practical examples. I'm saying "nice idea but it hasn't worked out" and you're saying "but here's this other idea that hasn't worked out!"

What objections? What will occur if PoW fails to overcome them?

What is it about, say bitshares, or say, dash which is partially based on dpos, that just hasn't worked out?

What vague arguments you have! And on on top of the dubious arguments you previously proposed and failed to defend under simple questioning.

Are you going to answer anything I asked or are going to go another round of you bringing up even more new arguments while abandoning your prior ones?

what about the silk road? I would argue that it worked TOO well that the people who currently run the drug business didn't like losing a piece of their pie.

I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.

Quite a lot of local dealers get their merchandise from darknets in bulk. I doubt it's made a huge difference to the conventional supply chains, though - there really just isn't that much volume in cryptos.

Angular is not a construct based on, and promoting, socio-political theories. It is entirely fair to have a political stance regarding these systems.

I've played around with investing in bitcoin and I'm a strong believer in cryptocurrencies and blockchains as a technology, but there really are a ton of scams in the industry and it's worthwhile to point that out.

What are your investments that aren't speculations?

I'm reading the article he linked and others on the site. It's super interesting stuff and he does paint a convincing picture.

I don't think 'not liking angular' is such a rare trait, it is more of a common view

Yes, it seems David chose specific community member characteristics to criticize the cryptocurrency/blockchain technology. So why not make a book about the community instead of the technology? If he is not clear about this, he is just following a classical fallacy.

It's an amazing technology and I believe it's only going to get better. But let's be honest here. Ethereum is a scam and so are 90% of the projects of there.

> Since blockchain enthusiasts had already self-selected for gullibility

Just by that statement alone, it would appear some of your arguments against Ethereum/blockchains are based on fallacious arguments. Fallacies are a strong indication there is a conflicted view being held by one or more debaters. Not all "blockchain enthusiasts" are gullible, but there may be gullible people in the space and people who prey on them. There may also be a large amount of negatively biased individuals in the space who only observe and comment on the behaviors of the last two groups. FWIW, I've observed both in person multiple times.

I always keep in mind the obvious polarization around cryptocurrencies when discussing them in public. I find it doubtful any arguments made with bias around the use of cryptocurrencies will have a serious impact on adoption in the future. Ethereum isn't used for anything important right now anyway, so any biased arguments made for or against it are rather pointless and a waste of good resources.

What will affect the future usefulness of cryptocurrencies is yet to come.

I voted you up. You could have written more instead of linking to an excerpt of yours. But after reading it with the great examples of bugged contracts you gave I must say: thank you. I especially love the GovernMental example (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ghzhv/government...). Small bug but the involved ether will stay in nirvana forever.

I only knew about the failed DAO up to now. All those smaller failed contracts fit perfectly in the image the DAO left. I mean I love the idea of ethernet and its contracts but I see no solution to the inherent software bug problem. You can't do a hard fork for every bug.

Skill based cash tournaments are a thing far removed from the block chain.

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