I believe it’s a sort of satellite-mounted weapon, and not extricable in any way from full surveillance a la smartphone location or - even worse, multiple exploited access points thus triangulating location.
I think it’s most logically a geo-stationary satellite, so wherever launches those might have more information about who might have a radio transmitter or two up there.
This was Philip K Dicks persistent hallucination/psychosis. It has been a constant in SF culture since he wrote on it in "valis" and other novels. He was however, quite open about the hallucinatory qualities of his belief.
Yeah, I actually would like to see a modern HN / Craigslist blend. One thing both sites do well is having a simple quick-loading site which works without JavaScript.
Network effect, reliability, free, anonymous, ability to run without JavaScript.
If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integration with Monero, it would be a killer app for the crypto industry.
>Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will.
Why "unfortunately"? This is a good thing. Facebook is horrible, in many different ways, and the last thing we need is to hand even more power over the internet to them. CL is "ugly", but it's fast and works great, and isn't filled with ads and tracking, something I definitely can't say about Facebook.
I think facebook serves a purpose but I also agree with your statement. The last thing I want are more places relying on facebook. I deleted my facebook to get away from it. Huge "but" though: I did get value out of facebook when I was younger. It's for that reason that I think it's probably a good thing.
Of course...there's also the ever present threat of a new social network growing up with another generation.
> Theres loads of competition for CL. Internationally many people have cut in on that space.
Correct. Here in Stockholm no one knows about CL (even if there is one for our city at https://stockholm.craigslist.se/). Just about all you can see there are some robot spam listings for medical cannabis.
Over here https://www.blocket.se/ has near monopoly position, even though it's quite expensive. They got here first, it's as simple as that. http://sv.shpock.com/ is trying hard to establish a presence, but it's seems to be going slow.
I read this (possibly wrongly) to be a proxy for "unencumbered page load speed" which is a feature that many users value beyond the 1% who care about noscript.
If you said it that way, yeah. But it means that the site is nice to use on very low-end devices - you know, the sort used by people to whom the second-hand market is very important, because they can't afford high-end devices.
From what I understand, people started local garage sale groups on Facebook specifically to remove anonymity. It's a benefit for those people. Facebook is just taking what is already a massively popular use of their groups feature and officially supporting it. It won't replace craigslist but it will do just fine.
They already did disrupt it, you just aren't cognizant of the fact that you life in that post-disruption world. It's hard to imagine what could have been, but I suspect there'd be a confetti of paid services (likely absolutely horrible side-projects by local newspapers) that everyone hated but still had to use.
I think the (slightly) higher threshold for creating even a throwaway account elsewhere makes for a better experience in the long run. I needed to get rid of a lot of stuff in the past couple months and fb/nextdoor/freecycle was more productive in a week than craigslist was in two months.
Same story for paid job listings on craigslist - I just put one up a few weeks ago. I'm starting to find that it's getting worse as time goes by for things like restaurant jobs. I've slowly started using other ways to find new hires, and next time craigslist won't be on my radar unless everything else falls through. Not that my few hundred bucks a year is a big deal for them, but I kinda expect better and get better from competitors.
As mentioned elsewhere, the average user probably doesn't know or care about JavaScript. They do know and care about simplicity and speed. Not having JavaScript (or only very little) often positively affects speed. (See Hacker News vs Redis on mobile for an example of this.)
When I visit Craigslist, it loads almost instantaneously, similar to how Hacker News does now, or Gmail used to years ago. This is not the case for sites that use JavaScript to position everything.
Perhaps I was. I used to use NoScript around the time I started using Gmail, but gave up at some point because I started having to disable it on almost every site I visited.
It certainly is for some (e.g. me and some people I know). I think quite a few people get pissed off at websites which do not have live content (it's live if it can't be cached; Craigslist content, e.g., can be cached) but require JS just to render the basic text. It doesn't help if those sites also make 100+ requests. And yes, some folks still prefer text-based browsers when possible. :) I do realize the latter make up quite a small percentage only, though...
In the sense that no JS = better performance on slower PCs - yes, I'd say that's a selling point.
My 70+ parents just listed and sold dozens of items in their spring cleaning - first time they used CL and they did it without my help. They might have had more problems if CL was "jazzed up".
I'd really like to know how to deal with users input, forms and other stuff without JS. Every tutorial we see today is like "throw tons of JS to this problem and it shall work".
Vanilla forms just GET or POST to some server endpoint with all of the <input>s passed in as query parameters. Frameworks (e.g., Rails) put some syntactic sugar on it, but that's really all that's happening. If the form submission contains invalid input, it's customary to return to the form page (with all the values already filled out) and show a server-generated message about what went wrong.
I think it's a little bit awkward to not use put, patch, delete... I wonder however if my server must follow the same technique, if not how to wire a delete endpoint to handle a form post and so on. I'll try to handle a form using only get and post sometime just to see how it works. Thank you!
Well you just made me feel old. For put/patch/delete you can just as easily wire different options to different URL's. We had URL's like /Foo/Delete?43. It may be awkward in a particular framework but it's about as simple as things get.
I've always hated put/patch/delete because it tends to result in data centric UI's instead of workflow centric ones.
Hmm now that you mentioned I realized I've seen this pattern before but I've never given it a thought. I'll definitely try it sometime, it seems to work pretty well. BTW sorry for make you feel old, it was not my intention haha
Hmm I've been using w3schools for quite some time now but I ALWAYS double check it with a third source, often MDN. I really like their straight to the point approach and I think they've been fixing some of the odd stuff lately. I don't really think it's really that bad if you already have some previous experience, it can work OK as a quick reference.
all that link says is that w3c is "not reputable". no evidence. For learning the basics in webdev (coming from C/C++) I've never had a problem with w3c.
Even if they have fixed all these instances since then, that all those errors were ever produced is a bad sign, especially when there were better alternatives even then.
You actually can't use Craigslist over Tor, so it's not anonymous. Also, your contact details can be leaked in their email relay system. If your name in your Gmail account is Jane Doe, the other person will receive an email from a Craigslist domain with your name as the sender... so just be careful.
Does craigslist's UI work really well without JS? I mean, sure, it looks lo-fi, but there's still a ton of script on most pages, and the submission process is definitely pretty dynamic. If anything, CL looks more like a relic of the DHTML era of 'designed for IE4' web design.
When somebody quits, their non-city troops should be abandoned. Otherwise there is too much volatility in the game: say I am about to capture somebody's king and they quit instead: now I don't get their land and troops, rather I have to fight against them. Enough of these types of swings, and the game is swung towards the lucky ones in a volatile way.
Yeah, I think leavers should retain their capital and still be capturable. Plenty of people leave right before they lose; the game seems to give you a few grace turns but it's often not enough.
Such a genius move, surprising nobody saw it coming. Just think: he will already have access to a large base of customer's roofs (which SolarCity effectively owns) --- 1 million by 2018.
Then, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to an on-demand, fully-cached, mesh network. They're probably not far from being able to provide internet service to all SolarCity customers, just a bit of a modification to the contract.
That is simply brilliant. Faux bricks which connect together to create a phased array antenna that create a mesh network between connected homes. Now if it was low enough power to run on the heat differential between the flue gases and the ambient air I would know I was in the future.
The canonical example of harvesting the heat differential is the biolite stove[1] it uses a thermoelectric generator[2] to provide up to 4 watts (peak) of power.
I'm on beer fuel atm and have only read it briefly, but isn't that pure, free energy? With a solid state device. Why do we not have some of these things around our fridge etc.
Because if it generates energy from your fridge it means you deeply failed at insulating your fridge, and you have to spend several times as much energy putting the cold back inside.
In most places you can use significantly more efficient devices to turn heat differences into electricity.
I think he is more talking about the heat that the fridge outputs to cool the inside, which is likely warmer than the ambient temperature in the room. Just a guess.
I was; the fridge outputs quite a bit of heat, good for raising seedlings on top of. But I would imagine the expenses involved in this stuff wouldn't make it sensible for a fridge (I don't think they draw that much power anyway).
I just had never heard you could harness this, it's cool.
Edit: Bit late to the party, 1821. Bit of catching up to do.
Okay, then that means you're ventilating the output heat poorly. If there is a significant difference in temperature between the coils and the room, you're spending more power than you need to when you pump heat out of the fridge. Adding fins or fans would save you more power than you could ever recover.
Somewhere on the fridge is a bunch of metal that heats up when it's working. If that gets particularly hot, then you have the potential to save power. You could add more surface area or have low-power fans blow air across it. That would make the actual fridge unit be more efficient. The amount of electricity you would save is much more than the amount you could harvest. Any device that harvests power would also impede the efficiency more and make it work even harder.
But either one would be a pretty small amount.
It's fun as a toy, but not much more.
If you want to save power, buy a more efficient fridge. Maybe also get one where the hot part can go outside.
They haven't announced pricing yet, or even when they'll start charging. As far as I know, the SIM isn't really user-removable so once they do start charging, you'll have to pay Tesla.
Monero, even with the addition of RingCT, is vulnerable to transaction graph analysis (intersection attacks) that can de-anonymize users.
Your comment is highly misleading. RingCT solves 4 of the 5 remaining, known, privacy vulnerabilities in Monero ## The last remaining vulnerability has to do with transactions made with very little turnover, i.e. an amount is received and then immediately spent again. The privacy is stronger as the amounts are held in the wallet for longer.
Monero is useable on a magnitude greater scale in 2017, and a full node can be run with small CPU and memory. Zcash on the other hand requires minutes to send anonymouse transactions.
In other words, Zcash provides 100% privacy at the expense of scalability while Monero provides privacy approaching 100 percent as variable with time.
You misread my comment. There _is_ an oustanding privacy issue in Monero, one that is often overlooked by its proponents. Transactions involving the same individuals will appear closer together in the transaction graph, and this remains the case so long as Monero's transactions have so few mixins.
My favorite example of anonymity is Richard Stallman's description of an anonymous currency: you should be able to pay a publisher for every article you read on their website, without them being able to associate the payments.
You can do that with Monero right now (within a cryptographically negligible, but plausibly deniable, risk) and it doesn't require crazy unreliable cryptography, a (badly done) trusted setup, or 8gb+ of RAM and 60 seconds on a Xeon.
The "trusted setup" is a permanent unfixable security hole. While it's partially secure in theory, it goes against the core value of Bitcoin and cryptography where you trust he math and not some person. It will be a constant cloud over Zcash. (I still see great academic value on the work behind Zcash with zkSNARKs, but as a cryptocurrency at the current state it's way too risky for real use)
Agda is a programming language where "each program in it must terminate and all possible patterns must be matched. Without this feature, the logic behind the language becomes inconsistent, and it becomes possible to prove arbitrary statements."
Since all programs terminate, reasoning about arbitrary properties about said programs becomes decidable.
Thanks for the pointer. It appears that proof assistants [0], like Aqda as you mentioned and one of its influences Coq [1], have the properties I were describing and indeed are examples of total functional programming [2].
For example, a
typical C program to compute the sum of a list of numbers includes three kinds of parentheses and three
kinds of assignment operators in five lines of code
Let me take the opportunity to plug a new language which I have spent the last 5 months designing: github.com/jbodeen/ava
An ava solution -- 9 lines of code, and 1 set of parentheses -- would look like this:
let rec sum list =
let are_we_at_the_end = 0 in
let take_a_number_and_the_rest_of_the_list n list =
add n ( sum list )
in
list
are_we_at_the_end
take_a_number_and_the_rest_of_the_list
in
Maybe we need to zoom out of ancient languages into more intuitive paradigms if programming is to become easier for more people to access
Could you elaborate on how this is more understandable to a novice than the typical C program? My guess is that neither is immediately understandable, and that the C program is clearer to someone experienced.
edit: blargh... sorry @simoncion, I didn't see your reply. It apparently takes me longer than 14min to type that out on my phone without typos + proper spaces to treat it like code :-)
No worries. It's astonishing how absolutely awful on-screen phone keyboards still are for doing anything more involved than writing a brief human-language message.
That's like a big chunk of my point. :) Phone/tablet keyboards really suck for anything other than short human-language text entry. You wanna write a five-page paper? A code snippet to demonstrate a problem? Forget about it.
It's astonishing that these devices have been around for at least seven years and their packed-in keyboards still fail at these tasks.
Ethereum could quickly outdate itself by defining a fixed language. How will the language adapt? Very slowly by consensus if Ethereum hopes to become a large market player.
Bitcoin could be easily made Turing complete. If each transaction can store 80 bytes of information, then one could use 48 bytes to store code and the remaining 32 bytes to refer to another transaction storing the next block of code and thus chain together code. Unless I am missing something, a new currency is simply unnecessary, and will always be at a second-mover disadvantage.
Soon, I am sure a prototype of what I described will be released on bitcoin thus obscuring Ethereum. A solid use-case for distributed computing would be distributed HTTP delivery. If ethereum could offer a product for decentralized web-hosting, then I would buy into their product, but until then the whole situation is just vaporware to me.
It offers a more powerful scripting language to define contracts.
> Ethereum could quickly outdate itself by defining a fixed language.
If offers a "bytecode" type language which can be created by compiling contracts in >=2 languages already. Bitcoin currently lets you define contracts in the equivalent of assembly code, with no higher level languages available. So this statment seems to apply more to Bitcoin than Ethereum.
> Bitcoin could be easily made Turing complete.
Bitcoin developers can't even agree to a simple block size increase. What makes you think they would be able to do something as complex as adding turing-complete scripting capabilities?
> Unless I am missing something, a new currency is simply unnecessary.
Since bitcoin does not support 2-way pegged sidechains yet, it's not possible to launch a new blockchain without launching a new currency to power that blockchain. Besides, you need a way to reward the miners.
> Soon, I am sure a prototype of what I described will be released on bitcion thus obscuring Ethereum.
That's basically what Rootstock[0] is supposed to be. Although at present, it seems to be vaporware.
A year ago I used to have a similar viewpoint to you, that Bitcoin had such a massive first mover advantage and network effects that it would remain the dominant public blockchain, and that even as new inventions appeared, they would be backported to bitcoin. But over the past 6 months I've realized how useless Bitcoin is without a genuine respected leader/BDFL, and now think that without a leader it's doomed to design by committee and stalemate on key decisions, which leaves the playing field wide open for competitors like Ethereum.
Ethereum's features with Turing-completeness and all the things it can do are great, but everyone is missing the point that not all of that is needed. What is needed is simple: people who act professionally, who get things done, and a network that is not artificially limited.
Litecoin could have taken on this role even more easily than Ethereum, or Dogecoin, or any of the other coins - but they refused to increase their blocksizes when they had the chance. Ethereum is coming of age now partially due to its Homestead release, but also due to the critical bitcoin halving event in July that is going to throw cryptocurrency into chaos.
People are missing the point - Ethereum isn't popular because it is better than bitcoin. It's popular because it has good people in charge. In that way, Mike Hearn is right.
Bitcoin's problem is not a lack of a leader, it's problem is that the leader is Gregory Maxwell at Blockstream and he's a terrible decision maker. Blockstream is the source of the refusal to bump the block size.
Indeed, the block size debate did not stalemate. It resulted in the small blockists winning, due to the much more aggressive tactics they used (e.g. hiring a bunch of developers then asserting they'd all quit forever if the block size were changed).
I've noticed a "know-nothing" strategy recently adopted by blockchain core - basically, the ideas is that community members claim that everyone who isn't part of core development is naive and has no valid position in debating the future of bitcoin. These users speak with pride about leaving social communities because of their ignorance. It reminds me a lot of the Fox news listeners who deride world media as liars.
Here's an example of the proud know-nothingness. The interesting part begins at 17:30. The speaker, Julia Tourianski, makes a fair attack against Mike Hearn for his departure, but then she goes on to point out that developers are faced with low morale because the community doesn't support their work. The conversation then moves to leaving Reddit and other media because "the trolls" (presumably persons who are in favor of a blocksize increase) have taken over.
Bitcoin's technical problems are that it fundamentally does not scale. If each node has to verify all transactions that is not sustainable in the long term. Hal Finney knew this way back: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... "Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient."
It is a myth that Bitcoin requires every node to validate all transactions in the long term. That's why the white paper explains the need for spv clients.
Moreover it a red herring to assert that Bitcoin has to scale to support every single financial transaction in the world just like it would be a red herring to attack the architecture of the Internet because it cannot scale today to include every form of communication we perform today.
Red herring/ strawman / Nirvana arguments are the defense for the entire small block position. Bitcoin, like every other information technology, does not need to meet every need today. It simply needs
1. Sufficient free capacity to encourage growth, and
Seem like you don't see the x^n argument. It should be obvious. Satoshi/Hal Finney were well aware of this, see the link. This has nothing to do with SPV. Producing blocks is what's important.
True, but we are not there yet. Bitcoin can probably scale 20x times without a problem. That would be 20 times lower transaction fees and 20 times more people using it.
Most large blockers are running businesses that depend on no/low fees, plus the reddit mob that goes with whatever argument sounds most conspiratorial (aka Blockstream sabotaging Bitcoin for sidechains).
Thanks for the article. But I don't see where it says that Bitcoin can't scale 20x without decentralization problems.
I see that "the block size should not exceed 4MB for X=90%; and 38MB for X=50%", but I don't think that 50% reduction of number of nodes would be a serious decentralization problem (we've seen a similar reduction already due to the implementation of SPV clients).
Mining centralization could be a bigger problem, but with headers-first mining the block size wouldn't contribute to it.
Also the authors of the article assume the use of Bitcoin’s current peer-to-peer overlay network, that can be drastically optimized.
I've chosen 20x because Gavin had conducted 20Mb tests more than a year ago, before many optimizations took place.
There is nothing bad in the low fees. Low fees is the marketing strategy to boost the usage of Bitcoin and create the large enough ecosystem. Miners are being subsidised by bitcoin holders for a reason.
Larger the blocks while preserving a reasonable degree of decentralization -> lower the fees per transaction -> more people use Bitcoin -> more valuable the bitcoin ecosystem is -> higher the price of bitcoin -> mining is more profitable -> stable and secure infrastructure for the new global economy.
"If each node has to verify all transactions that is not sustainable in the long term."
It is sustainable, but only for certain amount of transactions. Even if the block size limit stays at 1MB, I'm pretty sure some group of people/organizations will keep using bitcoin for something. Those who are not happy with it will move elsewhere, but there is so much infrastructure/tools/etc for bitcoin already, that many have will hard time switching to something new.
Sorry, I am not sure Bitcoin can be a niche currency. It needs to be big enough to survive.
If most people prefer to use other crypto instead then Bitcoin may fall into a death spiral:
...lower the demand for bitcoins -> lower the price of bitcoin AND lower amount of bitcoin transactions -> less profitable the mining -> less secure the network -> lower the demand for bitcoins....
So many new users just to attack you Mike. And all the buttcoin trolls suddenly became small blockers. Evidence of Blockstream hiring shills continues to grow.
Mike, the entire drama is ridiculous. However, you've turned your back on BTC because XT was rejected to go and work for R3 to put our tech back into the hands of the people we wanted to get away from. If BTC and everything that "could" come with it was so important to you then you should have stayed and fought the fight. Instead you decided to join R3,so let go and move on.
Blockstream is developing bitcoin into a bank settlement network (that the banks won't use). Maybe you should focus your ire there, instead of on the guy who has actually pushed open source and consumer-grade P2P payment systems miles forward.
> and now think that without a leader it's doomed to design by committee and stalemate on key decisions
As a regular in the cryptocurrency world, it's evident that no matter what you do, someone is going to find a reason to criticize you. One day these people are criticising Bitcoin for being run by a cabal of closely knit developers, the next you see this guy saying Bitcoin doesn't have a leader and is instead being designed by an apparently leaderless committee. They seem to alter their concerns and their approach to criticising Bitcoin depending on which way the wind is blowing.
BTW, I'm going to assume something and you should too: adrianmacneil here is almost assuredly long ETH. He probably albeit less assuredly so doesn't own any BTC. In any case you can assume I have the opposite portfolio.
First and foremost, Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn't possibly be more different. Bitcoin is a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin places a higher value on securing the cash. It places tamper resistance above all else, and generally takes no chances on that. That's a feature, not a bug.
Because if that core unit fails, then the entire cash system collapses. You can't exactly have a global currency that fails mid voyage. Modern financial systems don't do that very often and neither should Bitcoin.
Conversely, Ethereum is a smart contracts platform through and through. It has 15 second block times. It has its own VM. This VM has had critical vulnerabilities in the recent past, and is less than 1 year into production.
Notice how Bitcoin could never be about smart contracts like Ethereum does, at its core, since Bitcoin could only do that by taking on existential risk?
However, that doesn't mean Bitcoin can't better manage its risk by making what is essentially a "unikernel" for Ethereum functionality on top of the Bitcoin network. Sure it won't be totally perfect, but it will do everything Ethereum does, without exception, and will do so without compromising the core of Bitcoin's network, when doing so would jeopardize the cash system.
And this is what the poster I'm responding to completely misses when he says:
> [Ethereum] offers a "bytecode" type language which can be created by compiling contracts in >=2 languages already. Bitcoin currently lets you define contracts in the equivalent of assembly code, with no higher level languages available. So this statment seems to apply more to Bitcoin than Ethereum.
The point is, once you have the unikernel model down, who cares if it's Ethereum? Ethereum's VM is very first generational, highly unproven, highly unstable, has God knows how many vulnerabilities not to mention competitors who develop competing languages and competing VMs. We don't want to be in that business. We want to be in the business of running the best of it as a unikernel without even remotely jeopardizing the entire system all at once, though I understand Ethereum kind of had to do that in order to raise money. Turns out if you don't raise a bunch of money from a bunch of investors, you don't get people to voluntarily promote you on HN and Reddit.
> That's basically what Rootstock[0] is supposed to be. Although at present, it seems to be vaporware.
Speaking of Ethereum promoters, they do have a knack for reminding you how the unikernels of cryptocurrency will surely never exist. Nothing to see here.
You raise good points. I think one of the reasons why the conversations surrounding cryptocurrencies are disproportionally emotional is that everybody is long something and inevitably biased because of it.
Also, I agree that comparing BTC and ETH is bogus, they share nothing more than a blockchain but have completely different goals and governance structures, ETH being more like a traditional startup.
In a world were most people haven't heard of blockchains or distrust them, 'competing' with other blockchains is just silly (nobody is really competing anyway, except for mindshare on forums).
Now, disclaimer, I am long ETH, though not by much. Cool sci-fi stories and evangelism aside, I think it's like other startups so it should face the same risk of ruin, which is roughly 90%. So in that sense we might even agree, except I feel like this "very first generational, highly unproven, highly unstable" might turn into something.
> once you have the unikernel model down, who cares if it's Ethereum?
That's a very technical argument, but I'm not at all convinced that the world will adopt a technically superior solution, especially if it is late to the game. Without momentum behind it, it might not even be superior for long. So if there is any application for blockchain VMs, it will probably run on the EVM, all else being equal.
>You raise good points. I think one of the reasons why the conversations surrounding cryptocurrencies are disproportionally emotional is that everybody is long something and inevitably biased because of it.
These tokens ruin a lot of the incentives that makes open source software work. They attract non-technical people and ideologues. The whole thing is a mess.
Bitcoin and Ethereum investors who put a few thousands of their own money on the line years ago have seen it rocket up in value into a considerable fortune.
Naturally, to the extent an investment makes you "rich", the investment occupies a proportionately larger share of your net worth. And to the extent it's a major component of your net worth, especially if your net worth allows for you to retire early, this makes for a situation where you will justify doing and saying anything and everything possible to promote your own interests, which are now dominated by, in our case Bitcoin or Ethereum.
This is why distinguished readers can practically see the greed pouring out of people's eye balls as they discuss these "technologies". Pro tip: call it a "technology" when you're invested in it, but call it an "investment" when you're not.
As you've noted, this gets incredibly frustrating to deal with in the cryptocurrency world. Not just because it applies to so many people, but because cryptocurrency itself is all just a confidence game of trying to get people to buy into a particular unit of account.
For example, I doubt if any of the Ethereum people actually use smart contracts, like ever. They're only using that as an angle to poach investment capital off Bitcoin. We all can see this is true because no one is making any money on "smart contracts". Ironically, the only people who have ever made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by selling other people on the idea of smart contracts. Buy smart contracts now!
You seem to have pretty reasonable and moderate opinions, which I respect. And yes, for the record I do currently own a decent number of Ether (because I believe in the project), and I still own a decent (but lesser amount) of Bitcoin (I certainly haven't given up on it completely).
The main point of my post was responding to Bitcoin evangelism with counter arguments, so I guess it did come across a little fanboyish. I don't disagree that it would be nice if Bitcoin could become a sort of "layer 1" in the blockchain space, with smart contracts built on top of it using additional protocols (and I believed for the past couple years that this was the most likely outcome for Bitcoin).
The main problem I now have with this model is that there are still missing features in this layer 1 which Bitcoin needs to support before decent solutions can be built on top of it (e.g. 2-way pegged sidechains, which require at least a couple of new opcodes). Every time Bitcoin wants to support a new use case, it requires someone to submit a BIP, months of development work, debating, and a soft fork to implement. For an example, see the recent OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY soft fork. This is not the sort of thing which can be built in layer 2 - it needs to be supported by the underlying blockchain, specifically so that people can build other layer 2 solutions on top of it. This is just one of many features - every few weeks someone suggests a new opcode on the bitcoin mailing list (and they often get shot down). This is why I originally got excited about Ethereum - while the "turing complete" badge is a bit of a buzzword, they really have solved the problem of creating a generic blockchain which can have anything else built on top of it.
Now, this is not to say that Ethereum is entirely without risk. For sure, Bitcoin is a more secure network, and definitely a better place to park your money if you are looking for long term stability. Bitcoin is also optimizing for stability and decentralization over adding shiny new features, which is simply different priorities and not at all a bad thing. Ethereum still have a long road ahead of them, both with attempting to shift a live blockchain to proof of stake, and with scaling (which will probably be even harder than the challenges Bitcoin is currently facing). But overall I find the project to be a very interesting and exciting development in the blockchain space.
I find it noteworthy that crypto-currencies are treated as investments and 'bets' which would seems to imply instability or a design feature of fluctuating value.
Almost as if a primary motive behind designing crypto "currency" protocols is not a stable value exchange medium, but rather instead an investment system for early adopters to exploit late adopter buyers?
"Maker is a DAO based on the Ethereum blockchain, where it maintains the infrastructure for the Dai - a cryptocurrency that uses smart contract-enforced monetary policy to create price stability.
The Dai enables Ethereum users to transact with smart contracts and applications on the Ethereum blockchain without having to deal with the volatility that is associated with traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It also functions as a decentralized savings account as it is long term deflationary, resulting in slow and steady capital gains.
Maker is able to maintain the price stability of the Dai through the Dai Credit System, which backs the Dai with collateral stored in Ethereum smart contracts, while simultaneously functioning as an internet-based, p2p credit market that commoditizes credit by allowing anyone with valid collateral to take out loans that have low transaction costs and no middle man fees."
"they really have solved the problem of creating a generic blockchain which can have anything else built on top of it."
No, actually they haven't. Try and explain how a distributed system should be Turing complete in a scientific paper and you'd notice its not possible. Eventually this will be discovered and this blockchain will implode. The centralised team doesn't even claim that the chain will last - they want to migrate to PoS.
I don't understand what you are saying is impossible about this.
Are you just saying "try it and be really careful about it and you will see that it is impossible"? Because I don't see why that claim should be convincing without, saying why?
huh? Computers on the Internet don't coordinate like nodes in a P2P blockchain. Bitcoin's script is limited to a simple stack language for a very good reason.
A simple increase from 1MB blocks as proposed in 2010 by the software's creator is treated by obstructionists like Greg Maxwell as "theft" and a violation of social contract and blocked for six years.
Arguing about which blockchain will be used for computation is like arguing about PowerPC outcompeting Intel chips: it only really matters to people with a financial stake in the outcome. Don't get so distracted by speculation that you overlook that as a programmer, this technology allows you to build powerful new kinds of software.
I have used it and it has many many limitations. A lot of the people coming up with random ideas + a blockchain don't realize that a lot of those ideas would not be improved by adding a blockchain.
Can someone explain why chaining code together on the block chain is useful? I have heard this idea before but never seen an explanation of its utility.
I think it’s most logically a geo-stationary satellite, so wherever launches those might have more information about who might have a radio transmitter or two up there.