Re: Turing complete language vs non-Turing complete (Ethereum vs Bitcoin)
a 'computing environment' is not Turing Complete, but computer languages are.
So? Ethereum is turing complete then. Running out of ether is part of the environment, not the language.Quote
this poses the first problem of FALSE ADVERTISING. These aren't turning complete scripts, it's just a bloated up dispatching environment for financial transactions. I think they're overestimating how 'cool' this is going to be. It's not going to be fun to make or to use.
Yes, this is what I think is the real problem, programs are hard to understand and debug.
In law, sure judges are nondeterministic, but they don't do totally insane stuff, like in a parental custody hearing, they don't set their program counter to the wrong number and
Still, I am not sure if this is a fatal flaw, if anything it might limit scripts to what is easily comprehendable by one programmer. That's still a lot more flexible than bitcoin's scripting system.
I don't really care how they sandbox their environment, in theory it should be a lot simpler than the JVM. But maybe it is easier to just use the JVM and lock down everything except the few resources ethereum needs access to. Either way, the sandbox is not going to be what holds them back, I think those already exist and are a proven concept.
The execution environment for this thing would not be very simple. Another way to achieve this is to make the Bitcoin kernel modular and have the execution happen in a more privileged level, but those modules must be signed by various 'contract definition developers'. The contracts then are executed by this module and only the variables need to be defined. I think this may happen with NXT as it's natively Java and lends itself to this idea. We have a scripting system already in Bitcoin and it's rarely used. How many different kinds of contracts do they anticipate?
I think you're attributing some ideas to 'Ethereum' that are really more general concepts that have been floating around for a while. I don't see many serious dangers at the outset, seems like some overactive imaginations at work.
but as I mentioned, if they want to make this thing and offer it for free to the public then...
-bm