Ethereum: the Yellow Paper [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum: the Yellow Paper [pdf]

gavwood.com

13 pointsbeniaminmincu10 comments

All right, forgive me for being negative but I can't take this project seriously.

>"Here are a few verticals where Ethereum could engender disruptive innovation:"

It's literally dripping with Silicon Valley Newspeak. This is the language of the serial entrepreneur, the one who is more interested in having his latest project acquired by a bigger fish for a hefty price than actually delivering a quality product.

Not to mention I'm so sick of everyone cramming "social" into everything. The "Social OS"? Yuck. I mean maybe I'm just jaded and cynical at 3am but Ethereum just seems so... phony.

I understand your sentiment, but I'd warn against judging the project based on one blog post by Ethereum's communications guy. There seems to be some serious crypto/engineering heft behind the project:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0

Note: I'm not involved with the project. Simply watching it with interest at this point.

I'm curious about the heft you're talking about. Is there any public cryptanalysis by any of the Ethereum folks? Any widely used software projects? Cryptographic protocols? (I don't say this to argue otherwise, but I wasn't aware of any particular track record there, and a quick google didn't turn it up— so I was surprised to see that being said... Most of the people I know are involved in it were responsible for non-technical things in Bitcoin space or more or less failed other altcoins)

Could someone explain the difference between: Ethereum, Ripple, and OpenTransactions?

One difference that I am aware of is that OpenTransactions uses the Bitcoin blockchain and the other two are supposed to have their own blockchain. But it's hard to get details of how these things are supposed to work.

OpenTransactions is currency agnostic and doesn't use Bitcoin blockchain in way that I'm familiar with.

It's essentially a open source exchange mechanism based on anonymous federated servers.

I don't see how it's hard to find out about how these things work since literally every one of them has it's own wiki, blog and forum.

If you are able to extract concrete, detailed information about these things from their wiki, blog and forum, congratulations. I can't. It all sounds pretty vague to me.

This exactly. I think part of the problem is that each of these projects has a corporate backer, Monetas, sponsoring Open Transaction is building a business around the platform. There is some incentive to keep the best doco closed source. There is a slim to none chance that the only documentation Monetas is using is available publicly. I spent some time setting up an opentransactions server, but could never spend enough time/research to get a production server up.

It's not hard. It's time consuming. Scouring 9 different semi-curated resources to develop a clear and concise comparison of the 3 is quite a task, a task someone should take on if any of these technologies are to become mainstream. How would you summarize the differences between them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

"The problem with an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in reasoning that renders the conclusion unpersuasive. In contrast to a formal fallacy of deduction, the error is not merely a flaw in logic."

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