aakilfernandes

The DAO would not be possible without it.

In the scenario you gave, the trusted oracle never needs access to the funds. This is important for legal/regulatory reasons. This would not be possible without smart contracts.

Yes, its not 100% trustless, but its far more trustless than the alternative.

Hopefully no on ever trusts a contract with 100 mill for a while, but for lower values and simpler contracts... absolutely i would.

We want to allow recursion and loops. We want to be able to run arbitrary code.

We just need to be a little wiser about how we do it.

Ah, that means the exact opposite ie "use as much gas as needed".

This is different from the default _recipient.send() which would be limited to 2300 gas

> it didn't use gas

this is incorrect

The whole point of Ethereum is turing completeness. Ethereum without Turing completeness already exists and its called Bitcoin.

While this implementation of The Dao has failed, Ethereum is the only blockchain where implementing The Dao is possible.

Here's a better explanation of the attack: http://vessenes.com/more-ethereum-attacks-race-to-empty-is-t...

Ethereum is not doomed. But devs do need to be educated of this attack.

Missing from this article: any polling data.

Which begs the question, why is Urbit necessary? It would be relatively simple to port Ethereum's consensus protocol to "only a user with key X can sign new blocks" and each block would contain exactly 1 transaction.

"Virtual Machines".

Take the blockchain out of Etheruem, and you still have a pretty cool deterministic state-transition machine. My understanding of Urbit is very limited, but I believe it has a similar concept of Ethereum without a consensus protocol.

Its possible to disagree with someone without being rude. Whatever your criticisms are of another person, I hope you take some time and write them out rather than engaging in mudslinging.

The problem with biometrics is its a password you cant change. What happens if theres a leak? Unfortunately we can't update our facial structure.

This kind of API might be useful as a 2fa, but never as a standalone authentication mechanism.

Edit: I mispoke. The main problem isn't with leaks, its with other apps collect the same data google uses as biometrics. For example, a video chat app that grabs the same biometric data (facial structure/typing pattern) that google uses for authentication. That chat app then would have everything needed to emulate you.

I'm not an expert on Bitcoin's scripting language, but here's a few main takeaways

* Ethereum allows shared state between transactions, Bitcoin doesn't. That means one application can state "The price of Eth is $10USD" and a totally unrelated application can reference that value. The result is that each application provides an API that all other applications can call.

* Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have a stack based scripting language. However Ethereum also has a higher level language that compiles to the stack based language. That means you can right reasonably readable code without OP codes. Functional program is so much mentally easier than writing a stack

* Ethereum (unlike Bitcoin) is Turing complete. It can have code that loops and recurses based on the state of the chain

Glad to see Coinbase moving in this direction. I'm hoping they'll become a consumer friendly portal for the (hopefully many) assets that will trade on Ethereum.

My understanding of distributed commit/reveal RNGs is they need some sort of incentive mechanism. Otherwise, its trivial for an attacker to flood the network with lots of commits and only reveal the ones that give him a useful outcome.

https://github.com/randao/randao

Lightning/thunder is really interesting technology and could pave the way for a new set of bitcoin/blockchain use cases.

* A Tor/i2p alternative where nodes get compensated for passing messages

* Pay per second video streaming

* Incentivized filesharing

Basically anywhere where trustless microtransactions are needed

Lots of potential

IMHO the reason it hasn't been turned into an app is to justify its price. Psychologically, people will pay more for hardware than software even if it does the exact same thing.

Would be great if archival services recursively hashed their documents and put them in a blockchain. Then youd get 100% certainty the records havent been updated since they were first recorded

And every actor will know there's a double spend attack and stop accepting the chain. Unlike a public blockchain, there should never be a fork in a private blockchain. If there is a fork, you know the owner is mounting a double spend attack.

With a conventional database, the owner can set any value to anything they like.

With a private blockchain (and smart contracts), the owner can't forge values.

For example lets say you want to fake a transfer from client A to client B. In a traditional database, the owner can do that. With a blockchain, the owner can't.

You can use Ethereum as a private blockchain

The key (absurd) assumption is that 100% of assets are passively-investable.

The main problem I have with index funds is the otherwise financially savyy people who tell me that index funds will get you on average x% a year. No! Index funds, in the past, gave x% a year. However past performance is not a predictor of future performance.

There is no law of physics/economics that says the S&P500 has to rise at x% a year on average.

Condition B does not make sense. The proof provided to Andresen/Matonis is not known to be fake, and they both vouch for his identity.

> Arbitragers win the first auction and resell the ad, finding exchanges where it’s more valuable and pocketing the difference

I don't understand how this is possible. The original advertiser has to trust that the first exchange is reporting accurate demographic info. How does the exchange know the demographic info is accurate if anyone can buy the ads and sell them on another exchange?

Can any average Joe sign up for these exchanges and start trading? Would be more than happy to lose a couple bucks playing around

Does Min (along with Brave) do ad blocking at a different layer than plugins? Is there any advantage to having the browser do it instead of something like uBlock Origin in chrome?

Not sure how that would work, but I don't know much about Keybase.

You don't need miners at all, if you're not worried about censorship resistance. You can use Ethereum with a single validator. That means you don't need a token (ether) and you get instant transactions. Plus it prevents the hacker issue above.