On the other hand, lowering the barrier for issuing equity or app coins make creating scams or tempting people to run with a lot of money trivial. A recent Fred Wilson's post[1] about this makes the point very clear.
Lastly, not everything can be descentralized because you are challenging computation limitations and/or you need oracles outside the network that are the weakest point of the whole system.
[1] Buyer Beware - VC Fred Wilson on ICOs https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6h7d0j/buyer_bewa...
I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the same time once you hear how it works it sounds almost obvious. All the individual parts have been known for ages but they're combined in an innovative way.
I'm personally not convinced by the "political" side of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but on the technical side it's one of the most inspiring piece of software in the past decade IMO.
However the proof-of-work/auto-adjusting-difficulty method of asserting truth still seems horrible to me from a technical perspective.
Politically, I don't want to live in a world where this principle catches on and an ever-growing % of energy production would be spend on solving meaningless math problems.
As far as I know there are still some pretty big holes in PoS that still need to be filled in.
If anything is great about proof-of-work, it's how simple it is.
The important part is how blocks get added over network, and decentralized consensus of the addition. (Well, socioeconomic phenomenon of adding monetary value to all that jazz is pretty cool too!)
It's still all standard bachelor's degree algorithms, and I agree with the gp that it's not the interesting part. The interesting part is using these algorithms for social consensus on value.
It's not that special, each invoice gets assigned as hash of (invoice number + total amount + date of emission + hash of previous invoice). Besides having to send that XML file to the IRS each month with all the issued invoices, the hash also gets printed on the invoice given to the client (paper or PDF), so it gets tricky to change the past without getting caught.
But yes, dynamic-membership multi-party signature schemes and their use for creating permissionless systems is the real innovation.
Do you (or anyone else) have a technical reference for differences between the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain length function?
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Ethereum uses a variant of the GHOST algorithm, which was introduced in the paper Accelerating Bitcoin’s Transaction Processing: Fast Money Grows on Trees, Not Chains.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf
The Ethereum white paper mentions how they modified it:
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-g...
Full detail is in their infamously difficult Yellow Paper:
I had some idea about the Bitcoin blockchain - also succinctly summarized by @tylerswift.
But the Ethereum material is all new to me. It at least sounds more interesting than "the least interesting".
https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...
> the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units.
At the end of the day, we see blockchain as a general term. We have humble roots as the Bitcoin Association of Berkeley, but we wanted something agnostic and recognizable for the future, so we ended up with this. Sure, blockchains are just a data structure but the cryptographically enforced units wouldn't exist if it weren't for blockchain, or something like it (IOTA Tangle). I can assure you that the people here are only interested in the real stuff. :)
Some of the things we do here are related to teaching ([1]), Ethereum Dapp Development, and whitepaper talks. [2]
[1] https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/decal [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5sgoRfoSp3jeX4DEqKLwKg
its given, we've passed those stage already