wiki

Overall description: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa... Here's a Python client: https://github.com/ethereum/pyethereum

Great point. I'm assuming the appropriate counter measures would be a constitution, separation of powers, etc. For arguments sake, your (christian fundamentalist) concerns would eventually be mitigated through education/scientific literacy - a processes which has been naturally occurring one funeral at a time. This is in contrast to the existing tyranny of the minority/corporate interests in which self correction doesn't seem to exist. I posted this link after reading the Ethereum white paper: (https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...) It mentions 'liquid democracy' in the context of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Ideally, you'd be able to delegate or set up a proxy to vote on your behalf on specific issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy Generally speaking, our underlying political str

Perhaps this centralized non-profit could exist as a DAO[1] on something like Ethereum. Very hard to shut down a decentralized autonomous "central" bank who's purpose is to issue units of cryptocurrency that is pegged to units of traditional currency. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...

Completely agree. Judging from the technical description [1] and the most recent version of the draft white paper [2] alone, I think the project would benefit greatly from more substantial input and expertise from the academic cryptography community. I'm afraid they are spending a lot of effort cargo-culting on the wrong things, while missing where the real challenge lies: How to deal with the inevitable orders-of-magnitude increase in transaction size/complexity while preserving consensus-based distributed verification. To be more precise: The metered computation mechanism is a very clever solution for dealing with unrestricted computation and unbounded data storage, but their proposed solution does not convincingly address the inevitable increase in space required. Hand-waving about greedy subtree verification without actual numbers/sce

This version contains some mistakes and approximations. For a more up-to-date paper you should take a look at the White paper v2 draft [1]. A more formal and technical description is presented in the Yellow paper (also draft) [2]. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whitepaper-2-Draft [2] http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf

Actually, we kind of discovered that, unless we radically cripple our model (eg. by removing the first-class-citizen property) Turing-completeness is basically irrelevant either way. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whitepaper-2-Draft#com... I basically just chose to keep it in there because it makes a few contract types easier.

They propose fixed mandatory fees. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa... Nodes can't be compensated for this— only the single miner who chose to burden the chain with the contract. Everyone else has to go along for the ride (or skip verifying it and hope that the anonymous miner wasn't lying). This is one of the reasons Bitcoin has very purposefully eschewed contracts which are computationally expensive to execute. You can almost always perform a computationally expensive contract externally to the system and bind it with a hashlock or multisig, in any case. The inability of the a consensus system to perform IO to outside world usually demands those techniques in any case.

Wait, doesn't Bitcoin already have a scripting language baked in? And it is disabled on most clients to avoid trolling and DoS attacks. EDIT: It is addressed on the white paper: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...

There was some confusion on another HN thread[1] a few days ago as to what Ethereum actually is or is aiming to solve. This visual contract builder is a really cool demo of what's possible with Ethereum. For more read the whitepaper: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa... For some mind-bending implications of what might be in store with this technology, see the blog post on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations: http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/24/daos-are-not-scary-part-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492731

I found its wiki a clearer but longer version: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa... In short, it is a proposal for a framework/protocol/platform/you-name-it sort of like BitCoin with more feature.

Maybe this will help [1]. I didn't understand the site either but I kind of stumbled on to 'blockchain for contracts' (no idea whether that's right or wrong). In any case it seems like there are a lot of people in Ethereum meetup groups around the world [2], so this isn't a new thing. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa... [2] http://www.meetup.com/find/?allMeetups=false&keywords=Ethere...

One of the best presentations on cryptocurrency ever. Full notes here: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Problems