The author talks about making Ethereum more humane and user-friendly, but jargon like "The Internet of Agreements" and "Humanizing the Singularity" makes me think he's mostly interested in becoming a thought-leader through Branding™. Those terms and his bombastic language in general will not help bring Ethereum to the masses like he claims to want to do.<p>Also, the idea that Ethereum at $100 implies this amazing decentralized future is simply wrong, because that also implies that Ethereum at $1 didn't mean anything. Instead his argument should center around the many different businesses, products and experiments being built on the platform.
They forgot the feature where if a smart contract doesn't go the way they want it, they create a default-opt-in hard fork of the currency.<p>Sorry if I don't trust the "small group of legends" more than the government.
Hi I'm the original author of the piece and I'll be around for the next couple of hours to answer questions. Glad to see such a lot of debate here already!
The problem with smart contracts is that they are only 100% trustless as long as all the input data is already present on the blockchain.<p>Even something banally simple as "if such and such win the world cup deposit earnings there" cannot be 100% trustless. How does one overcome this problem?<p>I don't think smart contracts can overcome this problem while remaining 100% trustless.
I think it means a lot of people are going to lose a lot more money than $1 Ether would have meant.<p>1. The halting problem states you can't predict what a turing complete program will do, until you run it. This means to some degree, that you can't predict what your "smart" contract will do, until it does it. Thus turing completeness causes security to be far, far harder than non turing completeness. This is how you lose the millions of dollars as the DAO did after it passed audits.<p>2. Competing implementations of consensus code in different languages greatly increases breakdown of consensus. (more millions have been lost over this, and it created a fork at about 10 percent the value of the old chain.)<p>3. You can buy things with bitcoin. What can you buy with ETH? If you can't buy anything with a currency, it's not a currency.<p>Thus, human resolved chain rollbacks? Check. Failed consensus between implementations? Check. Passed audit yet totally failed smart contracts? Check. No place to spend them? Check. New tokens given out all the time forever? Check.<p>Every dollar that goes into bad ideas is taken directly from the good ideas. Smart contracts can never be smart until oracles are solved. Oracles aren't solved. ETH has all the technical odds and history stacked against it, however some how, the people that bought them aren't dumping.<p>There's a saying that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
as someone who's been involved since the beginning, the only thing $100 means is there are enough people invested that the real work can begin where developers and teams can take the time to learn how to build for it without worrying it'll disappear tomorrow. that assurance counts for something, but beyond that do -not- consider this a "production ready" platform. There will be failure. There will be losses. treat this as a place to experiment and dabble in the future but don't strive for world domination, let success build naturally. fuck the hype.
> By all and any standards, this is a success beyond anything dreamt of when the project started<p>I doubt this is true. When Bitcoin came out I think a lot of people realized a whole new game was afoot. An autonomous ledger was demonstrated and the race was on to create the autonomous everything else. An autonomous application host was the obvious brass ring, and whoever got it seemed assured to spark a market at least as big as Bitcoin.<p>I can't imagine Vitalik was thinking anything other than "if this works, it will be huge." That's a big if, but I think the stakes were clear.
This guy Vinay Gupta really has a gift for writing about technology. Lots of clear technical concepts without resorting to jargon, bright syntax and style, and never pedantic.
Bitcoin has had several drastic price corrections in its life. We are yet to see this from Ether. I suspect the fall will be greater if it starts >$100.<p>Of course, we will look back on this in 5 years and think $100 ETHER was cheap!
If you want to stay up to date on Ethereum, I've heard there's a fantastic weekly email newsletter that's worth reading: <a href="http://www.weekinethereum.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.weekinethereum.com</a>
This guy is a raving lunatic, you can see him spouting total gibberish here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3p-RUtGejI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3p-RUtGejI</a>
> On the head end of the blockchain there is a sort of roulette wheel.<p>This is interesting. Where Bitcoin seems to reward miners based on solving NP hard problems, Etherium is just handed out randomly?