Comment by gatehouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gatehouse | Hacker News Reader

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Trying to figure out a couple things (from pastebin link):

1. What protection against non-halting?

contracts are "funded" upon creation, and by those who issue transactions to the contract. if there are specific fees required by the contract to perform an action, it must be enforced by the contract itself. the cost of computation will eventually exhaust the contract's funding it fails.

2. what are the long-term economics? (i.e. is coin supply unlimited or limited and at what rate of decay)

    line 90

- planned fundraising period with issuance of 10000 ether per BTC contributed

- other coins will be issued so the initial money supply is 15000 times the contributed BTC amount, with 0.25x (i.e. 16.67%) to the founders, same amount to fund the Etherium organization. Division of BTC not specified.

- the mining reward will be 1/3 of the initial supply, per year, perpetually (i.e. 1/2 the contributor's reward.) So the money supply increases linearly.

3. if a person's only goal was to use the blockchain to store data, what would be cost per byte, and is there a max rate?

    line 385 to 399

- A contract is "funded" when it is created, and the computation performed by the contract consumes the funds.

- storage of a "data item" in contract memory costs 100x where x = floor(10^21 / floor(difficulty ^ 0.5))

- don't see the limit/cost of data items bound to transactions as per transaction definition on line 133

anyway it takes courage to name a currency after a drug like ether.

I don't think anyone associates ether with a drug first.

From Thesaurus: "ether - the fifth and highest element after air and earth and fire and water; was believed to be the substance composing all heavenly bodies"

And ethernet. Kids today.

"There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ethereum binge."

      Appologies to Hunter S. Thompson

Though another spelling of that is "aether" (I think this is more common than "ether").

Ethers are also a group of rather common organical compounds in chemistry. This is the page Wikipedia gives you when searching "Ether", as gateway allures to. Apparently, a specific compound of those (diethyl ether) can be used as a drug. Seems rather unlikely to me that people would connect the name to the drug first.

"composing all heavenly bodies"

Perfect name.

maybe it's just me and wikipedia.

And the late Hunter S. Thompson. It's the first thing I thought of too.

>> What protection against non-halting?

The transaction fee is determined based on the number of computational steps in the contract. My understanding is that, if the contract has not halted by the time the transaction fee has been "spent", then the transaction is rejected.

yeah I came to the same conclusion, except lines 327/328 confuse me a little bit, as to whether the fee goes to the miner in this case, since on 328 (regular termination) it says so explicitly, but on 327 (exhaustion) it doesn't specify.

I'm guessing that, if the transaction is rejected, then no fees are awarded -- I could be wrong though.

yeah, I'm thinking that if that is the case, it would allow you to create a "spike" contract, a highly funded contract designed to use a lot of miner resources until it inevitably fails. then you could send out transactions to this contract which would cause it to execute and fuck with all the other miners, where you just ignore it because you know it will fail. Maybe the cost for computation makes this unreasonable though, I don't really have a sense of the cost of computation .

you must be really burned out to think of a drug when you hear the word ether :D

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