Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum, Talks Bitcoin’s Most Ambitious Successor

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

I'd bet against it ever getting to try it's consensus given that their launch is now going to be completely centralized (ie, it can't stand up on it's own let alone with malicious attackers, so it's going to be remotely controlled by the developers for now). Will they ever remove the crutch and risk everything crumbling? Seems very doubtful.

If Ethereum is as successful as some of people working on it hope it will be, it could be as important as HTTP. Yeah, HTTP is one protocol... on the internet, most people have little idea about how it works or what it's about, yet it does affect billions of people and is an important part (at the infrastructure level) of one of the defining phenomenons of our era: the Internet. Some people hope that cryptocurrencies are going to be next decade's Internet and Ethereum is going to be its HTTP.

The main break from the standard internet given by Ethereum is the following: fully distributed apps that exist not in any server, but as a public contract between their users. If you want eBay on the internet, you build a program on a server you own and tell it how to mediate transactions between buyers and sellers. If you want eBay on Ethereum, you publish a contract about how buyers and sellers should behave, and include in that contract some provisions that enforce themselves, no middleman required. Will this be practical? Who knows. Would it be useful if it works? I believe it would be. Would it be industry changing? Perhaps. Would it be world changing? Well... let's say it at least has a chance.

Now, whether Ethereum is another http/www/html or, say, another Project Xanadu, that's a different question. Ethereum is an idea that can only work if many untested pieces turn out to work together as desired and the main benefits from those technologies are sufficient for people to buy into what would be a clean departure from the existing web. Experience shows that such departures are seldom successful (remember when every website was going to be a Java Applet? That was still way less of a moonshot than Dapps). But the thing is, regardless of whether Ethereum succeeds or not, its development is likely to produce useful ideas, and it is a project that, at least in principle, should it succeed, really can change our infrastructure. It is worth keeping in mind, that, in some cases, changing infrastructure has changed the world quite significantly (e.g. trains, telegraph, Internet, and even WWW vs the telnet/email era of the Internet).

You wouldn't run an arbitrary program on Ethereum. You run programs on Ethereum to define the state transitions in a database the whole world can access and trust. If you're building a marketplace, for instance, then you're defining what it means when a customer buys something. Every customer and merchant who uses your system has proof of how their interactions will work, and it's impossible for anyone to try to cheat.

The database and its state transitions are what matters.

If you're familiar with bitcoin: bitcoin is a platform that coordinates global views of bitcoin balances and verifiable logic for transfer of bitcoin from one account to another.

In a similar way: ethereum is a platform that coordinates global views of state and verifiable logic for state transitions.

> Can you give an example of what this would be used for and how?

This would be used in any scenario where a global or otherwise undefined group of actors desires to coordinate action in a way that does not inherently require trust from a single party.

In human terms, it is used when you want to communicate or interact with some unknown others without relying on a company/single entity to provide the medium.

Oh yeah, the example. Lets build a small one.

Lets say the people at the tor project wants to publish some master public keys, etc. There is a core group of folks who should have write access, but they don't necessarily trust each other. Some of their 'important decisions', like changing their group membership, or changing a public key, should be put to a vote. (Oh and lets say they need to be able to cycle their individual keys, as well)

They could create an ethereum contract (or interacting contracts) that managed the operation. They wouldn't have to necessarily trust each other individually, and their progress would be visible/verifiable by all.

The contract(s) would handle their published data (allowed adding/removing content), maintain their group membership, and would presumably only be modifiable by the members of their group. Members could be modelled as ethereum addresses. Member needs to change keys? Include logic to swap a member for another address, iff the call came from the member to be swapped out. Important tasks need to be voted on? Include logic to initiate and track votes on certain operations.

Unless you're really into the nitty gritty of cryptocurrency technology, it won't really make sense until people manage to build some compelling apps for it, hopefully around the summer time.

(INB4 someone says the ether allocated in the genesis block doesn't fit the strict definition of a premine)