What does $100 Ether mean?
medium.com
medium.com
Also, the idea that Ethereum at $100 implies this amazing decentralized future is simply wrong, because that also implies that Ethereum at $1 didn't mean anything. Instead his argument should center around the many different businesses, products and experiments being built on the platform.
What you're trying to do is define a space so that you can capture an outsized share of the attention and therefore the financial value from it. Plenty of people name spaces without needing that capture.
I have FOSS'd very, very significant IP in my time - most notably the Hexayurt Project - and it has been incredibly hard to get things done. In this instance, we need the protection in order to have our vision - rather than that of one of the big Stack companies - shape the future a little.
You'd grudge us that?
Insufficient political radicalism?
The blockchain is not a way to "arrange a lot of computers to do the same thing." it literally is just a chain of blocks. Moving them is the nodes job, and you can sibil attack the nodes if you wish. ALso, when machines drop offline or get hacked, the network notices quite dearly, as I'm sure you noticed when your ETH network was non functional a couple times this year right? You guys [formed a choir and forgot the chorus] when you rolled back the dao transactions...
Please don't use the highest ever seen price to describe the block reward for mining, its usually not $500 every twelve seconds right?
"A smart contract is a tool for changing the world." So far it seems they've only changed thew world for the worse? Is there a successful smart contract yet? Is the net gain going to exceed the loss from those poor dev's that learned how easy it is for a program to do something you didn't think it would, and now all the money is gone. Maybe, or maybe you could use safer languages for the contracts.
"Systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum have many, many implementations. As long as they can all smoothly work together (and bugs at this level are, indeed, very rare) the whole thing works like a single machine. That nobody owns."
It is surely owned. The chain itself exists on drives that are owned, the nodes and their bandwidth is owned, bitcoin has *many implementations? hmm. If no one owns it, who are these people voting for BIP's? Seems like ownership to me. The coins, the nodes, the miners are owned, and they lobby.
"Nobody owns the internet, and we get along just fine." Some citizens don't have this view, or the freedom to see it.
"[btc]The mining thing rapidly centralized in the hands of a relatively small number of miners, " You are avoiding that in ETH how?
"The ideas behind Bitcoin certainly ran into trouble as they encountered regulation" avoiding that in ETH how?
"And this is the core vision of the Ethereum community: a world in which two people can deal directly with each other, and the systems that support their interaction don’t distort the message as they carry out our instructions. You say what you want, and the machines carry your instructions to the person on the other end of the deal. Directness is the real fruit of disintermediation: people dealing as they would face-to-face, but with the benefit of a network."
Uh. I think the darknets are doing this at scale already?
I don't think the libertarians will like this: "I went to Norway recently, and I suggested at a talk I did that we could move Scandinavia very quickly to experiments involving a blockchain for payments, fully supported by their government, on the basis that taxation could be built directly into the platforms they might use (it’s unlikely, today, the Norwegian government could collect taxes in Ether not Kroner!)." When the Russians take out your internet, I guess you just won't have commerce for a while.
Your arguments for a blockchain seem to support BTC better than they do ETH. Your arguments for peer to peer commerce seem to support the darknet markets more than they do ETH. You hand wave oracles with your "internet of agreements" You will end up with human judges. Oracles solution on its own is worth more than all crypto currently.
"I think Ether at $100 means that so many people believe in the world they think Ethereum will create, that it is becoming inevitable." Dogecoin appeared pretty inevitable for a while.
Smart contracts are seriously entirely useless unless you solve oracles. If you can't trust your oracle, you can't trust your contract. Period. No hand waving.
Thus. If you want to build crypto products that are useful, like shapeshift, timestamp, and lots of other things, great! Don't think that it is ETH that you need to make that happen. Also, what exactly do I need ETH for if I want to use the ETH network for all its dreamed majesty? Isn't all I need gas, and how correlated is gas likely to be with ETH? You have humans setting that relationship no? ETH is where smart people go to throw away their BTC gains.
That being said, you're a smart dude and I like lots of what you've worked on. If you have to trust a human, you'll need a human judge. If you want to not have judges, you need to not need to trust humans. If you dont' want to trust humans, than you must determine the state of the "real world" for your "smart contracts" to make decisions. That thing that measures the real world is an Oracle. Since your oracle can be cheated, or ddos'd or make a mistake, you're back to human judges again.
Until you can create a digital oracle that is trustworthy and can translate real world events into data to be plugged into logic in your smart contract, you are wasting your time. You will, end up with judges. Hell, the DAO didn't even get to fail at the oracle level, it failed before it even got to make its first "smart investment."
All the talk of smart contracts is merely hand waving away the oracle problem. All the talk of blockchains is sadly also hand waving of lots of issues as well, which is why we've really only seen one successful one, and some of it's users nearly have a gun to their head, so it's quite compelling for them to eat the risks and make it work.
Thus the more brain power and money power that go into things that are useful instead of smart contracts with no oracles, the happier I'll be.
There is no way you could push down the market 10 percent today. Maybe back in 2011, or maybe in one of the lesser known cryptocurrency markets. But in Ethereum, you could unload a huge number of ETH and the price wouldn't budge. I'm assuming of course you're not an institutional trader, in which case of course Ethereum trading volumes are insufficient to absorb large trades without significant price movements.
>Smart contracts are seriously entirely useless unless you solve oracles.
Even a basic cryptocurrency transaction (sending ETH from Account 1 to Account 2) utilizes smart contracts. Having Turing Complete script evaluation just means the range of smart contracts possible becomes larger. So for example, schemes like Lightning Network are possible with Ethereum, without any changes to the protocol.
GDAX fell about 8% yesterday, from $96.82 to $89.07 in one hour (May 4, 9-10am) with about $2 million worth of trades. It's a little early to call this a post-volatility era.
The daily trading volume is $300 million at last count. There's arbitrage happening across exchanges so the price on one exchange is not isolated from what's happening on others.
Massive amounts of braindrain have funneled into ETH, and not just dev's but dollars. It's like 21 inc. They failed so hard that they pivoted into a payments layer. I literally paid them a 6 percent fee to send some BTC to their founder. I could have just sent him btc directly, but then they wouldn't have a profit model right?
Thus. Time and money can be wasted. I believe that much of ETH is such a waste. And even worse, it's actually a risk magnet that convinces others to do unsafe things, like tie millions of dollars up in smart contracts, that are quite unsmart.
Bitcoin's not exciting enough, so let's iterate all the xyz thing but with bitcoin ideas. They nearly all fail, so then we're on to, lets have shorter block times, or lets tie proof of work to something that's not electricity, like storage or selfies. Then there's the "smart" layers like colored coins, branded tokens, and mastercoin, and ETH which layers on itself.
So the situation is, everyone wants to get rich, but you can only get rich in crypto if you A. start with lots or B. Get in really early. Since most people don't start with lots, and most people aren't "early" to BTC, they venture into altcoin land, also known by a diminutive term I won't use here. You could C. ico, pump and dump as well.
Thus everyone wants to get in early, and get in on the pump, few want to work with boring, slow, nearly impossible to change BTC, corners get cut, and sheep get shaved.
The growing pains BTC had cost a couple orders of magnitude less financial harm?
Value comes from scarcity + demand. Open source software is by definition not scarce. Thus if a cryptocurrency has value, it's not it's code that its the value, it's the network effect of users using it that prevents other copies from outcompeting them at lower fees. Thus for any cryptocurrency token to have lasting value, it must derive that value from something external to it's bad ass code.
Take a look at how many things you can buy with BTC that you can't with ETH, that is the value, that is hard to replicate, hard to penetrate. Even lower volatility due to giant order books is a plus. Thus, when I see open source projects try to make money on the quality of their code, they're missing out on where the value comes from.
Now, could ETH be amazing, sure. Would it be amazing if the tokens were worth $1 or 10 cents, or 1 cent? Probably, the same way tcp packets are amazing, and worth pretty damn little.
SO when people hop on the pump, on a currency that is only hitting 1 metric, the pump one, it's dangerous and risky.
Then there's the risk that your'e enticing dev's to write smart contracts, when smart contracts are hard to write. And you're giving them all the tools they need to hang themselves.
Then there's the risk that you say lots of things that are inaccurate, which I guess I'll just tackle in a giant post next, lol.
I don't mind Bitcoin. But it's 10 years old. I was warning them in November 2013 about getting their political act together and innovating. https://youtu.be/P-7JIQKbm5U is me keynoting in London on just this topic.
What do you see the next move as being?
Sorry if I don't trust the "small group of legends" more than the government.
But more to the point, look at what happened with ETH and ETC. The Ethereum Foundation could have decided to hard fork without any particular % of support. Consensus was needed for price support, not to complete the fork. Let's say they forked with only 25% support. The new fork retains the ETH brand. The old chain rebrands (i.e. ETC). The market then votes on how much they value the old versus the new. Now look at ETH/ETC since the fork: the market is saying that they feel more comfortable with a known, trusted authority (i.e. small group of developers with trademarks and a conference schedule) than they do with true democratized first principles of immutable code. I'm not a righteous zealot, I agree with what ETH did and would have done the same thing; I am just calling it out for what it is.
Humans love to collect, horde, and trade items: puka shells, tulips, dot com stocks. Speculation is hard-wired into the human DNA. At some points, asset prices become hopelessly disconnected from the value and utility of the underlying asset. I think the initial rush into crypto was healthy because it funded (and continues to fund) hundreds of full-time researchers who can push the field forward. But at some point the speculative fever becomes a disease that can hurt more than it helps. The sooner we develop real-world applications based on public blockchains as an anchor-point to reality, the better.
But the fork wasn't a referendum on the governance model of Ethereum. If you picked ETC, you get your liberterian utopia - but you also get a chain where someone made off with 10% of the Ether supply.
Every market transaction since then has been a referendum on which model the market prefers. Ultimately, the market price dictates a LOT of down-stream behaviors, e.g. some miners will switch back and forth between ETH and ETC (and other alt-coins) based on hourly yield.
Even something banally simple as "if such and such win the world cup deposit earnings there" cannot be 100% trustless. How does one overcome this problem?
I don't think smart contracts can overcome this problem while remaining 100% trustless.
There is no cloud, just other people's computers.
Smart contracts can make trust relationships explicit.
By using a blockchain system, you entrust a network - which you may have no control over - with application state. If you rely on such a network, you indirectly also rely on the network infrastructure and operators' social and economic incentives.
Do you know about http://erights.org ? They are good - great - on terminology.
1. The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you lose the millions of dollars as the DAO did after it passed audits.
2. Competing implementations of consensus code in different languages greatly increases breakdown of consensus. (more millions have been lost over this, and it created a fork at about 10 percent the value of the old chain.)
3. You can buy things with bitcoin. What can you buy with ETH? If you can't buy anything with a currency, it's not a currency.
Thus, human resolved chain rollbacks? Check. Failed consensus between implementations? Check. Passed audit yet totally failed smart contracts? Check. No place to spend them? Check. New tokens given out all the time forever? Check.
Every dollar that goes into bad ideas is taken directly from the good ideas. Smart contracts can never be smart until oracles are solved. Oracles aren't solved. ETH has all the technical odds and history stacked against it, however some how, the people that bought them aren't dumping.
There's a saying that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
The Halting Problem states that you can't create a general purpose algorithm for predicting what an arbitrary program in a Turing Complete language will do. This is very different.
That's the point. Theoretical limitations has no bearing on solving the practical problem. That is why RichardHeart's original point [1] is wrong.
[1] The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you lose the millions of dollars as the DAO did after it passed audits.
Formal verification will be necessary in practice. This is not an ideal outcome either, since (1) you have to formally specify the problem you're trying to solve and (2) the proof that the code meets the specification can easily be bigger than the program, by many orders of magnitude. Even this does not guarantee that bugs won't happen, since there's no guarantee that your specification accurately describes the problem you're solving.
This line of reasoning does not help me write better code, and does not address the parent's concerns. Using this argument, I can say that every single program I will ever run in my lifetime is also decidable, since eventually the computer I'm using to run it will stop working. This of course does not mean that I will write bug-free code, nor does it mean that I will write code that is feasible to prove correct.
What I want is a decidable programming language where it is always feasible to reason about the smart contract's halting states for arbitrary input. Bitcoin and its derivatives let me do this. Ethereum does not.
If I can do this, then I can feasibly reason about how my code will react to other peoples' inputs (e.g. I can prove the absence of DAO-like re-entrance bugs). The fact that Ethereum allows smart contracts to be written in undecidable languages means that this is not feasible in practice.
Edit: Rereading your earlier comment, I understand now - you're talking about other contracts your code calls, not vice-versa. In that case, I'd point out that you're totally free to either write those contracts yourself if they're not already provably secure, or write your own code such that it's formally proved to work regardless of what those contracts do.
I also have to reason about the transactions that invoke other smart contracts that, through one or more subsequent calls, will call into mine. These transactions are inputs to my smart contract as well. Recall that the DAO was hacked by an "attacker" contract that called into it, for example.
> I'd point out that you're totally free to either write those contracts yourself if they're not already provably secure, or write your own code such that it's formally proved to work regardless of what those contracts do.
If formal specification and verification were practical, we'd be doing it in every programming domain. Normally, few people bother since (1) it takes a lot of work, and (2) the consequences of bugs are small in most domains, especially compared to the consequences of not shipping code on time. If you have not tried to formally specify and verify the correctness of a non-trivial program before, I encourage you to try it before recommending that strategy (especially if that recommendation includes telling developers to rewrite other peoples' code).
Since smart contracts have other peoples' money attached to them, the developers' first priority must be user safety. Ethereum does not appear to take this seriously, since (1) its default programming languages are not designed to be amenable to formal verification, and (2) smart contracts are allowed to call into one another.
I would much rather program on a blockchain that kept smart contracts completely isolated from one another, and required me to submit a machine-checked proof that the user's money (1) will be sent to an address of the user's choice automatically no more than X blocks after the deposit, and (2) cannot leave the smart contract at an earlier time without a one-time-use signature from the user. If a smart contract cannot be proven to do both of these things, then the blockchain should prevent it from running.
You can look at some programs with your mind, and tell quite clearly what they'll do.
You can't write a _program_ that will look at other programs, and always give a correct answer.
This is the one that really sticks out to me. What do people need any of this for? I think they did a fine job pitching the value of smart contract / blockchain technology. But why do I, or a bank, or society need anything beyond those?
The tech may be useful, but what 99% of these discussions come down to is whether you think a decentralized currency and disintermediated payments system have value. I don't really see the need for the vast majority of society to have the former in the long run, and I think the latter is actively harmful and impractical. Like you pointed out, you're inevitably going to have these code failures, disagreements, etc. Those are basic failures of any human-designed and human-negotiated system. As far as those go, I still prefer to wager my business on the time-worn technology of English common law.
As far as the tech goes, yes, banks should get behind some of this. Their infrastructure is garbage and could well benefit from associations of private chains and the like.
I can write an app for managing a business, fund it, and then walk away forever. Ethereum is a platform for hosting autonomous corporations.
I like that there's some level of the human element in the personal transactions I conduct with businesses, and I don't think I'm alone given how hackneyed the joke about bypassing automated phone support systems has become. If something falls outside company procedures there's usually someone who can help me out by bending the rules or deferring to a superior who can make an exception, or at the very least explain why it can't be done. Empathy plays a role.
If the entire business transaction is automated sure, maybe the more mundane everyday processes run smoother, but if there's an exception that wasn't accounted for you're shit out of luck.
I'm quite sure the same argument was being used by many brick and mortar stores at the dawn of e-commerce.
In certain businesses empathy matters, in many of them it doesn't. There are also businesses that would never be built without the blockchain - and that's the most interesting part.
It was, but even then every e-commerce company has a chain of escalation that, at some point, ends at a human who isn't controlled by an algorithm. Setting your business logic and "walking away" as the original comment said wouldn't have that escalation path. If it does, then how is it much different from the way things work now?
So it makes more sense to view it as a commodity.
While others have pointed out that this is wrong, it's worth amplifying: Turing machines are deterministic. You can run the contract locally and observe how it behaves, and it will behave the same way in the same environment elsewhere. If this wasn't the case, you couldn't have consensus at all.
> 2. Competing implementations of consensus code in different languages greatly increases breakdown of consensus. (more millions have been lost over this, and it created a fork at about 10 percent the value of the old chain.)
The DAO hard fork had nothing to do with a consensus failure. There's been one single short-lived mainnet fork due to a consensus issue, which was quickly resolved with - to the best of my knowledge - no financial loss.
"Deterministic" != "feasible to reason about halting states for all inputs." Running it locally to see how it behaves for a handful of inputs is definitely not sufficient for claiming that the code behaves correctly (i.e. is "secure").
Recall that people lost money in the DAO not because they didn't test how the DAO behaved when they sent their Ether to it. They lost money because someone discovered the contract as implemented did not behave the way it was expected and advertised to behave. Had it been possible to reason about the DAO's halting states for all possible inputs, the re-entrance bug would have been caught and fixed before the DAO was released.
And similar tech can be applied to smart contracts. Would have spotted the DAO bug. Not ready for prime time yet, but will be around the same time as sharding maybe...
The "Halting Problem" is a red herring here - eth transactions are technically not Turing complete since they automatically halt when they run out of the finite supply of ether attached to the transaction. Saying that ethereum isn't feasible because of the halting problem is like saying cars aren't feasible because an object in motion stays in motion - there are countless practical ways to manage it, and if nothing else stops you, in the end you'll definitely run out of gas.
Did you ever consider that the currency part of cryptocurrency was a misnomer and has nothing to do with the value of the asset?
And note I'm trying to be technology agnostic as we build out the VC firm and the Internet of Agreements organisation - I am not of the opinion any of these systems are going to scale cleanly. I think we will need to go back and build it from scratch on an abstraction like pi calculus and work it up from there, not try to accelerate the Proof of Work systems by increments.
Only time will tell, though. I'm flexible on this.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/854271590804140033
I doubt this is true. When Bitcoin came out I think a lot of people realized a whole new game was afoot. An autonomous ledger was demonstrated and the race was on to create the autonomous everything else. An autonomous application host was the obvious brass ring, and whoever got it seemed assured to spark a market at least as big as Bitcoin.
I can't imagine Vitalik was thinking anything other than "if this works, it will be huge." That's a big if, but I think the stakes were clear.
Much practice. I am old (45)
Of course, we will look back on this in 5 years and think $100 ETHER was cheap!
You could buy now and dump it when it hits $900 - $1000. It will.
As far as I am concerned, the current iteration of *coin are just pump and dump basically.
"Just pump and dump" implies you don't believe legitimate uses underlie the coin.
It's a stupid idea because there's always two parties to any transaction.
You know why they don't just store their wealth in dollars? Because nobody is insane enough to sell them dollars for a worthless piece of paper.
Bitcoin works the same way. How much Bitcoin would you give for a Zimbabwe Dollar during hyperinflation? Obviously none.
So you have yet another hard currency that nobody can get ahold of. What's the point, again?
> Or the idea that people would want to use it for international money transfers?
I buy things internationally all the time. It works pretty great, it costs me nothing and it costs the recipient 4.4% plus a fixed $0.30 per sale.
Plus if they try and screw me over somehow I get all my money back and try someone else, and they get slapped with a big-ass chargeback fee for being an asshole. How much are the chargeback fees in the Bitcoin model? Who do I call to get my money back?
Also, I can tell you for sure that Bitcoin costs quite a lot in fees to buy, sell, or trade. Each transaction is what, $0.50 in fees nowadays?
Insofar as Bitcoin represents a single world currency, the problem is that on a macro level this isn't a good idea. Separate currencies that can inflate/deflate (i.e. "appreciate" and "depreciate") are a way to levellize structural imbalances, and without this relief valve you can end up with total collapse instead of just workers who are upset that an iPhone costs $1000. Inflation is good, it reflects a growing economy, it's only when it turns into hyperinflation that this is problematic.
For a microcosm of this problem, you can see the ongoing problems with the structural imbalances between Greece and the high-earning German economies over the last 10 years. If they had currencies that could appreciate and depreciate, Greek labor would be very cheap on the international market. But since they're stuck in the Euro together, they can't do that.
The growth function for the money supply probably isn't optimal either, for these reasons. The ability to adjust the supply is critical for controlling both inflation and deflation, under various circumstances.
I don't think a scenario in which bitcoin became the single currency that the world used is very likely to happen.
I suspect what is going to happen is that bitcoin is going to be the world's first Electronically Tradable Liquid Asset (ETLA) that is frictionless and uncensorable. Its going to legitimize the concept of a much wider class of ETLAs being acceptable as money. Any company stock that has high price stability could function as money if we had a platform whereby people could trade fractional shares of stock at low fees.
This is going to take away the ability of central banks to manipulate the money supply. If a given country's CB tried to print money to cause inflation, the population would figure it out quickly and the price of ETLAs in that currency would immediately rise.
What I mean is the concept of it becoming an international currency where people actually transact business in it directly, instead of it being a commodity that needs to be converted to and from a local currency.
As such there will always inherently be exchange fees for international transaction, just like when you pay a fee for a credit-card transaction in a foreign currency. You're paying a middleman to hold those currencies so you can convert on-demand.
What I'm jabbing at here is the idea that there are "no fees" in Bitcoin, which is a point often used by its advocates.
The transaction fee is actually absurdly high nowadays - the average transaction fee is now above $1 [0]. For all the effort spent complaining about credit card fees - this is a totally absurd price, you only break even with the standard credit card fee at $23 dollars or more. Just from the transaction fees.
And of course every time you use a middleman of some kind they will (naturally) take their own cut. Buy Bitcoin? The exchange takes their cut. Buy something from a retail store? Bitpay takes their cut. Of course that's how capitalism works, but you pay that on top of the transaction fees.
Some people have the idea that somehow Bitcoin becomes the currency that you only make big transactions in, and transactions will happen off-chain somehow. But that necessarily involves a lot more middlemen taking their own cuts. Even if that's automatic, you know someone's gonna get paid.
> This is going to take away the ability of central banks to manipulate the money supply. If a given country's CB tried to print money to cause inflation, the population would figure it out quickly and the price of ETLAs in that currency would immediately rise.
Yeah, governments are going to love having a complete ledger of everyone's transactions. No more tax evasion, no more drug trafficking. We're halfway there with electronic clearing as it is - this will finally get rid of that pesky untraceable cash once and for all. Can't wait. /s
Bitcoin isn't anonymous, it's pseudonymous. As long as you're transacting something in real life, or exchanging it for another currency it's relatively easy to track you down. And you can easily track back through multiple transactions. When I hand you a cash bill - that's it.
Anyway, any cryptocurrency that gets adopted by a country would certainly include the ability to control the rate at which currency is issued. If governments wanted their currency to be tied to a commodity which they had no control over, they would never have left the gold standard.
Also, the whole "coin mining" thing is really pointless with a national currency. The point of the distributed ledger is that you don't have to trust someone. But really the government can trust themselves, and centralized systems have tons of advantages over distributed ledgers. For starters, massively greater transaction rates, also it's trivial to correct mistakes, or debit people as needed.
We could call it a "bank account". And then to authorize a transaction, a physical token you carry could communicate with this bank account to cryptographically authenticate you. We could call that a "chip and pin card". No warehouses full of graphics cards doing useless hashes are needed in this groundbreaking new system.
Now Ethereum? That's actually fairly cool in its own way. It's certainly not changing the world right now but these are the early days. I question its utility versus any other cloud computing - at the end of the day there is no "cloud", only someone else's computer - but hooking that directly to what's basically pre-authenticated chip-and-pin transactions is fairly cool in its own way.
We could replace a lot of the useless Etherium hashing with "first person to submit a valid block wins" though - so basically you are paying someone to watch for conditions X,Y,Z to be met. Getting rid of the mining and going with first-watcher-to-submit-a-validated-transaction would incentivize speed and efficiency over doing math that doesn't matter. But again, that is probably something where you could serve millions of people with one big server.
In comparison, Bitcoin is just digital gold, it's a whole lot of sound and fury but at the end of the day it just sits there and does nothing (except burn electricity).
But hey, everyone agrees it has value and therefore it does. It's just not actually backed by anything, the math itself is relatively pointless (unless you happen to need a giant hashtable of course).
[0] https://themerkle.com/average-bitcoin-transaction-fee-has-ex...
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have had fundamental differences in the orgs and fractured. Currencies isn't exactly like open-source orgs where fracturing the foundation is perfectly fine.
This is interesting. Where Bitcoin seems to reward miners based on solving NP hard problems, Etherium is just handed out randomly?
Because there is no way to know the true solution, everyone is just guessing so in the end it is random chance that determines who gets to mine a block, but those who spent more effort have proportionally more chance to win.
Imaging a million haystacks with a million different keys scattered within them. There is a lock which only one of those keys can open; it is difficult to find the key, but when you do, anyone can easily verify it is correct by turning it in the lock. Once a key has been found, a new lock is created and the process starts again.
The more robots (mining power) you have to search for the key, the more likely it is that you will find it before competing machines do.
The main point of block-chain is decentralization. It is thus important to emphasize that there isn't a central authority that rewards the mining of a block, but instead that the miner includes his reward in the block. It is also important (though less relevant) that the challenge of mining a block is a mathematical result of the last block. It too arises without a central authority.
Moving to even less relevant and yet interesting thing is that not all miners need be mining the same block. This is already the case for the 'reward' they are mining, but miners are free to exclude a transaction from their mining attempts. This then begets the matter of fees as a secondary incentive for mining besides the block reward.