Hacker News Reader

Comment by keymone | Hacker News Reader

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? :)

View on HN

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/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com