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Comment by jaimehrubiks | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the current issues with the updates, gas prices, different opinions on the community, devs vs miners vs users...

Am I the only one who thinks people underestimate Ethereum and its EVM invention? In 2013 this guy (who I think is a visionary) wrote a document with a proposal that led to the creation of a world-wide turing-complete distributed computer. And still, people are just starting to realize its potential. This month a layer-2 solution called optimism will launch a virtual machine called OVM (optimism vm) on top of ethereum smart contracts that can solve most of the current scalability issues (and there are other solutions being tested in parallel: zkrollups...). We are also starting to realize the potential of Dex and Defi (distributed exchanges and finance), DAOs (distributed organizations), NFT (non-fungible tokens) and a bunch of things more that 7 years after are appearing out of thin air. So even if Ethereum wasn't updated at all (although, we probably all agree that PoW is not environmental friendly and should be replaced with a better alternative: PoS) it could still thrive in the long term thanks to its most fundamental design choices (turing-complete...). I am truly amazed by this technology and Vitalik. I wish I knew a little bit more of the underlying fundamentals. What do you think?

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I have been keeping up with the developments in the crypto space from the outside for the past few years.

Never really invested in any currency as it always felt too risky / speculative for my taste.

It wasn't until last year with the upcoming of DeFi (Decentralized Finance) that I decided to get involved somehow, instead of just watching innovation happen. I also think this really has a lot of potential.

So I started investing my free time for building an experimental decentralized options exchange [1] in order to develop myself / become qualified in this field.

Worst case scenario I end up with a cool project on GitHub that never took of but provided me an awful lot of knowledge and some new friends.

[1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions

Impressive!

Thanks!

Amazing, love this idea!

Thanks man!

> 1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions

so you _did_ end up buying a boat load of ethereum i presume?

Not yet. For now the project "alpha" version is only deployed on Kovan testnet, in which ETH is free.

When I started coding this project ETH price was around US$ 500, and gas prices around ~40 Gwei, making it feasible to launch the project on mainnet without much hassle using my own funds.

Since then ETH has gone up to the roof. Now ETH is ~US$ 1900 and gas price ~150 Gewi, making it 14x more expensive to launch.

I'm still evaluating if I should launch on ethereum mainnet or in a different solidity compatible blockchain (ex: Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche) once the project reaches a beta version due to the cost of deployment.

In the project main page I ask for donations for covering deployment costs [1], but so far I was unable to secure any funds.

[1] https://github.com/TCGV/DeFiOptions#support-mainnet

Thanks for sharing! I'm curious what you use to generate the high quality diagrams for the readme and on your blog.

It looks like draw.io - or at least this would be easy to do with that.

You're welcome !

I use draw.io [1] for technical diagrams (ex: flowchart, UML, etc) and Google Drawings [2] for more generic diagrams (ex: system designs).

[1] http://draw.io/

[2] https://docs.google.com/drawings/

Satoshi already envisioned smart contracts that's why he created and designed Bitcoin Script Language "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc."[1]

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

One limitation of Bitcoin script is that it's not turing complete. But there are sidechains like rsk with defi apps like sovryn that bring smart contracts and defi to BTC.

I'm not an expert in Computer Theory but other people proved Bitcoin and Bitcoin Script are Turing Complete:

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160279

[2] https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-script-is-turing-complete-scryp...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6j-11H2O7c

These are deliberate redefinitions of the term "Turing complete". The reasonable interpretation is that evaluating a single block can involve an arbitrary computation (if given enough gas). Ethereum has this property, Bitcoin doesn't.

These redefinitions say that you can take a few computation steps per Bitcoin block and save their state such that a later block can take a few more steps, so over time, very slowly, spread out over many blocks, Bitcoin can also implement an arbitrary computation. This is theoretically cute but otherwise useless.

Ethereum blocks have a gas limit so it wouldn't be Turing complete under your definition either.

The EVM is TC in that you cannot determine if a snippet of code will halt, given sufficient gas. EVM code is undecidable, whereas Bitcoin script is not.

The universe is finite so no Turing complete computing devices can ever exist.

Ethereum has a Turing complete language that is only limited in practice by external constraints like the gas limit. Bitcoin doesn't have such a language.

Craig Wright is a moron and a fraud.

Bitcoin is deliberately and wisely not Turing complete. That gives a lot of power and mischief-making ability to anonymous entities in an adversarial environment.

It's partly why Bitcoin is 5x Ethereum's market cap, despite technically being less capable. It's less capable of losing money, of DAO attacks, or other serious failures too.

Bitcoin is five times the price of Etherium because it was the first cryptocurrency and everyone knows its name. It has nothing to do with the technical abilities of either.

I generally agree with this. But Ethereum is "less finished" than Bitcoin. I feel like this situation might be different in a year or two once ETH2 is fully rolled out. Right now, ETH is a bit more risky. There's no doubt that more economic activity is happening on the ETH chain, though

It'll take longer than a year or two for something as complex as ETH2 to mature to a point where it can be considered as finished as Bitcoin.

That's not a limitation. There is absolutely no reason to have a Turing-complete language in bitcoin.

This can even be proved from first principles: bitcoin, and blockchains generally exist to validate the execution of contracts which have already occurred in meat-space. Basically you and I agree to conditions under which some money is transferred from me to you and vice-versa, which is the actual contract, then write a program (the "smart" contract) which validates that those rules were faithfully executed. It can be shown though that any Turing-complete contract rules can be validated using a non-Turing-complete language like Bitcoin script (ignoring runtime limits). The block chain doesn't need to run every contract, it just needs to validate that every contract ran correctly. A different problem, for which Turing completeness is not required.

Edit: For the down-voters, show me a Turing-complete contract that can't have its execution trace validated in a non-Turing complete language. In the 10 years I've been in this space I've yet to encounter a single one.

Turing completeness is an anti feature in financial system like bitcoin. And pretty much zero contracts currently deployed to ethereum require Turing completeness. It’s just a buzzword to sell you this gigantic pre-mine scam.

I can't think of a single Ethereum dapp that could be implemented without an expressive scripting language.

Well, you’re misguided. It’s not the language, it’s platform features like kv store attached to blockchain that make these dapps possible to implement. And none of them require Turing completeness.

They may not require turing completeness in the strictest sense, but they do require branching logic and loops.

Branching and looping are constructs that you can have in non-Turing complete language with some limitations that don’t matter in practice for the purpose of ethereum or bitcoin scripts.

a non-turing complete language can still be useful and "expressive" in a loose sense.

SPARK[0] isn't Turing complete but it's still pretty useful, and likely a better language than Solidity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

I believe that was disabled in the protocol long ago because it was deemed to be a security risk.

Some opcodes were disabled but most of them remain. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

Most of the ethereum devs I know were bitcoin people first. Bitcoin is cool but you simply can’t do what you can do on ethereum. Remember Vitalik himself worked for bitcoin magazine and pushed hard for updates that would make his ideas possible on bitcoin, but they were repeatedly rejected. So we had to build ethereum instead. Now with ethereums success we are seeing people go back and say “bitcoin does this too” but it simply doesn’t. And a side chain, that isn’t inheriting security from layer one isn’t good enough.

There is a lot more bitcoin wrapped onto ethereum that there is on lightning. (Now 1% of total supply). Ethereum is eating bitcoin.

> Am I the only one who thinks

No, there are plenty of blockchain snake oil salesmen out there promoting the same misleading talking points while bypasssing legitimate concerns.

First, you have to understand that at least half of the concepts you're talking about have completely not broken through the barrier between the mindshare of the Blockchain community and the rest of the tech industry. Your post was the first I've heard about OVM, Dex, Defi, and DAOs.

That's not the fault of the tech community, that's the fault of the Blockchain community by allowing itself to be overrun with quasi-technical charlatans who promote world-changing revolution while yadda-yaddaing past the technical details.

Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us.

I think I fundamentally agree with you - Vitalik IS a Genius. Like Satoshi. But I am extremely concerned with the direction most mainstream adoption of this technology is taken, and the glee with which boosters like you allow it to be.

The one item on your list that has a lot of familiarity for the technical community, and even the rest of the populace today is NFTs.

You listed them in the other list of concepts I had no familiarity with. Yet I do know a thing or two about NFTs from what I researched. And I think it's one of the most apalling ideas to have been invented in this domain yet. Masquerading as a method to liberate artists and promote new opportunities for income, it is so clearly a giant money laundering scheme for the wealthiest of the world. That's before we get into the environmental impact.

So....that's what I think.

> Every other digital revolution was embraced bottoms-up by geeks - from The PC, to The Web, to Linux, to The Cloud. But Blockchain is primarily embraced by money-hungry Type-A salespeople, and it sets off ALL SORTS of alarm bells for most of us.

No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest. So that'd be your impression when you haven't spent time looking into it.

But it sounds like you've at least looked at Vitalik's writings. The Eth core has plenty of hard core tech in various corners of crypto. It's just that they're organized by project, and not all in one place.

>No, that's not true. It's just those types are the loudest.

In order to make it in the crypto market this is the way they have to behave, because the measure of success is the coin price, which is directly tied to the number of people buying into their coin (the vast majority know nothing of the underlying technical details and don't care). It's a race to the bottom and a real problem with the industry, reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, but I think far more pervasive in crypto. This is also why crypto will keep experiencing popping bubbles until it finds enough use cases with actual advantageous compared to existing solutions.

While true, that's a separate point about marketing on the internet today. The person I was replying to was saying how traditional tech is allergic to crypto because of the hype machine.

I'm saying, if you dig beyond the hype machine, you'll find plenty of hard core tech and tech adopters that you found in previous platforms, like PC and internet.

OP apparently cares about the underlying technical details. I'm saying if he/she looks deeper, they'll find what they're looking for.

The EVM is a natural extension of bitcoin's scripting system. Here's the original Ethereum whitepaper, Vitalik cites all sorts of pre-Ethereum work:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/blob/old-before-deleting-al...

There were tokens (Colored Coins) and Dexs (Omni) running on Bitcoin before ETH was launched.

Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC. That's what powers the Tether network. It's far from decentralized though. It's a cartel of exchanges that operate the network.

Colored coins were a neat idea but completely impractical in practice. Hence, why they never took off. Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.

>Omni is a completely different blockchain than BTC.

This is plain false. It says so in big letters, right at the top of their website:

https://www.omnilayer.org/

>That's what powers the Tether network.

Tether has issued tokens on the Omni protocol, Ethereum, and other networks. The blockchains and amounts are listed here:

https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

>Bitcoin script is far too limiting to build expansive applications on.

My original point was that weak smart contract features on Bitcoin motivated Ethereum's creation (Vitalik's name is on the Colored Coins whitepaper). This is in contrast to GGP's proposition that Ethereum had underrated novelty.

There are many people who understand Ethereum and the larger blockchain / cryptocurrency ecosystem. I have made my career and wealth in this space. What you won’t find are tons of people like me on Hacker News. This website has a toxic reputation in the crypto world given its intensely negative attitude towards this industry.

I love HN. Probably the website I check most. But I have tried so hard to understand why the community here is so virulently against what I have devoted my life to. It’s very sad. My conclusions are numerous, but I think it’s death by a thousand cuts.

Where do the crypto folks hang out?

Everything is organized around coins and projects. For example if you are into eth core then you are in eth magicians https://ethereum-magicians.org

The most popular crypto mediums are telegram and discord. Twitter is the social media of choice. Reddit has some decent subreddits but it isn’t the primary place.

This community is based on trust. Trust is earned through contributing code, knowledge, effort, etc. If you join in the bull market, stick around through the bear to show you are serious. Etc.

sound a lot like the mob

I'm positive about Bitcoin valuation over the long term.

I'm negative about Bitcoins utility.

I'm very, very positive on the utility of systems like EVM and their valuation over the long term.

I'm still negative about mainstream adoption of direct usage. It's complicated and too easy to make unrecoverable mistakes.

I believe a lot of the criticism on HN is valid and deserved within certain contexts. Some contexts, like block chain VMs, don't come up much here at all.

I hope to understand the ecosystem better ... and imagine that at some point the greener operation and greater utility of Ethereum ETH 2.0 will beat out Bitcoin.

Will this lead to better returns for Ethereum over Bitcoin medium- or long-term, eventually? When will that switchover happen (if not already)?

My take is you have to understand finance, central banking, its abuse by banks and governments, and so on in order to see the utility of the crypto industry.

If you never got lost, you might not see the value of GPS.

Others don't need to get lost, but they are better at seeing the economic implications like increased efficiency when navigating roads, waterways, airspace, ...

Instead, the disbeliefers consider it expensive, unecological, and related company stocks as in a bubble.

Same here. Crypto literally is the best thing that happened carrier wise to my life. From the wild wild west in the early days that allowed anyone to make some beermoney then (and be rich today if they holded) to the immense community we have today that turn simple products/dapps/whatever into millions strong businesses over night.

Crypto is exactly the movement to give power back to the people (for a while at least) its sad to hear such a negative attudide from a otherwise forward thinking community

The issue is that exact story is “get rich quick”. A good predictor on how jaded you are towards your reaction to it is “did you get rich?”

I dont own a ferarri or tesla, but i havent had a regular job in years parts to crypto.

Where would you tell a crypto noob to start today?

This is the go-to guide for anyone new to crypto today. It goes over the why and how and provides links for further reading. https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-1-starting-with-b...

I hadn't seen this, thank you for sharing!

It doesn't help that the shadiest of people use crypto and ICOs to cheat and steal from gullible people. The suspicion and guard is up because the stakes are different. Let's say you write an opensource logging library for your language and promote it on HN - the stakes are low for everyone involved.

Let's say you're trying to launch rabbit token that's going to be the next only-fans replacement. You have a ton of motivation to hard sell your product and for this reason people are going to be equally not so exited and will have their guards up. I think it'd be naive to expect a OpenSource launch like happy reaction...

So it's 1) bad guys in that industry that have the wrong motivation giving the industry a partial deserved bad name.

2) A recognition that people espousing a technology are not purely talking about those technologies but have a vested interest in those assets having a positive view in other people's perception.

Ofcourse it comes with the territory. Like if a lawyer says, wonder "why is my profession, not universally loved?"

"Its just the 80% of the corrupt politicians giving the rest of the 20% a bad name."

Not passing judgement or moral judgement but I don't think crypto is going to shake-off the suspicion for quite a while.

This is because there is a knowledge gap between the masses and the people that know how things work. Till you have that gap there will be opportunists that will want to cash out on the knowledge arbitrage.

Its actually not just with crypto. Look at products that talk about AI enhanced this and AI enhanced that. Those guys are viewed with suspicion as well. Just slap-on an AI label to your PPT and bang your product is now cutting edge. Everyone see through that BS..

It's likely that the shadiest people use cash though.

I hear the most dreaded criminals tend to breath air and a shocking percentage of them are found to be mammals.

Jokes aside, How do you compare an ICO to cash? Its more closer to an IPO process.. if you started allowing listings in the stock market backed solely by 5-6 nice LinkedIn profiles and some 'white-paper' I'm sure the exact same people will list their companies in the stock exchanges as well.. Unlike an IPO, there is no vetting process, there are no mandatory disclosures or oversight.

That is freedom from central control, sure. But, the cost of freedom is the risk that gets loaded on the part of the investors. This gap is wide open for people that are thus inclined to cheat and make a quick buck. I am not berating crypto, but, I have a lot of confidence in criminals going after easy money that doesn't have too many down sides.

I don't think it was visionary. Ever since, blockchain has struggled to find a real-world use case. We know how blockchain works, the concept is thousands of years old. This problem existed in the past (coordinating in an environment where no one trusts anyone). However if this was a real problem in the real world, companies would have built blockchains long ago.

This is rather survivor bias. Apparently blockchain found some straws to hold on to. It could have been one of those millions go-nowhere projects just as likely.

I think there are legit use cases for it, but ultimately, we are still far from mass adoption and without the crazy monetary gains, I don't even believe anyone would talk about blockchain these days. Technology wise, it's not a strong value proposition. We can do pretty much everything without blockchain. Yeah there are some cases where trustlessness helps, but once this problem would become serious enough, it's not hard to build blockchain technology. It basically follows directly from basic principles defined by the problem. And the fact that everyone "thinks blockchain is new", already proves that the problem actually doesn't really exist.

I hold, transfer and pay with crypto a lot. To save a lot of fees, have additional security and because it is simply comfortable and fast.

Smart contracts allow that i can swap any currency to any other withoit kyc or even registering. I can move USD from ETH to Tron and so on within seconds for a low fee.

Cashing out to IRL money is simpler and faster than even paypal or paysafe for example.

Even if the crypto market is unstable, the last years it generally went up while holding USD or EUR basically was a loss game valued against ex. CHF.

I personally cant imagine a world without blockchains anymore.

do you mind telling me, how you cash out USD without giving anyone your name :)?

IRS has entered the chat.

Also, transaction fees seem pretty high. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by cheap insecure transactions.

Transaction fees for sums above lets say $500 are way cheaper than most banking fees especially assuming different currencies. Even more when we compare to western union or even paypal

Let me give you a real world example. You buy something for $10. Then ethereums $5 fee sounds crazy compared to 3% or so for creditcard or paypal. However transfer $1000 and those 5$ suddenly sound a lot better than the 30$ the creditcard or paypal charges.

Ahh what i ment is using tether or usdb instead of usd. Which is instant and decentralized and widely accepted crypto bound to the usd value. It just saves you from up and downs, its still crypto

Well, so you are still trading with people believing in the value of these systems (which are <95% of businesses), which is a very specific distinction to cashing out money with which you can pay e.g. your taxes.

Cashing out is no issue either, just not without a name. However even that exists trough localbitcoins.

I largely agree. I think the field is exciting and interesting, and like many crypto fanatics say, there might be parallels with the early days of the internet.

I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though!

There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road.

Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters.

I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)

The existing banking system? Goliath was better than David at fighting and he was not keen to learn rock-slinging. (I'm not implying David will always win though. It's unlikely.)

Plenty of central banks seem interested in launching digital currencies. For me the main selling points of cryptocurrencies are programmability, easy international transactions, and potentially easy micro-transactions. Personally I don't care much about the fact that they are decentralized, and while I'm happy for my bank to see my transaction history I'm not that keen on having it public.

If I could move my savings into a digital currency provided by a central bank I'd do it today. Bonus points if it can be stored in something like special drawing rights rather than euros.

Agree. The blockchain is the tape; amazing! I'm a bit late to the party, but have invested a reasonable amount into it recently. I'm on the side of ETH 2.0 and massive scalability and lower gas prices(even though I currently mine liquidity) so the true potential of smart contracts and DeFi can be realized.

The Ethereum docs are pretty great if you want to learn more: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/ .

It really is amazing when you understand the capabilities and speed of iterations of the growing use cases of this new shared trust machine. DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, so many different ecosystems currently being built cooperatively by hundreds of different companies and project teams. It's almost a force of nature.

It's not obvious that Turing-complete smart contracts are a good long term decision. I agree that Ethereum is fascinating tech, but with great power comes a great many ways to shoot yourselves in the foot. For financial institutions, being boring is to some degree a feature and not just a bug.

I few years ago i sold all my eth because i did not get the hype. Years later ETH sparked my interest and i agree that the technic is very likely the greatest crypto innovation since bitcoin. And the thing Bitcoin should have been to begin with.

If by the document you mean the original Ethereum yellow paper that first formalized it, the main author was actually Gavin Wood, not Vitalik :)

Both were crucial in laying down the technical and theoretical foundation of Ethereum.

Gavin is working on other things now. Vitalik is not the thought-leader he was in the early days (which is a good thing as he’s not a SPoF and decision making is more decentralized)

Never underestimate the efficiency with which money launderers and organized crime are able to innovate and adapt.

The point of Ethereum is not really to be a distributed computer. It also seems misleading to describe it that way, as it doesn't distribute computations. Every node computes the same thing.

It also barely computes anything. It's closer to distributed consensus. (Distributed tricky consensus? - I acknowledge there's a tiny bit of logic)

It can compute anything you want it to compute.

No, it really can’t. Unless you mean it in a sense that Minecraft is a Turing complete machine and can compute anything you want it to compute. Good luck computing anything non trivial.

Yes, Ethereum Mainnet isn’t much of a distributed computer in the Mosix sense (it’s more of a decentralized computer); but a private/protected PoA EVM blockchain very much would work to truly distribute computation.

Or, to put that another way: as long as all nodes can trust each-other (and so run entirely in fast sync, with no redundant verificational executions of the same blocks), then Ethereum does in fact allow N computers to work on pieces of N subproblems in parallel and use the state trie as a blackboard for syncing/linearization between those subproblems. (The actual heavy computation would have to occur outside the chain, in oracle sibling processes, but they could at least load their binaries from the state trie. Think of it like AI bot-clients cooperatively playing a MOO where users can define object code.) Essentially, Ethereum is a distributed database with Turing-complete CRDTs.

Mind you, nobody’s using Ethereum that way, but that doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t natively capable of being used that way. (Just like, say, oldschool fixed-function-pipeline GPUs could be used as GPGPUs, if you could translate your linear-algebra problem into an equivalent scene-geometry rendering problem.)

I’ve never understood Oracles as a concept. They seem fundamentally untrustworthy.

ETH seemed to have a higher tolerance for introducing the trade offs of Oracles than Bitcoin.

But without Oracles, the overlay networks you speak of couldn’t compute any meaningful logic without requiring an absurd amount of resources from the main net.

If you’re making a distributed computer, it’s like you’re scaling silicon circuits up to the network level. So any operation using those circuits will of course be more expensive. That means that many computations on the main net are cost prohibitive.

I would like to learn more about the trade-offs and risks of a blockchain relying on Oracles as a source of truth.

Oracles are always going to be less decentralized than a distributed blockchain VM. Chainlink's (oracle platform) approach to this is to have oracle nodes post a bond that can get slashed if the computation is deemed invalid. But most Chainlink oracles have 21 or fewer nodes. This is fine for supplemental data but would be vulnerable to all the same attacks that DPOS chains have suffered if used as base layer consensus.

Like I said, Ethereum can be used as a distributed computer presuming an complete web of 100% trust between nodes. E.g. when the nodes are all run by a single corporation, with the node operators being different employees in different locations. In that case, the oracles (= native processes interacting with the blockchain nodes) would be presumed-trustworthy just as much as the nodes themselves are. The only question would be whether the out-of-chain computations of the oracles are able to move the state forward in a deterministic, linearizable manner as if they were on-chain computations — which is totally possible if you make your blockchain into a collection of arbitrary-CRDT smart-contracts and only interact with shared data through them.

But to directly address your statement, in general, oracles as a concept are “trustworthy” iff 1. they rely solely on public information as input; or 2. are run by a centralized entity, which is the same entity that has sole ownership of the resource being modified by the oracle; or 3. the system is built such that any oracles can submit a cryptographic proof of X, and as soon as any oracle does so, the condition is triggered.

Re: case 1, just as you can re-compute the transactions of a blockchain to arrive at the same consensus state, you should be able to grab a copy of the oracle’s code yourself and run it in a proper “context”, whereupon it will re-assert all the same transactions it ever originally asserted to the chain. This requires that all APIs the oracle deduces its assertions from have historical-data variants.

Re: case 2, the oracle is basically just standing in for a human. If you trust a human to do X, then you trust an oracle to do X.

Re: case 3, this is what on-chain prediction markets do. Rather than the win-condition for a prediction being something a human watches for and then enters, many private individuals (bettors) are incentivized to each have their own oracle running that watches for the win-condition however they like, and then — as soon as that condition attains — proves to the smart contract that the condition attains. The smart contract doesn’t have to care which oracle submitted the proof, only that there is now such a proof.

Sorry, plopping JavaScript on top of blockchain is not something I would call visionary. Smart contracts were there long before eth. Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and very little delivery. It’s got nice PR, but it’s really the PHP of cryptocurrencies. But of course almost everything else except bitcoin is much worse.

Turing completeness is literally a bug in such system. It’s an anti-feature. You shouldn’t want it. It’s a model of evaluation where halting problem exists.

But hey, it’s a nice buzzword for script kiddies. Great foundation for financial system, right? :)

Ethereum gets around the halting problem by using a "gas" model, where it halts your execution if you run out of gas before the program returns.

If Ethereum is actually the PHP of cryptocurrencies, that puts it in a great spot for adoption.

In any non-trivial program you will not know how much gas it requires to complete because that’s what it means - to solve the halting problem. What a great basis for your financial system handling all people’s economic interactions. What can possibly go wrong.

I’ll stick with deterministic bitcoin script, thankyouverymuch.

You don't have to know how much gas it requires to /complete/, you can just run the program and check whether it runs out of gas before it exits. You do not need to solve the halting problem. Actually, it's pretty trivial to implement this and this model has scaled quite well considering the size of Ethereum today.

Determining whether a Turing machine halts within k steps is computable: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3370296/halting-pro...

If the number of steps is specified in unary, then the problem is NP-complete: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html

JavaScript powers much of the Internet today, and PHP too. When evaluating the effect of any given system or protocol - do you only analyze the design of its language - or its outcome?

Cool, I just don’t want it to power any of my financial future.

You don't have to, that's the beauty of having a choice.

Now that HN knows that you're so opinionated about the tech stack of your bank - can you detail down what type of infrastructure your current bank has, and why it's so good? Or is that just something you assume since you basically have zero knowledge about what traditional finance uses as back-ends?

I know a lot about it which is why I trust simple and stable systems like bitcoin. Banks are archaic, ethereum is Wild West with script kiddies “building” the future, bitcoin is just right for me.

>can you detail down what type of infrastructure your current bank has, and why it's so good? Or is that just something you assume since you basically have zero knowledge about what traditional finance uses as back-ends?

It doesn't really matter what backend my bank uses because there's regulatory backstops (eg. FDIC) to protect me if something goes wrong. The same can't be said for crytpo.

> Ethereum is a huge pre-mine scam with lots of promises and very little delivery.

You really should visit https://ethereum.org/

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