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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like these higher profile cryptocurrency projects are just still following thru because they’ve been approved at the peak of its hype and fully funded back then.

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I think Jack Dorsey's interest in Bitcoin goes a little beyond the current hype cycle.

[1] https://www.ccn.com/i-hope-bitcoin-will-be-internets-native-...

Your comment implies that the peak will never be surpassed. It is certainly possible you are right, but remember a lot of internet companies declined a lot after the dot com bubble burst, and a few rose from the ashes. It would be silly to not continue to pursue a new technology just because it is not as big as it was late last year.

The ICO-scam mania is waining, systems that run those ICOs are cooling (Ethereum), but the need for a system of sound, programmable money remains. This is why Square is pursuing Bitcoin.

> the need for a system of sound, programmable money remains

I understand that the original goal was to have the value of the currency to be not controlled by a central bank.

Is there any other benefit to it? What does it mean that the currency needs to be "programmable" in this context?

Programmable money means that I can download a bitcoin contract that functions as a will without having to pay a lawyer or live in a country with a robust legal system to ensure that: after 180 days of me not moving my funds, my heirs get it, etc

See https://bitcointechtalk.com/what-is-a-bitcoin-merklized-abst...

Programmers capable of auditing such a contract to the same level of reliability a lawyer would get you are vastly more expensive than said lawyer.

Now, perhaps, because it's a highly specialized skill. Maybe it will become commoditized in the future.

Auditing a contract that will be applied by a human judge with common sense and written in more-or-less English seems inherently easier than auditing a contract that will be applied strictly literally by a machine and is written in, well, code.

Maybe I’m in my own bubble but do you really think the following contract is so complex that you need to hire auditors?:

  OP_IF
    <Alice’s pubkey> OP_Checksig
  OP_ELSE
    “3 months” OP_CSV OP_DROP
    <Heir’s pubkey> OP_Checksig
  OP_ENDIF

Would you say that you need expensive programmers to audit/create an escrow contract on Bitcoin? Multisig contracts are simple, battletested and deployed in the blockchain.

> Would you say that you need expensive programmers to audit/create an escrow contract on Bitcoin? Multisig contracts are simple, battletested and deployed in the blockchain.

Given the number of high-profile smart-contract hacks we've seen, yes, you do need expensive programmers. (At least, to a greater extent than you need expensive lawyers. It's perfectly possible to write your own will without a lawyer, and frankly I'd have a lot more confidence in that than in my own smart contract, even as a programmer).

>Given the number of high-profile smart-contract hacks we've seen, yes, you do need expensive programmers.

There have been no hacks of bitcoin multisig addresses. The hacks you're referring to are on ethereum because ethereum is a dumpster fire with a marketing team trying to con people into believing all number of unpractical solutions.

I feel like the counter to this is unfortunately still the court system; if Bob leaves all his millions to an animal shelter in his will via a cryptocurrency smart contract, his heir Alice could still take it to a traditional court and try and get those assets seized on the grounds he was senile, etc.

Ethereum is the robust base layer for a whole bunch of stuff. ICOs are an ok use case for Ethereum today, but when plasma is ready (months not years), the transaction capacity will explode and fees could go to zero within a plasma chain. There will surely be a huge increase of real useful applications, including in the payment space

I think Bitcoin might be useful for storing and holding wealth, whereas Ethereum is much more active protocol, for active communication and interaction

>Ethereum is the robust base layer for a whole bunch of stuff.

Solidity et al are imperative languages which basically turn the never static ethereum blockchain into an absolute nightmare to reason about or write robust code for. See basically the once weekly massive security bugs in ethereum contracts. Turning completeness and imperative languages; I would not call that robust on the code execution level.

Ethereum is also not immutable, see DAO bailout. I would not call that robust.

Ethereum has architected their consensus choices such that miners can increase blocksize to push out competitors. That leads to coercion centralization. I wouldn’t call that robust. Even if we live in a future utopia where coercion isn’t a threat, then The system is a horribly inefficient AWS.

Bitcoin has the lightning network which is already in production and in use today with a few little applications running on top of it.

http://satoshi.place/

* https://satoshis.place/

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