I suppose it's a step up from "honest Ponzis". https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract...
It's quite rare for angular-like libraries to try to steal money of their users.
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.
Such as?
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.
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.
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.
I'm not arguing the ethics of buying drugs, simply that this was a perfect use-case for cryptocurrency that did not exist before.
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.
The "decentralised storage" - do you mean IPFS? So far it looks a lot like BitTorrent entirely on magnet: links, but not as good.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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 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?
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 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.