Hacker News Reader

Comment by sagichmal | Hacker News Reader

For fuck's sake.

Please let's post more substantively, even if you get your buttons pushed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did you read the article? It's got a lot of good information on how code runs on the ethereum virtual machine. And the benefits of using something like WASI. Even if you hate block chain, it's still fascinating.

Why would you use ethereum when you can use Amazon web services instead? Is it because when we use ethereum, the price of eth goes up?

The idea of smart contracts or world computer is flawed. A better term would be a scripted financial transaction. They can be done in a trusted environment, but there are a lot of benefits of having a public cryptography secured ledger.

Though the article author omits it, EOS mainnet runs on LLVM and WASM contracts and executes about 1000tx/s today.

A more powerful financial VM is needed e.g. for on-chain order books.

More about use cases vs. databases can be found in my article

https://tokenmarket.net/news/opinion/capital-markets-upcomin...

I'm reading it. It's great, thank you, a great complement to the parent article.

"This idea doesn't seem relevant in my tiny corner of software development, therefore it is not relevant in ANY of software development" is the disease of this website.

Agreed, though what's really fucked up is the native Ethereum language and machine. Almost anything is an improvement on that. I still don't know what to use any of that for though. :-/

Edit: yes I mean Solidity. I mean, it's cool that it works, but look at it, it's insane. They could have picked just about any language, including assembler, Lisp, Lua, Javascript, Visual Basic, LLVM bytecode, whatever and would have been better off. But over time there will evolve compilers which can from another input language provably (-ish in most cases) produce safe output.

Care to say more? Solidity? If so, I agree. That's why this article is interesting.

You are right, the article doesn't address why ethereum might not solve any real problems, if you feel that way.

An EVM smart contract bytecode is usually 2kB - 4kB. You can think it as DSL optimised for its use case.

EOS contracts are 250kB because they suck in C++ stdlib, templates or what not.

There are benefits of having compact bytecode performance wise: cache pressure, price of on-chain storage and so on.

But it’s not very optimized. It’s very low level and you have to add defensive code, taking up space.

That is also totally insane.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com