In case you missed it Ethereum announced its first developer release a week ago. What is Ethereum? According to the video it's a "planetary scale computer powered by blockchain technology." Given the breathlessness, some skepticism is in order, but what if it purports to do on the tin is true?
One good sign, I'd submit, is they recognize that Ethereum does not exist in a regulatory vacuum despite their claims of being a 'trustless' computing platform. On that note, I'd say widespread adoption, of any digital currency, hinges on gov't/central bank[*] backing, viz. fedcoin or cf. any other govcoin.
also btw...
Vapor No More: Ethereum Has Launched - "These are very early days; this is only the first preliminary phase of a multi-stage launch. (One which will theoretically end with an eyebrow-raising transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, for you hardcore cryptocurrency nerds out there.) Even then, performance will be terrible; it will be a decentralized virtual machine, but a painfully slow and weak one compared to the computer on your desk, or even the one in your pocket."
Ethereum Network Continues Thawing Process in Anticipation of the Start of Trading - "The gas limit will not be released immediately, but will grow gradually. Ethereum's gas price is determined by miners and how much of their computing power they are wiling to contribute to the network. If no miners update their client and raise the artificial limit they are willing to accept, then no transactions will be possible on the Ethereum network."
Ethereum Launches Frontier; Ether Mining Begins, Trading to Follow - "The Frontier release is an achievement to be lauded and not taken lightly, but Ethereum still has a long, difficult road ahead. Its technical merits continue to be challenged by different parties, and significant development milestones remain. However, to anyone excited by the promises of decentralized blockchain technology, Ethereum is a project that is surely awe-inspiring and, if successful, to be one of the greatest technological feats since the advent of the Internet."
Some previous hype:
The Utopia Algorithm - "When you buy something on eBay or Airbnb, a cut goes to the company for facilitating the transaction. A handful of programmers are planning to build an online marketplace on Ethereum where buyers and sellers can connect without a third party and their commission."
Come With Us If You Want to Live[*; pdf] - "I prefer thinking about the problem of 'How do we make sure that all people have at least something?' So figuring out how to create a currency that would, say, give everyone on earth one unit per year—to me, that would be the ideal."
More on the possible benefits of Ethereum[*] - "One of the more advanced concepts being touted for a next-generation Bitcoin is the idea of decentralised autonomous corporations (DAC) – companies with no directors. These would follow a pre-programmed business model and are managed entirely by the block chain. In this case the block chain acts as a way for the DAC to store financial accounts and record shareholder votes."
Filtered for the future of the firm - "So, y'know, the idea that a corporation - an organisation for orchestrating human endeavour to deliberate ends - an entity invented in the 1600s, and entity which BY ITS INESCAPABLE LOGIC forces us into mass production, mass consumption, mass media, alienation and the loss of individuality, and all kinds of ugly inhuman shit... the idea that we can re-invent the corporation, and create new forms of it: That's interesting."
The idea that we might create a type of organisation which is empowering, has local value which doesn't mean everything gets coerced into the value of giant companies, is smaller, can be interrogated and critiqued because it's just code, that avoids the priesthoods of capital and law. That a company might be a fuzzy-edged thing, where consumers are owners too... I'd say: Make a little bottle-city company that embodies all of this. Consumer-owners, internal currencies for resource allocation, corporate governance as executable code, doing an actual interesting tractable not-too-ambitious thing. Half co-op, half lifestyle business, half startup. Show what happens when we use capital, instead of capital using us. Do it simply and elegantly. Make a little nest of these companies. Then sit back and see what happens.
Teenage Hacker Transforms Web Into One Giant Bitcoin Network - "Ethereum and other next-gen crypto-platforms paint a very attractive picture of our online future, one where users are in control, not governments or big companies."
There's a blockchain for that[*] - "There's this hopelessly geeky new technology. It's too hard to understand and use. How could it ever break the mass market? Yet developers are excited, venture capital is pouring in, and industry players are taking note. Something big might be happening. That is exactly how the Web looked back in 1994 — right before it exploded. Two decades later, it's beginning to feel like we might be at a similar liminal moment. Our new contender for the Next Big Thing is the blockchain — the baffling yet alluring innovation that underlies the Bitcoin digital currency."
There is a contingent on today's Internet—a minority, perhaps, but influential—who believe that the industry took a wrong turn over the past decade. That an Internet dominated by a few big companies is an unhealthy one. That the centralized-computing paradigm—of privately owned data silos housed in giant server farms that harvest our personal data in order to sell ads—is one that needs to change.
The entrepreneurs, coders and crypto experts leading the blockchain charge — I shall call them blockchainiacs, because they need a name — see this new technology as an antidote, and they are hopped up on dizzying visions of a disrupted future. (One sure sign that this technology has achieved geek-cred critical mass: The tech publisher O'Reilly just announced a new conference on the topic.)
Some more background material:
Understanding the blockchain - "The technology concept behind the blockchain is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is different. For developers, the blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts that needs to be well understood. We need to really understand five key concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts, and proof of work/stake. This computing paradigm is important because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs."
The reality is that the crypto-led computer science revolution is giving us concepts that go way beyond a one-currency type of scenario. Yes, bitcoin is programmable money, but the blockchain is also programmable value, programmable governance, programmable contracts, programmable ownership, programmable trust, programmable assets, etc. And we have barely scratched the surface on these applications. It is too early to tell exactly where the cryptocurrency landscape will end up. Maybe it will be like social media, with four giant platforms, dozens of large players, thousands of other companies as beneficiaries, and of course, millions if not billions of end-users. And that would be a good thing. But to get there, let's not forget the basic golden rule of network effects: without users, there is no network effect.
Blockchain scalability - "Blockchain scalability is an essential set of issues that must be tackled as blockchain technologies become more popular. It's particularly difficult to build for scalability and to maintain backward compatibility. Solutions are being proposed, in academic papers and whitepapers, but we'll have to wait and see what really works."
The Blockchain is the New Database - "It's a bit like your home address. You can publish your home address publicly, but that doesn't give any information about what your home looks like on the inside. You'll need your private key to enter your private home, and since you have claimed that address as yours, no one else can claim a similar address as theirs. The blockchain can also be seen as a software design approach that binds a number of peer computers together that commonly obey the same 'consensus' process for releasing or recording what information they hold, and where all related interactions are verified by cryptography."
Enabling Blockchain Innovations - "Chaum introduced the blind signature, which he used to provide a cryptographic means to prevent linking of the central server's signatures (which represent coins), while still allowing the central server to perform double-spend prevention. The requirement for a central server became the Achilles' heel of digital cash."
Clarifying the Foundational Innovation of the Blockchain[*] - "Let me repeat that again for emphasis: before the blockchain's existence there were *no* systems that were organizationally decentralized, yet logically centralized. This is why Bitcoin is such a foundational technology."
Blockchains as a public and private resource - "In other words, what's still to be determined is whether Ethereum and its ilk would ever be more cost efficient on a per participant basis than just trusting the government to run an equivalent database on the public behalf, funded by good old fashioned tax dollars."
Demystifying incentives in the consensus computer[*] - "Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are a massive network of computational devices that maintain the robutness and correctness of the computation done in the network. Cryptocurrency protocols, including Bitcoin and the more recent Ethereum system, offer an additional feature that allows currency users to specify a "script" or contract which is executed collectively (via a consensus protocol) by the network. This feature can be used for many new applications of cryptocurrencies beyond simple cash transaction. Indeed, several efforts to develop decentralized applications are underway and recent experimental efforts have proposed to port a LinuxOS to such a decentralized computational platform."
In this work, we study the security of computations on a cryptocurrency network. We explain why the correctness of such computations is susceptible to attacks that both waste network resources of honest miners as well as lead to incorrect results. The essence of our arguments stems from a deeper understanding of the incentive-incompatibility of maintaining a correct blockchain. We explain this via a ill-fated choice called the verifier's dilemma, which suggests that rational miners are well-incentivized to accept an unvalidated blockchain as correct, especially in next-generation cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum that are Turing-complete. To explain which classes of computation can be computed securely, we formulate a model of computation we call the consensus verifiability. We propose a solution that reduces the adversary's advantage substantially, thereby achieving near-ideal incentive-compatibility for executing and verifying computation in our consensus verifiability model. We further propose two different but complementary approaches to implement our solution in real cryptocurrency networks like Ethereum. We show the feasibility of such approaches for a set of practical outsourced computation tasks as case studies.
A simple model to make sense of the proliferation of distributed ledger, smart contract and cryptocurrency projects - "I think the two dimensions that help me think about these projects are: [1] 'Who do I trust to maintain a truthful record?'; and [2] 'What do I need the record to be about?' "
Cost? Trust? Something else? What's the killer-app for Block Chain Technology? - "Imagine we're living five or ten years in the future. Perhaps we have a securities block chain that records ownership of all securities in the world. Perhaps we have a derivatives smart contract platform that records (and enforces?) all derivatives contracts? Maybe, even, there will be a single, universal platform of this sort."
Sure – everybody still has a copy of the data locally... but the consensus system ensures that we know the local copy is the same as the copy everywhere else because it is the shared consensus system that is maintaining the ledger. And so we know we're producing our financial statements using the same facts as all the other participants in the industry. Does this mean we no longer need audit? No longer need reconciliations? Obviously not, but perhaps this approach is what is driving some of the interest in this space? But notice: this is just a way of ensuring we agree on the facts: who owns what? Who has agreed to what? We can still run our own valuation algorithms over the top and we could even forward the results to the regulator (who could also, of course, have a copy of the ledger) so they can identify situations where two parties have very different valuations for the same position, which is probably a sign of trouble.
Smart Contracts? - "I reprised my current theme that the world of 'blockchains' is really two distinct worlds – the world of Ripple-like ledgers and the world of Bitcoin-like systems – that happen to be united by a common architecture, the Replicated, Shared Ledger. This unifying concept is based on the idea that each participant has their own copy of the entire ledger – and they trust the 'system' – whatever system that is – to ensure their copy is kept in sync with everybody else's. The differences are about what the ledger records and how it is secured."
Broadly speaking, Ripple-like systems are focused on the representation of "off-system" assets and are secured by identifiable entities. Systems like Ripple, Hyperledger and Eris are broadly in this world, I think. The security model of these systems is based on knowing who the actors are: if somebody misbehaves, we can punish them because we know who they are! Bitcoin-like systems are more focused on "on-system" assets and are secured by an anonymous pool of actors. Bitcoin and Ethereum are broadly in this space, I think. The security model here is based more on game-theoretic analyses of incentive structures: the goal is to make it overwhelmingly in the actors' financial interests to do the "right" thing... Bitcoin-like systems could be disruptive to existing institutions if they gained widespread adoption, whereas Ripple-like systems seem, to me, to be far more closely aligned to how things work today and are, perhaps, a source of incremental innovation. If this observation is correct, then firms looking at this space probably need to assess the technologies through different lenses. The question for banks for Ripple-like systems is: "how could we use this to reduce cost or improve our operations" whereas the question for Bitcoin-like systems is: "how would we respond if this technology gained widespread adoption?"
A Simple Explanation of Balance Sheets - "One can imagine a world where the bank still records that it owes some money to its customers but the shared ledger is the place that records precisely who those people are. This is fundamentally different to using the shared ledger as a mirror (or mirroring it to the bank's own ledger) – it's more akin to seeing the shared ledger as a partial subledger. And it might perhaps be something that gets adopted to different degrees by different firms... hopefully this sketch shows some possibilities for where this could be going. And, like I said earlier, none of this will happen unless we get everybody to the same page with the right mental model for how banking works."
Two revolutions for the price of one? - "Bitcoin is worse than existing solutions for all the use-cases that banks care about. It's expensive. It's slow. And it's 'regulatorily difficult'. And this is by design."
So, if this is true, we should expect to see adoption of Bitcoin come from the margins, solving marginal problems for marginal users. But disruptive innovations have a habit of learning fast and growing. They don't stop at the margins and they work their way in and up...
Bitcoin essentially runs on a MASSIVELY replicated, shared ledger. (The trick is in keeping it consistent, of course...) It sounds insanely inefficient and expensive... and perhaps it is. But we also have to ask ourselves: inefficient and expensive as compared to what?
Just look at the state of banking IT today... Payments, Securities, Derivatives... Pick any one. They all follow the same pattern: every bank has built or bought at least one, usually several, systems to track positions and manage the lifecycle of trades: core banking systems, securities settlement systems, multiple derivatives systems and so on.
Each of these systems cost money to build and each of them costs even more to maintain. And each bank uses these systems to build and maintain its view of the world. And they have to be connected to each other and kept in sync, usually through reconciliation...
But what if... what if these firms – that don't quite trust each other – used a shared system to record and manage their positions? Now we'd only need one system for an entire industry... not one per firm. It would be more expensive and complicated to run than any given bank-specific systems but the industry-level cost and complexity would be at least an order of magnitude less. One might argue that this is why industry utilities have been so successful.
But a centralised utility also brings issues: who owns it? Who controls it? How do the users ensure it stays responsive to their needs and remains cost-effective?
The tantalising prospect of the blockchain revolution is that perhaps it offers a third way: a system with the benefits of a centralised, shared infrastructure but without the centralised point of control: if the data and business logic is shared and replicated, no one firm can assert control, or so the argument goes.
Now, there are lots of unsolved problems: privacy, performance, scalability, does the technology actually work, might we be walking away from a redundant (antifragile?) existing model? Who will build these platforms if they can't easily charge a fee because of their mutualised nature? Difficult questions.