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Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
- waterlesscloud 13y agoThe page doesn't say who is behind it, but the wiki is edited by user "vbuterin". So maybe it's Vitalik Buterin, one of the more interesting cryptocurrency thinkers out there. Hmm. http://about.me/vitalik_buterin http://about.me/vitalik_buterin
- knapp 13y agoAlso, the subreddit /r/ethereum is modded by and features a welcome post by "vbuterin".
- bendoernberg 13y agoThis is indeed Vitalik's project, you can read the whitepaper on his website: http://vitalik.ca/ethereum.html http://vitalik.ca/ethereum.html
- cornellwright 13y agoMy first thought was why would one want their currency to be Turing-complete? It's actually a cool concept though. Being able to have your money make decisions opens all kinds of possibilities.
- kordless 13y agoThis allows for the implementation of a completely distributed trading platform.
- nullc 13y agoNo it doesn't. Or rather— it's not necessary or sufficient: you can already trade distributed cryptocoins, and no amount of cryptocoin magic can completely distribute USD or other non-cryptocoin assets because their differential counterparty risk makes every promise different.
- kordless 13y agoYou need a central agency ATM for trading coin. Those guys have to run wallets and do the transactions in non-trusted space. This skips that.
- kordless 13y ago> 6) A full-scale on-chain stock market. Prediction markets are also easy to implement as a trivial consequence." Line 283 of http://pastebin.com/NCGRv74u http://pastebin.com/NCGRv74u
- cube_yellow 13y agoNote that Bitcoin is purposefully not turing complete. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/17258/turing-completeness-of-bitcoin-script http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/17258/turing-comp...
- est 13y agohttps://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script wiki here
- eurleif 13y agoFirst paragraph: >It is purposefully not Turing-complete, with no loops.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 13y agoI don't really see any reason why it couldn't be Turing complete, as long as it was completely deterministic (no "rand()" etc) and the specification included a maximum number of operations (which Bitcoin's Script already does) What am I missing? Is the idea that without loops the transaction size can be used to estimate the computation required without actually performing it, and thus the appropriately sized transaction fee required?
- grondilu 13y agoNakamoto designed script to be non-Turing complete from the very beginning (it was mentioned in his white paper). I suspect it was for security reasons. You don't want arbitrary complex code running on miners machine. At the very least, it could obstruct the system.
- mike_hearn 13y agoScript is not mentioned at all in the Bitcoin white paper. Perhaps you are thinking of a comment he made elsewhere. Bear in mind that in the Bitcoin design it's not just miners who have to run scripts, it's all nodes, yet fees accrue only to the miners. Bitcoin does use fees to try and make computationally expensive transactions financially expensive as well, but that's just a basic antiflood mechanism, the fees don't actually get collected by those doing the work.
- pipeep 13y agoI think the clever idea here (IMO) are the fees. An argument against implementing a Turing complete language inside Bitcoin or an Altcoin might be that it's hard to determine when execution should end. The fees allow arbitrarily complex constructs without any hard cap, while preventing abuse.
- maaku 13y agoMaybe, but not the way its implemented here. The fee needs to go to all the nodes which perform the validation, not to the miners.
- nullc 13y agoExcept it pays the wrong people. In Bitcoin, at least, miners are kept honest by other people running nodes that limit what miners can do. In this protocol the validation would become very expensive but only the miners are paid. This sounds like trouble.
- fragsworth 13y agoDon't all the miners have to run the entire program, so they are validating each other?
- maaku 13y agoNo, the mine pool operator has to, but no more than once to cover every miner in his pool. To draw a comparison to bitcoin, there might only be a dozen or so pool entities which receive nearly all of the subsidy and transaction fees, but thousands of non-mining full nodes.
- jaekwon 13y agoIs there a dedicated forum or mailing list for further discussion?
- nadaviv 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/ http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/
- aabalkan 13y agoSite is down. How do they manage to go down with probably static content, I have no idea.
- brotchie 13y agoWith the availability of free CDNs (CloudFlare setup is 30 seconds max) I'm not sure why static sites have issues with bandwidth these days...
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- hippich 13y agocloudflare do not cache html/php/etc stuff and as a result all these request still going to the hosting server, sometimes killing it.
- gottagetmac 13y agoHmm. Maybe he took it down? Here's a story about him: http://fusion.net/modern_life/story/ethereum-bitcoin-currency-created-19-year-372034 http://fusion.net/modern_life/story/ethereum-bitcoin-currenc...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jaekwon 13y agoI don't understand who does all the turing complete contract computation. Presumably the miners, but they're paid to do some useless proof-of-work work, not the turning complete computation of the contract.
- maaku 13y agoThe fee goes to the miner who happens to find the containing block, yes. But not to the thousands of validating nodes integral to the network. And over time fees are given proportional to hashpower... which doesn't make any kind of sense. The incentives are all messed up.
- jaekwon 13y agoHey, I like your assessment ability. Contact me at jkwon.work@gmail.com, I have an idea I want to share with you.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoAre you the same guy who called the bitcoin peak perfectly in April on irc?
- chm 13y agoHow do I mine them?
- sdfow 13y agoThat's what I'm wondering too. There isn't even a release date
- benhamner 13y agoText content: http://pastebin.com/NCGRv74u http://pastebin.com/NCGRv74u (Saw comments that the site went down and still had it loaded on my machine)
- fragsworth 13y agoI'm still trying to understand how the whole system works. It appears to be groundbreaking but I'm not really sure. The last sentence in the document should catch your interest: "As a result, we have a cryptocurrency protocol whose codebase is very small, and yet which can do anything that any cryptocurrency will ever be able to do."
- redler 13y agoUnless one considers the lack of Turing-completeness to be a feature (as Bitcoin apparently does, pointed out in a few other comments here).
- phreeza 13y agoit mentions the ability to create subcurrencies, so probably you could create a subcurrency that isn't Turing complete?
- kordless 13y agoDenomination is a wei. Weis are tied to compute jobs, basically. It's a distributed computing network/server with built-in trust. Holy shit.
- tsmyrnios 13y agoThey must run their webservers on top of their Turing-Complete cryptocurrency... their site seems to be down.
- ChristianMarks 13y agoThe currency has been hacked.
- fragsworth 13y agoBecause the site is down?
- gatehouse 13y agoTrying to figure out a couple things (from pastebin link): 1. What protection against non-halting? contracts are "funded" upon creation, and by those who issue transactions to the contract. if there are specific fees required by the contract to perform an action, it must be enforced by the contract itself. the cost of computation will eventually exhaust the contract's funding it fails. 2. what are the long-term economics? (i.e. is coin supply unlimited or limited and at what rate of decay) line 90 - planned fundraising period with issuance of 10000 ether per BTC contributed - other coins will be issued so the initial money supply is 15000 times the contributed BTC amount, with 0.25x (i.e. 16.67%) to the founders, same amount to fund the Etherium organization. Division of BTC not specified. - the mining reward will be 1/3 of the initial supply, per year, perpetually (i.e. 1/2 the contributor's reward.) So the money supply increases linearly. 3. if a person's only goal was to use the blockchain to store data, what would be cost per byte, and is there a max rate? line 385 to 399 - A contract is "funded" when it is created, and the computation performed by the contract consumes the funds. - storage of a "data item" in contract memory costs 100x where x = floor(10^21 / floor(difficulty ^ 0.5)) - don't see the limit/cost of data items bound to transactions as per transaction definition on line 133 anyway it takes courage to name a currency after a drug like ether.
- arisAlexis 13y agoyou must be really burned out to think of a drug when you hear the word ether :D
- Geee 13y agoI don't think anyone associates ether with a drug first. From Thesaurus: "ether - the fifth and highest element after air and earth and fire and water; was believed to be the substance composing all heavenly bodies"
- hnolable 13y agoRipple is also working on the same thing and is supposedly releasing them "soon": https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts
- fragsworth 13y agoUnfortunately, Ripple is a worst-case example of pre-mining. I would really hate to see it take off.
- hnolable 13y agoFair enough, although their technology can be appreciated separately from the pre-mine. Anyone can fork it and do a purely mined version.
- kylebrown 13y agoI would rather see an actual, functional product take off (even without miners). The resistance to Ripple just enables an endless series of me-too fundraisers. The ethereum proposal is the most technical yet. Hopefully it sets a new minimum bar in the market for crowd-funded vaporware (I'm highly skeptical of them all).
- Geee 13y agoDoes this mean that arbitrary software can be run in "trusted" way? So that everyone knows for sure what software is being run?
- pmcpinto 13y agoThe site is down for me.
- wyager 13y agoThis is a very cool idea. I think it may have some critical flaws, but even the fact that people are thinking of stuff like this is so cool. Very singularitarian.
- alptrv 13y agoThe site is down for many hours. The cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- rch 13y agoI'm most curious about cryptocurrency algorithms that can be optimally run on FPGAs, but not ASICs or GPUs. Is there anything along those lines floating around already?
- croddin 13y agoI think any chip image that you put on an FPGA will run faster if you turn it into an ASIC. Are you thinking self modifying code?
- rch 13y agoPrecisely. I would expect that the algorithm itself would change over time, with modifications based partially on the state of the network. Edit: maybe the modification strategy could provide some 'proof-of-steak' protections, without burdening the system with excessive early adopter advantages.
- phreeza 13y agoFor what reason are you interested in that? Any such algorithm would have to make use of the re-programmability of FPGAs, since a static FPGA layout can always be turned into an ASIC...
- rch 13y agoMy interest really has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, but I've been reading about dynamic method migration[0] and modular reconfigurability[1] for a long time. I can see how some of my professional work could benefit from 'adaptive computing'[2] trends as well. The algorithm I have in mind would simply be geared towards hardware that I want to own already. [0] http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2004.1303105 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2004.1303105 [1] http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~tbecker/papers/iee06.pdf http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~tbecker/papers/iee06.pdf [2] http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/about/IDC-AdaptiveSC.pdf http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/about/IDC-AdaptiveSC.pdf
- greyman 13y agoWhat's so wrong with ASICs? Litecoin don't have them, and now they are plagued by a botnet who mines on infected PCs.
- nazgulnarsil 13y agoMy understanding was that a balance based model opened up some pretty serious security problems, which is why bitcoin didn't use it. I'm dubious of a new coin as complex as this.
- amluto 13y agoI don't know if the Etherium people are looking for comments, but here are a few. I think that Dagger has serious issues. First, the spec is buggy: the text says that eight bottom-level nodes are hashed together, but the pseudocode only uses four. Second, it does not require 512MB per thread; it requires 512MB of write-once, read-many-times memory, shared by all threads; this property seems to be asking for a rather large ASIC (or a smaller ASIC backed by some multi-port SRAM) to have a huge advantage. Also, what's up with the choice of secp256k1? It's at least less likely to be backdoored by evil choice of parameters than, say, P-256, but there are many better choices out there (e.g. curve25519 or some of its larger variants). Those better variants have the big advantage (especially in this application) of having faster verification operations. (The fastest-to-verify option would probably be plain ol' RSA, but signatures are rather large.)
- Sergio_D_Lerner 13y agoFor the record: Qixcoin.com was the first coin to propose a Touring complete system. It shares 95% of Etherum design.