Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If code has bugs (and sufficiently complex code will always, always, always have bugs) you simply have to suffer the consequences (sorry for your loss) or the entire community can choose to execute a hard fork and rewrite history (see DAO). If a vanilla legal contract has some typos or even some semantic differences that lead to ridiculous outcomes, lawyers and judges will hash it out. People, not computers, make the final decisions in our legal system, so human errors are mostly tolerated. If I sneak a clause into a contract saying that the other party must pay me their entire salary every year, it would be voided in an instant. Not so if placed in a "smart" contract.
Perhaps you could say that Ethereum is better than our legal system because it's decentralized. But I don't think it's enough to say something is better simply because it's decentralized. Why should I be afraid of a centralized legal system? We elect politicians, who choose judges (who have to be confirmed by legislative bodies whose members we also elect). Sure, it's not perfect, but it's hardly the tyrannical system that would make me turn to the bug-ridden wild west of Ethereum smart contracts.
I think the only reasonable argument in favor of Ethereum contracts is that they are easier to create (less friction, don't need to hire a lawyer, etc), but that's hardly a good thing. Real life contracts are expensive for a reason, not because Rothschild & Co. have some other nefarious plans. You need lawyers to write good contracts and think through their consequences, as well as reasonable, human judges to decide issues when they arise. Ethereum, to me, seems a purely ideological creation, not one rooted in actual needs that people have. Sure, it's decentralized and immutable (unless a contract hurts the wrong people, lol) but did anyone really want that (except for those with ideological reasons, i.e. libertarians)?
Not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to hear a strong opposing viewpoint on this.
Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and paper" umbrella.
Let's hope we have to wait a long time until you die. Can one of you daughter change her receiving address meanwhile? Can you change it? (Perhaps someone stole her laptop with the wallet.)
Did you (1) write the code, or (2) copied it from ethereum.stackexchange or (3) use a webpage that writes the smartcontract for you?
Are you sure the contract has no bugs??? Can someone else change the her receiving address?
(1) If you write the code, probably nobody else review it. Let's hope it has no bugs or it's small enough to be unnoticed.
(3) If many people are using the same code, and someone finds a bug it can be used to steal the money from all the contracts. So you get hopefully more code review from the creator and users, but also more unwanted code review.
(2) If you just copied the code from a forum or something, you can have the best or the worst case of the previous scenarios, I'm not sure.
One "feature" of Bitcoin is that the programming language is so horrible that nobody tries to write code in it. So you have a few types of standard transactions (send money, post a message burning a small amount of bitcoins, ¿multisignature wallets?, ¿¿escrow service??) but all (most) of them are extremely straightforward and extremely carefully reviewed.
In theory you could deploy a democracy as a contract. You could deploy a currency with a deterministically democratic central bank. You can create crowdfunded employee-owned work communes that pay dividends to member holders.
From a global perspective, if you ask yourself - is there anywhere that could benefit from such a system - and the answer is "yes" - then I think crypto is a great hedge against legacy systems.
I like how they frame the DAO hack as an opportunity for growth rather than a gross display of incompetence followed by a breaking of the original promise of immutability of the platform, which is what it was.
"Ethereum is an unsecure, trust-requiring, centralized, mutable platform that runs stoppable apps and censors people Ethereum Foundation (EF) dislikes - the opposite of what it advertises itself as. Ethereum Foundation misrepresents what Ethereum is to prospective investors for increasing the value of the traded asset ETH while profiting financially. This means, by definition, Ethereum Foundation is participating in fraud by continuously misleading investors. Furthermore, the act of suddenly changing the properties of the unregistered security after the sale of the security in the initial coin offering (ICO) and/or on exchanges while profiting personally constitutes securities fraud. Additionally, Ethereum Foundation is connected to damaging the value of sold assets, damaging the value of competing assets, theft from competition, and market manipulation of competing assets for profit."
Eth is great as a developer platform, and it can/does have a future. However, btc will remain the true king because of its decentralized nature.
The entire point of crypto is that it tries to solve the problem with existing currency (fiat), which is too tightly controlled by a few individuals.
What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central roof to solve the proof-of-work.
There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.
Nope. See below.
https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic
Ethereum has supposedly 34k nodes, which includes light-nodes which merely hold the last state of the blockchain, that is not a full-node and heavily reduces the trustlessness and security of a cryptocurrency. Light-nodes are closer to an SPV than a Node. I haven't seen any source reporting only full-nodes which would be the proper comparison.
On the other side the number ~7.5k nodes popup for Bitcoin, but that's wrong as well. Those are the full-nodes that are listening for new connections publicly. Not all the nodes of the Bitcoin network.
Following [1] you can see the data from a seed DNS node of Bitcoin, which shows a number closer to reality which is 86k of actual full-nodes.
[1]: http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...
That's a big statement. Expand on it.