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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine. "Ok, so the overbalanced wheels didn't quite work, but we'll add ball bearings and flowing water and gears and..."

In 1872, a man named John Keely demonstrated a machine that operated on what he called the "vaporic" or "etheric" force:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely

The same year he raised 5 million dollars, equivalent to about $100M in today's money. Two years later he demonstrated a model that was described as a "hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine" with "quadruple negative harmonics". No doubt he'd be a blockchain entrepreneur today.

(Edit: Someone actually maintains a big wiki dedicated to Keely's "Sympathetic Vibratory Physics" and "Etheric Elements": http://www.svpwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Sympathetic+Vibra... Amazing that an investment fraud from 150 years ago is still producing "research"! A sobering reminder of the power of lies.)

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Perpetual motion machines are disfavored because they break a law of physics, not merely because they involve a stack of complicated mechanisms, each of which fixes a problem introduced by the mechanism below. If you've ever had a complicated medical problem, you know that very often you get drug A to counteract side effects of drug B, which was used treat an infection caused by procedure C which was a necessary precaution before performing treatment D to treat the underlying illness. Yes, sometimes such complicated mechanisms are obfuscating a doomed process, but other times engineering is just complicated. The Saturn V had a lot of interdependent parts too...

I would say the "Proof of Stake" they're planning to move towards also defies the law of physics.

Intuitively, I think "proof of stake" could violate Gödel's incompleteness theorems. These basically state that no complete system can proof its own correctness. And that's exactly what "proof of stake" tries to do: proof its correctness without external anchor of truth.

Of course, Vitalik Buterin knows that so he resorted to "weak subjectivity", basically saying that if you are not online often enough, you need to trust someone with providing you check points to decide which fork is the "true" one.

I do not find your explanation of the objective of PoS convincing. Maybe you are talking about their protocol that is true by construction?

Proof of Stake strategy is to make it where attacks on the blockchain are impossible in the economic sense. Proof of work strategy is making the attack infeasible by making the work required impossibly large.

Now is PoS possible? No idea. That possible fork attack seems like an impossible barrier to overcome. But we will see.

History has shown us that humans don't always act economically or rationally. So nothing is impossible.

In PoS, it is a known assumption that if the majority of nodes act rationally, then so be it. This is an issue that is out of scope.

Humans can be rational or irrational. That is how they are born. So far, we can only make tools and books to prevent irrationality.

Do you think PoS is as safe as PoW when dealing with irrationality?

Yes, there are principled ways to model these things. You can compare the byzantine fault tolerance threshold across PoW and PoS. You can compare the cost of deviating from the Nash equilibrium, and calculate how much an attacker needs to spend to deviate in return for every dollar of damage he causes.

Be careful about how you interpret the word "prove" there. Are you sure that the sense of "prove" that applies to that theorem of Gödel corresponds to the sense of "prove" when you are talking about proof of stake?

The proofs of Gödel's theorems work by encoding the axioms and inference rules of the system in a way that can be dealt with within the system, and using that to encode statements like "this statement cannot be proven within the system" within the system.

I am not sure what the analogous thing would be if you were to attempt to carry the proof over. I am not even sure what it would mean to try to do that.

To prove that, there is no proof that can be carried out within proof of stake, that there is no proof of Falsum that can be carried out within proof of stake?

What would that even mean? What would it even mean for proof of stake to prove Falsum?

I am not asserting that proof of stake can work well, but I am not convinced by the line of reasoning that you lay out, with its current level of detail. Perhaps if you went into the details I would find it more convincing.

Just a quick handwavy idea: from falsity you can derive anything, so maybe in this context Falsum would be something that could be used to "prove" the validity of any transaction you want? That said, I'm not an ETH enthusiast and I don't know how you'd express this in that system or if their notion of proof is comparable to "proof" in logic.

Isn't that equivocation on the word "proof"? In the case of "proof of stake," I don't think it's referring to a formal proof of the correctness of the system. It's intended to be a consensus mechanic that the users of the blockchain consider "good enough" to trust. Of course there can always be collusion among parties in a blockchain or other attacks on the blockchain, but "proof of work" (and every "proof of x" mechanic I know of) is intended to be "good enough."

To me the logic behind Proof of Stake is more like "so much money is bet on the answer being correct, that we'll assume it is. If the majority is wrong then feel free to permanently leave this chain and start your own". I consider it to be a superior system to Proof of Work in nearly every way.

> "so much money is bet on the answer being correct, that we'll assume it is"

Good luck with that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail

The one you link is entirely different. zzz

How?

Corporations is controlled by those who own the shares. 1 share 1 vote. But usually only a very very few individuals own majority of the shares. So they have all power what a "too big too fail corporation" can do.

With Ethereum PoS. It is dependent on ETH being distributed to many individuals. If only a few individuals own most of the ETH, then they will then have the power dictate what is the "truth" in the blockchain. Right now, ETH is very well distributed around the whole planet.

As you can see, one is oligarchic, the other is very democratic.

Ethereum is not a Corporation that is designed to make profits. It is non-profit, it's not even a company, it's simply a protocol implemented in Free Software.

The problem with that is that you only know that 'so much money' is being bet because you know who owns the money. But you only know who owns the money because that same money was bet earlier by people that you know owned the money because the same money was bet earlier by...

It's completely circular. It's like the Bible trying to proof itself. With no anchor to the physical world, you can't actually ever know

It's not completely circular. For example in casper-ffg if you as a full node log in every 4 months starting from ethereum's genesis block (about 3 years ago), the chain of logic you outlined terminates at the genesis allocation and PoW rewards.

I'm not saying that requiring clients to log in every 4 months is a reasonable security assumption, just showing that hand-waving it as "completely circular" is incorrect. It's more nuanced than that.

How did the node get started in the first place though? Unless you were part of the genesis block yourself, you only believe the history at all because someone told you it was the right place to start.

In full PoS in the model I described you'd need social consensus to determine the allocations in the genesis block. In PoW you need social consensus on the genesis block as well - the PoW algorithm, the initial difficulty and block reward, the difficulty adjustment algorithm, the block reward schedule

Allow me to hyperbole this a bit. If we go back to 2008, this is like saying - "there is so much money bet on subprime loan being correct, that we'll assume it is". And it worked for sometime before it dint.

Sorry, but you seem really confused about Godel's theorems. You're going to need to explain why you think it's related to proof of stake at all, besides the use of the word "proof".

"Proof of stake" does not appear to have anything to do with "proof" in the logical sense. I really, really do not think the incompleteness theorems are at all relevant here. Apologies, but this reads just like every other nonsensical attempt to invoke the incompleteness theorems without a good understanding of what they actually say. (Like, how are you possibly going to get proof of stake to simulate arithmetic?)

Proof of stake is just another way to achieve distributed consensus. Not sure how that’s impossible or violates the laws of physics.

While Hermel certainly appears to have no idea what he's talking about, that doesn't make this reply of yours correct either. In particular, the incompleteness theorems are not physics.

I never made the assertion that Godel’s incomplete theorems are physics. My comment was to point out that if one makes the claim “X is impossible”, the burden of proof lies upon the person making the claim or assertion. Simply making an assertion or premise does not prove nor disprove it.

In what way?

Possible. Progress will be made by sharpening that intuition into a mathematical proof or clean toy model exhibiting the failure, not by arguing from analogy.

I dunno. Proof of Stake is simply codifying an old rule of economics: The rich get richer. You prove your stake and get more Ether out of the deal. A "Dividend" if you will.

I don't think its very good for the cryptocoin community, but hey, I'm up to see the grand experiment unfold.

I feel like proof of work reduces to proof of stake because the rich get richer, there's just an intermediate step of buying miners with your dividend.

PoW is generally even less balanced than PoS, because poor people can't afford to take advantage of economies of scale with ultra-efficient mining farms. Meanwhile everyone will get the same % return in PoS.

Both are "rich get richer" schemes in the grand scheme of things, except that Bitcoin PoW started out as a completely open network which anyone could start mining from, so technically it's our own fault that we didn't realize the potential of Bitcoin in the early days and jumped onto Bitcoin. Otherwise we would be all billionaires. So I don't think it's the same. Just because you can label two things "Rich get Richer", doesn't mean they have precisely the same quality of "rich get richer scheme". Bitcoin PoW is completely capitalistic where people who mined to get their bitcoins deserve their wealth--they "worked" for their coins. So in Bitcoin it is true that "the rich get richer", but also "poor can get richer" too, as long as they started out mining early. This is not the case for PoS systems where bootstrapping PoS requires external capital, so this one is truly "Rich get Richer" in a sense that ONLY the rich can get richer.

That said, talking about this "fairness" is totally missing the point. As I mentioned, in the grand scheme of things it's all "rich get richer" and that's how capitalism works. The truly important question is how immutable an stable the ledger is, because that's what makes these blockchain projects meaningful.

If you ask anyone who has a thorough understanding of these technologies they would say PoW is superior to PoS in this sense. And Yes, this includes even the guys who are working on PoS blockchains. The only reason people bother with PoS is because PoW is having a hard time scaling and many people think maybe there may not even be an ultimate solution just with PoW.

... there's the other small detail of the appalling electricity consumption of PoW. Blockchains with PoS are more appealing to people who care about the rest of the world.

Congrats you've just repeated myself. Look for the part where I said PoW doesn't scale.

You probably didn't even read my comment. Because it wasn't about whether PoW or PoS is more efficient.

That’s a rude way to say “thanks for clarifying, I agree with you.”

“doesn’t scale” usually refers to technical difficulty with throughput. If you meant that Bitcoin et al cause massive environmental damage, you sure didn’t say it clearly.

I suggest that you would get a lot of mileage out of improving your writing skills first before trying to flame people. As it is, you’re just playing yourself.

PoW is theoretically better in this regard.

I mean, in theory the market should push the profit down to a minimum, forcing the miners to spend their revenues in order to keep mining.

It is however extremely more inclusive. Everyone in the world right now has very good chance to join. Unlike traditional capitalism where it can do lots of things to keep others from joining, keep many dependent on their salaries just to survive.

It won't be perfect. But it is definitely tons better than the current capitalism.

Another very important feature here is the ability to easily fork. So if we need to fix something, it can easily be done (no need to wait for an organized citizen revolution)(although this is probably better attributed to the idea of Free Software).

No better than the stock market in this regards. Except the stock market explicitly hands out profits from the biggest and riches companies, and our tax system is designed to give more of those profits to poor people.

A low-income person getting into Ethereum today has no hope to ever get as much ethereum as anyone else in the early adopters.

Hell, a low-income person was too busy trying to buy food today and/or pay off credit card debt to even think about investing into Ethereum, the Stock Market, Bonds, or other securities.

Pretty sure getting into Ethereum is easier and fairer than getting into Stock Market.

If you wanted to be an early investor of facebook and you are a pleb, then you're out of luck. And you should have a big capital to join.

If you wanted to be an early adopter of Ethereum, then you only need an internet connection and a computer. You invest put practically any amount, so any pleb can join.

There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?

Pretty sure this is better than stock market.

> Pretty sure getting into Ethereum is easier and fairer than getting into Stock Market.

Robinhood offers free trades on anything in the Stock Market. Literally free, you can't beat that.

> There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?

That's not the stock market. That's venture capitalism. The stock market is literally open to everybody with an internet connection from a variety of well trusted sources (RobinHood, E-trade, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, etc. etc.) and a variety of pricing schemes. ($0 for Robinhood, although it seems like their execution is not as good. You get what you pay for afterall)

Furthermore: the stock market is regulated. The National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) system in the USA ensures that everyone in the USA pays relatively consistent prices, or at least more-consistent than BTC / ETH. Unlike ETH or BTC, no one is going to steal your money Mt. Gox style as the SEC is a strict watchdog.

You get no assurances with Eth or BTC. Coinbase has different prices than Bitfinex. And some of these exchanges look like they're running scams (ie: Bitfinex's support of Tethercoin).

I think more "plebs" have been burned by Mt. Gox and other such failures in the cryptocoin marketplace. Its a hugely unregulated, and highly risky market. Cryptocoins are just not mature enough for mainstream speculation yet.

Ok, I stand corrected. It was Venture capitalism I had in mind.

I wanna note though, regarding crypto exchanges. One does not need to use them to invest. Use your own wallet. Use decentralized exchange if you don't wanna risk using centralized exchange.

You have to at least give him credit, he didn't use a car metaphor.

> Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine.

Funny you'd say that:

"Vitalik's project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer."

http://archive.is/8wHvq

"Buterin later said he had “greatly overestimated” the likelihood of the team breaking mathematics"

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/

More: http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/

All sufficiently successful entrepreneurial “geniuses” are eventually shown to have been lucky for the most part.

  - Proverb

Simulating a quantum computer on a regular computer to speed up np-complete problems is insanity. Trying to break mathematics is insanity.

I tried to verify your sources, it seems to go back to Gregory Maxwell and an anonymous source, BitcoinErrorLog. David Gerard cites BitcoinErrorLog. zero proof.

https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/906189639802859520

Jorge Timón was pitched it

> Was he soliciting investment though? > Jorge Timón @timoncc Yes, he and another guy were claiming the classical computers simulating quantum would be a mining revolution.

i'm honestly trying to verify this. i'm quiet skeptical about the character of some developers of bitcoin, i dont know about peter todd. bitcoinerrorlog is linking to this video of him talking about quantum computers as a proof. this is the closest i have come to hard evidence of this extreme claim. i have listened to the first half of the video, just him talking about quantum computers. Very impressive talk for a 19 year old.

https://youtu.be/DkUpZkeqhF4?t=16m46s

How about Vitalik himself

http://archive.is/bXZaW

interesting, but that sounds quiet differently from the claims from maxwell and your original post.

Did you expect him to say, "Yes you caught me guys!" - instead he blames it on "a team" and it only had 5% chance of working, etc.

He has never denied trying to get money for a quantum project. If rumors were floating around that I had I'd instantly deny it 100%

so vitalik says he just had a short term connection to this team before he grew suspicious. if he really was the head behind a scam, why did noone sue him? why is there no evidence, like former employees, payments, company registration?

> why did noone sue him?

perhaps because not a single person was dumb enough to fall for it?

How about this- for 4 years people have been talking about this, not once has he simply replied "I never tried to raise money to build a quantum bitcoin miner"

well, i guess he gave a talk about quantum computing and bitcoin, you could see that as an ad for that company. this looks to me like a motte-and-bailey argument. if he gave a talk, grew suspicious of their plans, quit supporting them, then there is no wrongdoing here, no proof that he ran a scam company.

Vitalik admitted it himself. I linked the ref in my piece.

i have read that, maybe you should read it again.

http://archive.is/bXZaW

Fwiw bitcoin error log is a real human being who attends conferences and has met many people in meatspace.

He went to conferences with that pitch trying to raise interest and capital. A lot of people who were active back then hard the pitch in person. It's not exactly a secret and no reason trying to pin this on anonymous sources.

if you read my other comments to nope96 in this branch, you will be able to understand my position better. i even linked the video bitcoinerrorlog cites as proof, which is probably the talk you are referring to. none of this proves he was the head of this company, it does not prove that he knew their qc was never going to work. it does not show him lying, in the video he talks about qc and the consequences for bitcoin.

Funny that you mention the 19th century, because another example of a system that required an ever-increasing series of hacks to solve major flaws is the internal combustion engine. Whether the problem that Ethereum solves is anywhere near as valuable as the problems solved by ICE remains to be seen, but this just seems like the engineering process to me, especially for a young technology.

Internal combustions work, really well, today, and are not theoretically impossible. Not really the same.

Well, you haven't proven Ethereum's theoretical impossibility either. 'I think this might be a scam' is not a proof, no matter how many heuristics are on your side.

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

This paper does a pretty good job of laying out a formal, mathematical proof that pos doesn't work

ICE didn't work really well in 1910.

Ethereum works today as well.

I think you missed the point of the analogy.

They work really well thanks to the invention of the spark plug, the carburetor, the supercharger, and decades of iteration. For many years, they were objectively terrible.

Ethereum is three years old. ICE is 200+.

Somehow I think that at 3 year anniversary of ICE people had some actual real world use cases for ICE where ICE was still somehow better than steam engine and animals, even if ICE itself was objectively terrible?

Ethereum is objectively better in some cases. What if I want to gamble somewhere, but I don't trust websites to be honest about their odds? With Ethereum I could check the source code of the contract and be confident that it's legitimate.

Not only can you verify the code, you can verify that the code and the output wasn't modified during execution by some external actor.

A 1910s ICE might have been terrible compared to a modern computer-driven engine built on one or the other dozen million man-hours, but back in the day it was still a very useful thing that powered machines and vehicles and even had broad military applications.

Right! There was widespread public enthusiasm about engines in the latter half of the 19th century. Both John Keely and Karl Benz created engine startups, among hundreds of others around the world. Keely ripped off gullible investors for decades with faked demos, while Benz's company is still going strong.

But if we're going to make the analogy to the present day, it's important to frame it right. Blockchains are just a subset of distributed databases, and the lasting "Benzes" of the field might be projects like FoundationDB rather than blockchain-anything.

Internal combustion engines didn't have research papers explaining why they were impossible.

I'm sorry, but I feel this is really lazy and nonconstructive criticism. Perpertual motion machines violate a law of physics, and the bells and whistles attached to it were at best misguided attempts that didn't address the fundamental issue, or at worst attempts to defraud investors. I can't tell what you are claiming here; is it that

1. Sharding is fundamentally impossible; in any public blockchain, all computers must validate all transactions, and the scalability trilemma cannot be avoided, or

2. Sharding is possible, but the solutions outlined in the FAQ are unnecessarily complicated; a much simpler solution exists

You haven't provided arguments for either, and I can't even tell which argument you're making.

On a higher level, I could agree with the general sentiment that complicated solutions tend to be wrong or at least very suboptimal, but only as a heuristic. It's a heuristic that doesn't even hold very well in this space; in the space of PoW fork-choice rules, bitcoin-style longest-chain is simpler than Somplinsky's GHOST rule (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf), which is in turn simpler than ethereum's current "modified GHOST", but in each case the added complications really were necessary and lead to better properties.

More explicitly, my position is this: Ethereum's claims of an upcoming blockchain-powered "Web 3.0" revolution are so overblown that they're indistinguishable from perpetual motion peddlers.

The Ethereum designers don't want to recant their outlandish promises, so they keep proposing increasingly complex bells-and-whistles fixes that sound impressive in a 10,000 word FAQ but won't bring the "global supercomputer" substantially any closer to reality.

Great, if frustrating reading there. I love the linked news article interviews with Lieutenant E.L. Zalinski.[1][2]

> Lieut, Zalenski's mirth interrupted him at this point. "Now," he resumed," when I started for Philadelphia I was careful to take with me a 10,000-pound gauge. That was my little equipment. This, as I suppose you know, or if you don't must take my word for it, is a standard instrument. Well, as soon as the Keely people saw this gauge they said to me, 'You had better not show it to Keely. It would only anger him!' Much I cared about angering him! I wanted justice. One of his partisans, however, informed Mr. Keely that I had brought this gauge with me, and the great man replied that he would not use it. In the course of his experiments he said he had got 50,000 pounds pressure. But—observe the but—he then remarked that he had broken all the pressure gauges he had. I then quietly rejoined that I had a pressure gauge which was only capable of registering 10,000 pounds. Said I, 'I would like to have you put it on, and break it for me.' Mr. Keely made no immediate reply to this. Shortly afterward, however, he remarked, with an air of feeble assertion, 'I do not believe in pressure gauges, anyhow.'"

> The subject appeared to be excruciatingly funny to Liet. Zalenski.

[1] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/09/24/106...

[2] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/11/16/106...

Those are just brilliantly written, thank you. What a contrast in journalistic style to today!

"And the energetic gentleman laughed in the same strain in which the cat was heard when she feelingly exclaimed, 'Hi, Hi! I have eaten the canary!'"

"The 'etherealized vaporic force' which was so liberally poured into the ears of a large and gullible public..."

I can't get enough. It's wonderful.

Reminds me of that guy who pretends to be Satoshi Nakamoto: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/craig...

As someone deeply involved in this community, I sort of agree about the "Rube Goldberg" feel of his ideas, but Vitalik et al have delivered pretty reliably: I think both ethereum and casper are pretty safe bets at this point (yes, I'll likely get some comments telling me I'm wrong and how horrible ethereum and casper are)

The sharding stuff, however, is still iffy at the moment (I've studied it pretty closely) ...but if vitalik is confident he can make it work, I'll bet on v every time.

Ethereum is, so far, missing a key element for me to take it really seriously: Formal Methods.

There are some small efforts, but I'd rather have formal methods from the beginning, not as an afterthought.

The problem is that market forces favor releasing early rather than releasing correct things. It's the MIT vs NJ paradox again, or worse is better. But this time the potential risks are much bigger.

Well it was a ton of work to get ethereum out the door... Adding a couple more years to formally prove everything first sounds like the perfect way to be stuck in development limbo forever. As you say, formal methods are being applied after the fact to some degree at least.

I think it is a common misconception that formal methods will lead to an extremely slow development cycle. That is only the case if you go for the best guarantee of correctness: Theorem Proving.

There are more agile options. For example, model checking all protocols is pretty easy in comparison to theorem proving. Still a significant effort, but perhaps an order of magnitude easier.

well, that would be tooling though. you wouldn’t say that x86 is missing formal methods therefor you shouldn’t use it right...

solidity, etc sure maybe... but at that point, releasing early is probably a good thing so that you can get a whole community working on things and getting ideas and collaboration from a large group of people

*edit: unless you mean like geth, or some minimal reference client should be formally proven

Well, a lot of x86 actually does get proven using formal methods. Clearly not all of it, but we've realized that was a bad plan, and that we should go back to formally verifying all of our hardware.

Uh, I think that many cryptocurrency experts would take strong opposition to the idea that ethereum has delivered reliably.

Just because a bridge is still standing today doesn't mean it's safe. Ethereum has been almost religious in violating best practice blockchain design.

Yeah, I looked at the original Ethereum spec and thought this thing isn't going to scale. Boy, did I miss out on making a lot of money. I still don't know what practical use people actually use Ethereum for besides as a currency and ICO scams.

There's a decentralized Twitter clone that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. https://peepeth.com/welcome

One use case that's already operational and doesn't need additional transactions - distributed domain resolution

The entire .eth registar runs in a smart contract. You put your ETH in to claim the domain, others also bid during the bidding period, the winners ETH is locked away and returned when they release the domain, the rest get refunded.

Considering DNS is continually politicized and still subject to points of failure (the CAs), distributed ENS is a far better design IMO

Haha, “Vitalik’s project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer."

He was like 16 years old when he was working on that thing and has a solid track record since then... let's cut him a break.

He tried and failed to scam people when he was 16, but now has a successful scam so we should cut him a break?

"solid track record" meaning cloning bitcoin and giving yourself and friends a bunch of free tokens worth $7,764,000,000:

"12 Million Ether were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers"

"solid track record"

Can you name one thing he built/invented that does anything? Beyond collecting bitcoin.

Speaking of which, Ethereum is not really novel either. Bitcoin includes its own VM which has opcodes that allow smart contracts too... just most of them are disabled because the reference implementation had bugs at the time Satoshi abandoned the project, and the development process is currently so calcified and politicized that development has essentially ground to a halt.

The concept of memory-hardness is not really novel either, see: bcrypt/scrypt.

Vitalk was originally a bitcoin developer who proposed extending the op codes to make a more general purpose computer, and only started Ethereum after he encountered resistance to the idea. I don’t think anyone was claiming bitcoin wasn’t prior work.

Can you cite any evidence at all that he actually proposed new op codes? I've heard this claim many times, but never seen any evidence to back it up.

What opcodes does Ethereum support that Bitcoin does not support, or could not be implemented using Bitcoin's opcodes?

You've got everything that looks essential to me: add/sub, mul/div, logical and/or, bitwise, string, crypto, etc.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script#Opcodes

No disagreement that the Bitcoin development process is broken as fuck though.

Bitcoin specifically avoids loops and recursion. The codes you included allow basic contracts, but bitcoin scripts are guaranteed to halt. Its a conscious decision, and I'm not sure its a bad choice for the project.

What solid track record? I see just hype and broken architecture.

19 at University, not 16 kid

https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/906189639802859520

here is vitaliks version of the events:

http://archive.is/bXZaW

I agree, I don't think there's any clear evidence that they will eventually get Ethereum to work at scale. At one company I was with, there was an experimental project that only had "just one more thing to fix before it will work" for ten years, before being eventually abandoned.

The name isn't a coincidence. I kind of agree with you, there's a whole lot of words and invented terminology but not much is being said... however solving the problems DLT currently has is (hopefully) doable even if the "well let's add XYZ to the ABC!" approach fails.

Yep. I've considered many times that Ethereum went down one path of evolution from Bitcoin, which is get more and more complicated. The problems with certain subsystems (the scripting language for example) have been discussed at length on HN, knowing how hard it is to modify complex systems that only get more complicated, I doubt they'll ever fix these issues, they'll be battling them indefinitely. That's a real problem considering you can never really trust Ethereum and the entire thing is predicated on trust.

And what does all this complexity buy? Cryptokitties. We sure this is a worthy tradeoff? Would they Eth guys even be able to recognize this considering what's invested personally and monetarily? There's plenty of suckers, so I'm sure the "next year" kicking the can down the road cycle can go on as long as it's needed, but I'm interested to see if we ever get something of value out of it.

The other evolutionary route interests me, but I'm too busy, lazy, ignorant, and disturbed by the entire space to test it out. Maybe some day.

I guess you aren't familiar with MakerDAO and DAI.

etheraffle.com also seems like a relatively good use case for a ÐApp.

In fact there are thousands of good use cases.

I don't think you're familiar enough with the space to be providing meaningful criticism. Your reductio ad absurdum to "just cryptokitties" is fairly telling.

I've been observing the space since before Eth launched. If you believe that raffles are an example of useful systems, then we'll have to disagree.

In fact there are thousands of good use cases.

If there are, then we'll surely see them. You're providing more of what I'm talking about - it's always next year, always coming, but the mainstream adoption is nascent.

While I suspect that in the long run blockchains will absolutely end up finding some niches where they're persistently used, I do agree that a lot of the broader claims remind me a lot of "next year will be the year of linux on the desktop".

Fast forward to 2018, and we have Windows Subsystem for Linux, and a very popular BSD in silver aluminum cases made by a fruit company, dominate the desktop market. You could say that the year of linux on desktop is today (in some perverse modified form, but nonetheless).

That's actually a really good point (especially if one includes Android) - but "20 years later than we hoped, in a completely different form than expected" is significantly what I was trying to handwave at.

The web was nearly useless and mainly business card style web pages from 94-98 even though the building blocks were available.

1. The web was already used for all sorts of things in that period. Geocities was a wonderful open world; I have fond memories of Simpsons and X-Files fan webrings. Not to mention services like ebay, Amazon, or Craigslist arose during that period.

2. Even if we accept your statement as true, the world wide web became generally available in 1991. Blockchain technology has now been around for a decade. The web certainly showed its practical usefulness in its first 10 years, yet blockchain remains largely in the realm of hype.

"Blockchain technology" is a misnomer because different projects require different technologies and concepts.

Ethereum was the first blockchain with smart contracts and it only went live in July 2015...

And was immediately and irredeemably invalidated in May 2016 with the DAO fiasco, yes.

Ethereum Classic lives on, feel free to support it with money/code if you feel so strongly about immutability at all costs

Yea but where was the web in 1981 or Arpanet in 1969. Bitcoin was just an idea in 2008, didn't gain any real significance until 2013 where it really started to enter mainstream consciousness. If we want to compare it to the web we're still far away from 1991 in terms of tech.

That's just not true. The 1996 web already had news, porn, and forums — the same things people use it for today.

Those things were a bit slow to access over dial-up (porn in particular), but millions of people were using the web daily by the time Netscape IPO'ed.

There's no similar moment in sight for Ethereum's hypothetical "Web 3.0".

I'm claiming that the realized potential was maybe 1/100th of what we have today. Perhaps I should have left 98 out, but the idea stands. And that's after the component parts had been around for years: https://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html

Any comment on MakerDAO + DAI[1]? I think it's an incredible project / feat of engineering and would be interested to hear how you think it's just a toy that doesn't serve a good purpose.

Whether or not you "believe" raffles/lotteries to be a useful system does not change the fact that it was a system with a $280BN market cap in 2015. Lotteries on a blockchain with smart contracts solve three problems with traditional lotteries: transparency (provable fairness), easy and secure participation, easy and secure disbursement.

  We'll surely see them.

Yes! You can see them right now. There are thousands of DApps, at different stages of development[2].

1: https://makerdao.com/

2: https://www.stateofthedapps.com/

It's another instrument (like lotteries) whose main value is to make money for the founders. That has a use, yes, but if you're outside of that system I'm not sure the mainstream value is that great.

I can tell you that the team is the least diverse (not just race/gender but in age/possible life experience) I've ever seen, which doesn't bode well. How different can their perspectives be?

https://makerdao.com/team/

The vast majority of those apps are cheap moneymaking schemes. Again, they have a place, but I'll very much take a wait and see approach, which I believe is realistic and more than warranted.

Dai is a stable cryptocurrency, not a speculative money making scheme, since it's purpose is to be stable. A decentralized stablecoin is an enormous use case.

I'm not seeing why race/gender/age are relevant. These are all superficially diverse things that don't actually say anything about diversity of perspectives, unless you believe that people who belong to the same group also have similar thoughts.

With a name like "MakerDao", one would think it would have something to do with the Maker movement, in that it'd be connected to fabrication tools somehow.

EXACTLY this.

I have yet to see any good use case for smart contracts, except for, of course, launching your own speculative asset.

I just want to see a real use case that has nothing to do with launching more tokens.

Or the epicycles of the heliocentric era, where the focus then as now was on futile ever finer retweaking of conclusions to fit unexamined and faulty premises.

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