ZeppelinOS, a platform for smart contract applications in Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

ZeppelinOS, a platform for smart contract applications in Ethereum

blog.zeppelinos.org

48 pointselopio16 comments

The whitepaper is probably the most HN-friendly overview of what ZeppelinOS is:

https://docs.zeppelinos.org/docs/whitepaper.html

As an aside, it's somewhat ridiculous how every blockchain-anything project feels the need to have a Serious And Highly Credible CS Whitepaper — and the way to achieve this is to typeset your marketing talk in Computer Modern and add a list of pointless references at the end. (The ZeppelinOS whitepaper has nine references of which two point to Zeppelin itself and three are links to heroku.com, ifttt.com and ethereum.org, just in case your Google is out of order.)

Computer Modern is not a good font by any measure, but it seems to have amazing signalling powers even surpassing Comic Sans.

Blame the investors. They have a list of things they look for, chief among them being “the whitepaper”

It does appear to be a cargo cult. Blockchain investors want to see something that looks like the Bitcoin whitepaper, even though they can't understand a word and the mock-scientific format doesn't make a lot of sense for products being proposed by businesses.

I guess fools and their money will be eventually parted, whether it's through ICOs, Bitcoin price manipulation, or whatever is the scam du jour in cryptocurrency-land.

Holly crap! They literally link to "https://heroku.com", etc. I thought they'd link to a page on those sites, but just the root domain? Dang.

It seems to be mostly an excuse for yet another initial coin offering.

This is another scheme for changing contracts retroactively to "fix bugs". Who can make changes is regulated by what seems to be a proof of stake system. What a contract is for change purposes is ill-defined. The authors seem to think of a contract as a standard form, and changing that standard form changes it for all existing users of that form. A real contract is a text plus the agreement of the parties. That doesn't seem to have been thought through.

There's a lot of "trust us" stuff in there. See 5.5, "Trusted Oracles", and 6.4, "Marketplace Curation". There's a bigger problem - this is supposed to be for contracts in Etherium, but control rests with the holders of the proposed "ZED" tokens.

If you want to know more details, you can watch the video from ETHBuenosAires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241136

A platform for making things on a platform made for creating platforms.

I'm sure (semi-sarcastically) that you'll surely make a lot of money.

They launch "ZEP token" and have a white paper. They will surely be a success.

Why is this here? Why does it contain a picture of seventeen people standing in the dark? What are any of us supposed to do with this information?

Impressive you counted how many in the dark. There is also a total of 1 person in the light. He is probably making an announcement. It's a announcement post.

They're so far down the hype hole that they've completely failed to make a business case for their product. This isn't an announcement of anything at all, as far as I can tell, especially since all their stuff 'went live' at some indeterminate point in the past.

I repeat: what are we supposed to do with this information? Does anybody know?

“Today we’re excited to announce the first mainnet release of ZeppelinOS” ...sounds like the contract just went live on mainnet

This is a library that allows “smart contracts that can be easily upgraded over time.” If this is applicable to you, what’s difficult to understand?

If this is NOT applicable to you, why do you care? Do you criticize other software libraries that you don’t understand, when they’re unrelated to blockchain technology?

The presentation was done at a hackaton in Buenos Aires. The people in the dark should be the firsts rows of attendants.

Zeppelin is actually one of the more popular libraries; many contracts use their SafeMath and Token libs. It may seem abstract to people unfamiliar with the space but their libraries are indeed useful, they are basically the recommended stdlib for Solidity. The need for a token still isn't clear though.

Is it recommended to editorialized the titles in HN? I posted this same URL a few hours earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162884 but it didn't work audience-wise.

BTW, it is interesting to read the third party smart contract audit since Open Zeppelin are one of the top auditors: https://medium.com/nomic-labs-blog/zeppelinos-smart-contract...

A pity it's not actually a system for operating Zeppelins.

Maybe they should team up with UrbanAirship.com and build real urban airships:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Santos-Dumont_flight_arou...

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