Ethereum White Paper – annotated version (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum White Paper – annotated version (2015)

fermatslibrary.com

102 pointsslbenfica15 comments

The annotations I see look very thin.

Was this submission to HN intended to generate interest to crowdsource more annotations (à la RapGenius)?

Seems to be a subtle way of drawing interest to the site (see the author of annotations) using a currently hyped tech. Of course, Buterin has earned the right to be annotated along with greats such as Einstein and Keynes.

Snark aside, this is a really cool site. They seem to be attempting to annotate a variety of papers (amateur and professional), so it's understandable. It is a bit jarring to see something by Kenneth Arrow or Feynman alongside Ethereum marketing material, though.

They've even got McCarthy (maybe a better expenditure of time):

http://fermatslibrary.com/s/recursive-functions-of-symbolic-...

> ...Buterin has earned the right...

Care to explain why?

Is building a new currency that is the platform for billions of dollars of rampant unproductive speculation not enough?

Frankly, no. I don't want to hear anything about mr Butlerin until (a) Ethereum is a widely used & useful product and (b) the security agencies of the world declassify their involvement.

Until/Unless I can acquire and manage proper securities & options via one a decentralised ledger, I reamain thoroughly unimpressed by anything other than the marketing efforts of most crypto projects.

Also, a "new currency" would be bitcoin. So far mr Butlerin's major achievement IMO is convincing major financial actors of the merits of his platform. As a private person, I'll take btc/ltc any day over etherium.

That is usually the bar, I like the relativity of how people's opinions suddenly begin mattering because they were associated with something that is over a billion dollars now.

Don't know why people may try to create a separate standard for cryptocurrency.

Of course I'm just speculating (ha), but Ethereum is more than this. You can build your whole payment gateway from a smart contract. I participated in a crowd-funding event that (no, not an ICO) had me so impressed with the payment gateway tech, I had to send more money twice just to recap what I just learned about this new cryptocurrency.

https://firefly.city/

The device itself is pretty impressive for $5 worth of parts, but I did not really hit "wow" until I saw how easy it was for this guy to take my money and establish a point of contact and a payment relationship that can support repeat business. (He's also the one who built this payment gateway, it lacks some for polish but it is also as a bonus, essentially proof of concept that shows how the device can work. tl;dr: it's a portable thin wallet that runs inside of the browser, you get a javascript file that you can save and keep as a backup of your keys. The arduino jobber is just doing the signatures.)

The tokens do not need to appreciate in value, that helps speculators of course, but if you don't yet recognize that Ethereum is a substantial advancement over Bitcoin, I can't really help you with that. You'll have to figure it out! While I'd love to get rich off of trading the coins, if they can simply just remain stable in valuation it is ultimately going to change how we do money around the world, I don't doubt this anymore.

Did you take my comment to be a criticism or trivialization of Ethereum in some way? Why are you telling me any of this, I am very familiar with solidity development

I misread this sentence completely:

> Don't know why people may try to create a separate standard for cryptocurrency.

Interpreting Ethereum to be "the separate standard for cryptocurrency" rather than the standard being about what is noteworthy. Eg. "Why aren't people just satisfied with Bitcoin, it is already the standard" Sorry! My mistake.

>> ...Buterin has earned the right...

> Care to explain why?

(I believe that was sarcasm.)

The Ethereum white paper was published in 2013.

The events surrounding TheDAO, which the annotations mention, occurred in 2016.

I'm not sure where the 2015 in the HN title is coming from.

https://genius.com/Ethereum-ethereum-whitepaper-annotated

It's also on genius, not super annotated

is Genius still a thing? It was constantly on HN years ago and the founders looked like superstars but I haven't heard too much since then.

It's definitely still a thing, its just that 99% of people only really care about song lyrics from (12-24) years old.

A lot of the buzz moved on to stuff like Music.ly but Genius is still doing good business.

It's funny to see how data generates itself based on societal interest. Like, you're going to have shittons of training data if you were going to look at commentary on Jay-Z lyrics but not on, say, Principia Mathematica haha.

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