Quote from: behindtext on May 03, 2014, 11:25:55 AM

Quote from: bluemeanie1 on May 02, 2014, 05:27:52 PM

It's like removing seat belts from cars and declaring yourself a genius for making us slightly more comfortable.

lol!

to your point about it being monolithic: after having my devs collectively spend several man years rebuilding bitcoin from scratch (starting in late feb 2013), even having bitcoind as a reference, it's still not finished. there are myriad new features proposed in ETH that all have to be tested before they are released. i suspect that even with a pile of VC money, say >USD 10M, you would be hard-pressed to get all these features coded, tested and added.

while bitcoin is itself relatively complex code-wise, its fundamental insight is rather simple - "use proof of work as both (1) a distributed timestamp and (2) a minting/reward mechanism". if you take 10 such insights, roll them into one, then try to hack out the code, you will soon be in over your head.

Did you like my monkey picture? great movie.

sorry not familiar with your project. Do you have a link? (if it's NXT see below) I've been in the Bitcoin-qt code, it's not pretty.

while ethereum has some interesting ideas, if you followed the discussion you would perhaps have different take on it. It went something like this:

"Damn, this scripting system SUX guys!"

"ya it's got no loops or ifs, wth?"

"y u no have turing completeness?"

"can we make it turing complete? i have big brain."

2 months later...

"we have (quasi) turing complete scripts! now we can take over the world!"

"it's also a cloud computing platform!"

"Bitcoin is the next TCP-IP! to arms!"

Seems to me that the cloud computing people got involved at some point and turned the thing into something it wasn't initially.

So, this project is going to take a lot of resources to do. Developers want to be PAID, and investors want RETURNS. It's looking very similar to Ripple at this point. I raised this point re. Ripple many moons ago, which resulted in much consternation and gnashing of teeth: "if it's open source, can we fork it and make our own network of XRPs? or Ethers? Dogethereum?" The Ripple guys didn't like that. So if Ethereum is open source, it's possible to do this and the Ethers are only worth exactly the cost of processing power. Something tells me though that key components of the system will not be open source- Ripple dithered on this point for some time before fully open sourcing everything(I think, it's really impossible to tell). And basically it comes down to a key point- why is this hashing power a commodity if it serves no real purpose? not unlike the arguments of gold bugs- gold is valuable because it's valuable, and that thinking seems to prevail at certain times and other times not.

I wrote a number of papers about p2p financial contracts before Ethereum or related projects ever even came out. Fact is, we can do this fairly simply with something like NXT. I think NXT is very compelling because it's a complete rewrite and the code is CLEAN java. Innovations will happen fairly quickly in NXT(amof they ARE happening). So we can support complex contracts simply by making the kernel modular, having a TYPE field in the TXs and the TX is processed by the module according to type. They already have a namecoin clone and bitmessage clone in there. No need for complex turing complete support. Most importantly the system remains SIMPLE, PEER TO PEER, and accessible to the community. I don't foresee Ethereum in this role. One thing I see with this model is that it allows any sort of agreement imaginable, the fact is the users dont need or even WANT such flexibility, people want standardization in order to have fungibility. Fungibility means marketability, and that means money generation. Would you sign a contract written by some lawyer with terms you barely even understand? no you wouldn't - so the number of contract types are countably finite. We don't really NEED such a complex scripting engine, certainly if it comes at a price - simplicity.

What can we do with such contracts? We can do financial engineering in a p2p environment. Here's an example, the EURO that you may be holding in your hand if you live on one side of the atlantic is really a complex of debt between countries. If any one country defaults on their obligations, then the Euro takes a hit. It did great for a while up until the Greece incident, and I expect to see more collapse, perhaps a major collapse of epic proportions(im a Euro bear). So if we implement the things I outlined on http://altchain, we can do things like a Euro, or create a mutual fund, because assets can be CHAINED together. I collateralize a debt obligation, turn that credit risk into a commodity, group them together, and use this as form of payment tender for a set of e-commerce operations(that is essentially what they did with the Euro). It's very powerful. It can be supported in NXT 1) without any need for mining 2) fairly simple modifications save one component and I may publish that soon. NXT has serious potential IMHO. I was originally intending on using something called Confidence Chains, but seems pure PoS systems offer similar benefits and they are an accepted idea.

I also like Counterparty btw- but I think their future is questionable due to outside factors. I was a critic of these block chain piggy-back ideas(eg. color coins) because they require the consent of the core bitcoin developers and in some cases the technologies interfere with the basic Bitcoin features, and I think my first lemma has been shown to be correct. If something like Counterparty were to become widespread, it would cause a serious problem of bloat in the block chain and they would probably be forced to move to an altchain, some coalition of core devs and long-running node admins would force them off the network. In this case, they have precisely nothing on NXT(which is implementing a native CC feature). Also some of their ideas are defective in ways that have yet to reveal themselves. Roll Eyes

-bm