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Comment by alvarosm | Hacker News Reader

An overengineered and useless cryptocurrency (Bitcoin-like currency). It was also pre-sold so they've made quite a bit of money for themselves (out of nothing) already.

Smart contracts are pointless since you need trust anyway to deal with real-world assets. Nobody would rather trade in a p2p system instead of a "real" exchange either.

Overengineering in Ethereum is rampant too, as it's trying -and failing- to definitively work around Bitcoin shortcomings by significantly increasing complexity without good reason. They're also reimplementing it on several programming languages, without code reuse from Bitcoin or any other related technology either.

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They haven't made money "out of nothing", the money is paying for development. They've had running code since before the Ether sale. That code has been used in projects like Counterparty and Eris. It's already of value.

Implementing a system in different languages ensures that, unlike Bitcoin, assumptions and bugs don't get baked in to a single codebase or development environment. It's a robustness measure and good software development practice (I'm disturbed by how few supposedly professional software engineers are familiar with this principle). Simply re-using Bitcoin code would work against this.

Smart contracts can reduce legal costs in trusted transactions. And they're not just for replacing existing legal contracts.

As for "real" exchanges vs. p2p, it depends what you're trading. Twenty years ago if we were discussing whether someone would one day sell a house on eBay I'm sure we'd be having a similar conversation.

The development process for the final release isn't finished yet so if it's true that they've "failed to work around Bitcoin's shortcomings" that's something you should go into more detail about so it can be addressed.

> Smart contracts are pointless since you need trust anyway to deal with real-world assets.

jgarzik (bitcoin core dev) disagrees with you, he tweeted recently that he's excited about their potential (he calls them "active addresses"). Also, Nick Szabo disagrees with you.

> Nobody would rather trade in a p2p system instead of "real" exchange either.

Lots of people would rather. There are many projects attempting to do decentralized/p2p exchange. For example, atomic cross-chain transactions have been on the horizon for a while now. And startups like tether.to, so that USD-tied assets can circulate in a decentralized manner (I won't mention ripple, but it is the same idea).

It is a natural evolution, the demand for an alternative to centralized exchanges comes from the same motivation to have an alternative to PayPal. Oh, and people also want a decentralized Silk Road (once they realize that its possible).

Though I disagree with you, I upvoted you because your criticism is substantive and well informed.

Thanks. If only everyone did that on HN... Someone should teach people they're supposed to upvote stuff based on how useful it is, not on how much they personally agree with opinions expressed.

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