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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I don't see this panning out well. Between the wonky incentive scheme, the lack of usefulness, and the mishaps with broken hash algorithms and stuff, there is not a lot of promising stuff going on here.

Is there something I'm missing? Does Ethereum actually let us do anything new, or better than we can do it now?

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Ethereum is truly innovative; the first genuine stab at a post-Bitcoin blockchain.

It's also going to take many, many years to work the kinks out. The scripting language is so much more sophisticated that it'll be quite some time before the ins and outs of attack vectors will be reasonably understood.

I'll save comments on the mining for another time; I'm not totally up to date with their current plans. One thing any mining strategy needs to have a solution for is the popularity / security dichotomy: Bitcoin has provably much more compute than you securing the network. This makes you want to tag on to Bitcoin, with, say the side-chain proposal.

On the other hand, if you do that, pre-mining becomes harder, and you will be dealing with ASIC cartel economics. If you go the other way and build a 'non-ASIC-able' proof of work, you probably don't want to accidentally get on the ASIC bandwagon when you've promised your customers that they won't be on it.

> If you go the other way and build a 'non-ASIC-able' proof of work, you probably don't want to accidentally get on the ASIC bandwagon when you've promised your customers that they won't be on it.

You also run the risk that anybody with access to a botnet might be able to gain 51% of the network's processing power.

Are we already going post-bitcoin? By all accounts we are still struggling to figure out bitcoin.

I actually think it's unfortunate that a "pure" currency was the first application of the blockchain. Bitcoin's problems are around mindshare and social acceptance, because it's useless without it. Something like Filecoin interests me much more, because the value of the system is a bit more independent of crowd psychology.

You can "snap together" pieces and build an ethereum script for various things here: http://etherscripter.com/0-4-0/

See the code sample link. You can even check out the output in a Lisp-like language.

You didn't actually answer any of my questions. Why is ethereum useful? It's also not that innovative. Increase the scope of the scripting language and charge for ops, and you've just turned Bitcoin into it.

You'd also need a key-value store linked to contracts, as well as the ability for contracts to call each other. Those are more difficult (though your main point stands)

One thing that nobody's mentioned in the Ethereum camp is how useful good tooling is. If you think back to the past year of Bitcoin history there are a lot of high-profile sites that could have and should have made use of more sophisticated bitcoin escrow transactions. Why didn't they[0]? IMO there isn't going to be much of an abstraction layer over the underlying Bitcoin transaction language and anyone who wants to use these features will have to learn how to write directly in the transaction bytecode[1]. Ethereum will have much better tooling (they're already working hard at it!) and this is how you'll turn Ethereum's competitive feature advantages over Bitcoin into users.

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[0] Ok, let's assume good faith on the operator's part.

[1] What I'd like to see is a 'C' for bitcoin transactions instead of the current assembler. I don't think that will happen.

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