Quote from: AGD on February 13, 2018, 08:20:57 PM

A lot of good reasons to stick with Bitcoin, esp. Core and keep running full nodes and I also would trust smart contracts a lot more, if they would be based on the the Bitcoin blockchain than on any other shitchain.

Quote from: HeRetiK on February 13, 2018, 11:03:47 PM

Yeah, a lot of the stuff that I've seen happening with the alts (eg. IOTA and its self rolled crypto or that whole Parity debacle... twice) and some of the hardforks (eg. B2X's insta-death and the BCH difficulty fluctuations) during the last year made me really appreciate the way Core handles things. Sure, progress may seem slow, but it's slow for a reason. Stuff's done when it's done.

On reading OP, my own first thought was of the whining in certain quarters about Cores relatively slow pace and its done when its done policy. Also directly related is persistent calumny over their cautious desire to avoid hardforking the chain, and do so only if necessaryfollowing research of what could happen, and how to prevent oopsies. I even once saw somewhere an explicit suggestion that Core should follow the amateurish wannabe cool kid Silicon Valley 2.0 motto of move fast and break things (!).

Whereas to the best of my knowledge, Core is the first and thus far, only open-source project wherein a tiny little bug could directly destroy liquid value equivalent to a hundred billion dollars in a microsecond. I appreciate the its done when its done approach.

Quote from: HeRetiK on February 14, 2018, 11:02:35 AM

It seems like both developers and investors tend to forget that they are handling real, actual money. Would you leave a suitcase full of cash in the middle of the street? Would you give your credit card data to some random stranger on the internet? That's what basically happens in crypto all the time.

There is pertinent idiom, Other Peoples Money. Ive mostly seen it applied by people who are critical of Bitcoin altogether, on grounds of the amount of ridiculously stupid code which idiots deploy to (mis)handle Bitcoin. Of course, thats like criticizing computers because most software of all kinds is trash (and so are all popular CPUs!). Solution: Dont entrust your bitcoins to ridiculously stupid code, and dont use services which do.

Quote from: HeRetiK on February 13, 2018, 07:05:34 PM

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The cryptocurrency most commonly associated with catastrophic bugs is ethereum. Thats not due to its underlying code, but on account of the smart contracts that can be built on top of the ethereum framework.

Here's the next thing. Granted, if Solidity where more strict and rigorous its developer base would likely be much much smaller.

Its not only a matter of Solidity. IIUC, the exploitation of loopholes in the DAO contract (not a hack) applied some interesting features of the Ethereum VM itself. Anyway, the whole concept of bolting a Turing-complete VM onto a blockchain is sheer lunacy.

This is why I am drooling over the concept of Simplicity (PDF) for Bitcoin. A powerful smart-contracts DSL with formally verified properties, which is designed to support writing of formally verifiable contracts, is exactly what we need.