Quote from: bluemeanie1 on May 02, 2014, 03:54:49 PM

Quote from: coinrevo on January 28, 2014, 04:28:07 PM

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And Vitalik Buterin has gained his high reputation not by chance. He seems to be one of the brightest minds in the community.

what has he actually implemented? the only thing this shows is that is that cryptocurrencies are currently going nowhere, when such drivel can get so much attention. so I ask: where is the source code that does all these magical things? smarts contracts, DAC, ... all of this is simply nonsense the way it is described. and this has little to do with Turing complete languages.

Im with you on this. 'Turing Complete' seems to be some sort of totem to attract investors.

What I'm not hearing is the obvious problem here- to compute a balance or verify a chain I need to compute several million little C programs with potentially infinite loops? perhaps several billion?

It's a huge problem and the various rantings I'm hearing lately about magical 'turing complete' tx scripts don't even begin to address this basic problem. The current scripting language has limits on execution time and processing requirements. If you put limits on infinite loops, then its not turing complete.

see: The Halting Problem, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

there's no 'grey goo' nightmare scenarios here, the scare is that I can put a TX in the block chain(perhaps several thousand) that potentially use all the processor resources of a node. This seems to be yet another episode of the centralization story.

-bm

Your computing environment is not Turing complete either! Here's proof: while (true) { print("hi") }

Run that, I guarantee it will be interrupted because it used too many resources. How long will it be before it's interrupted? Well, that can be arbitrarily long. But it's the same with ethereum. There won't be any infinite loops that don't get interrupted after some reasonable time.

Whether new nodes having to catch up by executing a billion scripts is a problem, depends on whether the history grows faster than Moore's law. Hopefully there's some kind of feedback mechanism that prices ether according to computing power needed to operate a full node.