Etherium reveals Mist (eBoner alert)

[Josh F]

I've been tracking the progress of Etherium for a little while now.  They just released this video today explaining how users will be able to browse their decentralized apps.

 

This is bitcoin 2.0 at its finest, the biggest step since the blockchain in the development of decentralized and secure financial tools.  Anything from marriage to escrow to democracy to DROs to decentralizing your entire business will soon be at the world's fingertips in something as simple as browsing a website.  

 

 

If you're prone to crypto-boners like I am, this is NSFW

 

 

For the uninitiated I can give you a general analogy to understand Etherium.  If you think about email, SMTP, its basic functions are somewhat limited to send and receive.  Not unlike bitcoin itself, these functions were ground breaking and yet not the final destination of the internet.  Enter: websites!  Websites are programs running on centralized servers, somewhere out there in the world.  Instead of sending and receiving data between two users, this created the 'web' we think of today full of intricate tools for exploration and computation and visualization.  Etherium is the web of the crypto-world, it allows decentralized hosted apps (dapps or contracts) which include secure and unique ways of managing resources (namely money, but not exclusively).  

 

Etherium is the culmination of all the bitcoin side projects, like colorcoin, mastercoin, idcoin, etc.  It is a blockchain with the ability to program nearly anything into it.  Marriage contracts, stock exchanges, escrows, wills, reputation systems, voting, etc.  Charities can guantee how their money is spent.  Divorce can be accomplished without courts and lawyers with a few simple clicks based entirely on terms arranged by the couple.  Time delay inheritances, peer to peer gambling, even decentralized cloud storage and processing.  Something like dropbox can be created with less than 30 lines of code.  Make your own digital currency with less than 5 lines.  Set up business accounts with security preventing and limiting and insuring particular transactions.  Don't want the CEO to steal the pension money?  Lock it.  Divide backups for your accounts by dividing your key and sending it out to 5 friends, 3 of which are required to repair the account.  Its.... amazing stuff.  Enjoy!

[dsayers]

It is a blockchain with the ability to program nearly anything into it.

 

Forgive me if this isn't the place to make such an inquiry, but this sparked something I've wondered for some time now.

 

I don't fully understand Bitcoin myself despite numerous attempts to grasp the basics. What stops the blockchain from bloating ad infinitum? Didn't it grow in size at rates larger than anticipated due to unanticipated popularity? And this is just while tracking money; Wouldn't the inclusion of contracts, etc exacerbate this issue exponentially?

 

Has anybody designed a way to truncate the blockchain every so often i.e. "as of X, this is the state of the blockchain and everything before it is culled for the sake of size." If so, what if somebody wanted certain records to persist? If such a mechanism was incorporated, what would stop people from flagging every single transaction as persistent?

[Josh F]

Yeah, LTC figured out a way to reduce it which is mimicked by most alt coins, though BTC does have a bloating issue.  Etherium does not require its miners to download an entire blockchain history and has something to keep it down in size.  The contracts themselves are not hosted on everyone's computer, that would be extraordinarily redundant. Each contract is split into pieces, say 10 pieces, of which 6 are required to recover the entirety of the contract.  Each 10 person is unaware what they have, incapable of piecing it together themselves, yet finically incentivized to host the contract.  

 

Also there is a factor to reduce bloating in that all operations within Etherium cost money, so it isn't free to host a contract and it isn't free to run a contract.  If a contract was a huge file it would cost a chunk of change to access it.  I'm not 100% certain, but in the case of using Etherium as cloud storage, the files are hosted on people's computers and the contract is only about 20 or 30 lines of code required to access those files on other people's computers.  Similar to torrents.  

[Josh F]

oh, just want to add, I also think but I'm not completely certain that Etherium works with Bitcoin as well.  

[Josh F]

Quick Bump:  This software is potentially the culmination in the goals and promises of bitcoin to truly displace the financial control by the politically powerful, end war, provide equality to things like divorce, the rise of DROs and other types of organizations aimed at replacing state functions, etc.

 

This deserves everyone's attention, sincerely it might be a huge solution to a wide list of problems discussed in this community.  

[luxfelix]

Quick Bump:  This software is potentially the culmination in the goals and promises of bitcoin to truly displace the financial control by the politically powerful, end war, provide equality to things like divorce, the rise of DROs and other types of organizations aimed at replacing state functions, etc.

 

This deserves everyone's attention, sincerely it might be a huge solution to a wide list of problems discussed in this community.  

 

In tandem with peaceful parenting of course. 

[Josh F]

Sure.  Though, have you read Lloyd DeMause's Origins of War, its in the book store on this site.  I think he makes an interesting point, not one unsimilar from Marx, which is that culture and morals and everything else are a byproduct of the economic realities we exist in.  Industrialism ended infanticide, for example.  I think that a liberated economy will produce more moral and cultural improvements.

[luxfelix]

I've not read it yet.

 

Is it a chicken-and-egg question then?

[Josh F]

Well, I had a marxist teacher explain it to me this way.  Eskimos (Innuit) have some 40 words for different snow, but nothing about the stock market in their language.  This is because language is part of the superstructure, which includes anything from culture to language, etc.  They are piled upon the Base, which is the economic relationships.  Ancient Egyptian language and culture and art is based around their economic realities as a Master-Slave economy.  

 

Pyramids, for example, are their most famous architecture and its only built for the rulers and by the slaves.  On the other hand, our largest buildings in any city center are our banks.  But architecture in our culture isn't limited there, as we have famous home designers for the upper-middle class all the way to interesting eco-pods and such for low income housing.

 

Similarly, our morality is structured on top of an economic base.  We replaced slavery with electricity, unlike the Romans for example, whose labor saving devices were other humans.  Who needs a faucet in the kitchen when your slaves fetch the water for you.  Working conditions have made it possible for women to work and for children to not have to work.

 

So in this line of thinking, and forget Marxism for a bit, but perhaps abundance of goods and opportunities through a free market is what will propel people into peaceful parenting, and for that matter what has already begun to make peaceful parenting possible.  

[luxfelix]

That makes sense, and abundance would certainly remove much theft due to scarcity; in addition, I'm guessing it can also work the other way around.

 

(and even better if both are done together  )

[Josh F]

Yeah it almost falls into that chicken and egg scenario sometimes, especially the degree to which an inventor creates something with the intention of disrupting a current system, but even this can backfire.  I'm not certain of the history, but I was told Eli Witney invented the cotton gin with the goal of reducing slavery, when in fact it made cotton so cheap it became more popular and actually had the opposite effect.  

 

I don't think theft is a response to scarcity, but likely a producer of it... at least more often than not.  I think that things like peaceful parenting were a byproduct of post-industrialism and can only spread around the world when the economic conditions don't necessitate violent parenting.  Maybe slavery was ended in the west because we had technology like steam engines and suddenly could afford the moral option.

[luxfelix]

Relevant Bitcoin Awesomeness: 

 

http://harmonicjunction.com/sending-bitcoin-transactions-via-sound-waves/