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I’ve seen the future of the web, and it's Ethereum

Max Veytsman on November 06, 2017

“Never trust anyone over 30” is something they used to say in the revolutionary sixties. The Cryptocurrency Revolution doesn’t have anyone over 30 ...
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theodesp profile image
Theofanis Despoudis

I've browsed the issue tracker and I found this>
github.com/thousandetherhomepage/k...

ETH balance exceeds pixel count?

Is it true? Because if it is, it looks like Ethereum its just one of those platforms where you can mess up with real money.

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mveytsman profile image
Max Veytsman

Yes it is, and I really want to solve this mystery! FWIW, I don't think it's a bug in the code so much as people somehow sending us extra ether in transactions.

You definitely can mess up with real money in Ethereum, and in ways that are much more consequential than that issue. i.e. twitter.com/dguido/status/92789652...

I'll say two things on this.

First of all the list of platforms that you can mess up with real money is very very long. You can mess up by using floats, a database, or even feature flags!

That said, cryptocurrencies today make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot and there's no one to talk to to return your money if you do. Well, most of the time there isn't.

Why am I still excited?

1) I'm much more excited about the web stuff I wrote about in this post than I am about the replacing fiat money stuff.
2) I think this is a glimpse of the future! I wrote more about that in another comment

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Wonderful post. Use cases, even gimmicky ones, are so helpful in understanding a concept. And your gimmick is a really wonderful use-case. Bravo.

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Jilles van Gurp • Edited

I'm also involved with an ICO. I like the idea of smart contracts. However, as others have observed, most smart contracts out there are barely used at all and the ones that do get used basically are about doing an ICO. There are a lot of prototypes and alpha/beta projects but very little with measurable traction on the blockchain.

The sad state of the current generation of blockchains is that they are not suitable for running lots of small value transactions because of cost and performance reasons. Anything that needs that, needs to wait until blockchains come into existence that support that. Several are in development right now, most of these move the problem rather than solving it. Thousands of transactions sounds nice until you realize that this is globally and you have to share those with basically the rest of the world. That's not nice at all if you consider a simple db on your laptop can do that without breaking a sweat. So, if you need more than a handful of transactions per second right now, there is essentially no production quality blockchain out there that can do that.

EOS when it ships in a few days will need time to prove itself as well. Ethereum and bitcoin have enjoyed years of people trying to hack them and by virtue of still being around sort of have proven that they work as advertised. That kind of adoption for a third blockchain has yet to happen. Whether that's EOS or some other thing remains to be seen. Also Ethereum itself is evolving.

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alex_escalante profile image
Alex Escalante
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mveytsman profile image
Max Veytsman

Yeah, this is really bad.

I'm excited about the potential of this technology to change how the web works in the future, and building and using this DApp is like looking into a crystal ball into that future.

As I said in another comment, I certainly don't think you should throw away your credit card and your Heroku account tomorrow!

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Alex Escalante

I also saw about this and found it exciting. But it's still very early…

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boubis12

Ethereum is just the tip of the iceberg. Many more smart contract blockchains are currently built with some really nice features. My favorite is EOS. If the developers deliver what they promise (and judging by the testnet I believe they will) It is really next gen. Several thousands of tps (3000 now on the testnet on average hardware and single threaded) interchain communication, zero transaction fees. And it supports c++ for the time soon every web assembly compatible language. You could check it out too.

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kayis profile image
K • Edited

Isn't ethereum so slow that in does less than 100 TX per second?

How should this work?

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mveytsman profile image
Max Veytsman

You're right, Ethereum is slow.

And it has a host of other issues that need to be solved before mass adoption (environmental impact of proof of work chains is number one on my list, before transaction volume).

And, this technology is being developed in the open so we can see all the problems as they come up.

I certainly don't think you should throw away your credit card and your Heroku account tomorrow! What I do think is that something that has it's roots in Ethereum is going to be ubiquitous in the future, and you can see a glimpse of it today. And there's a good chance that thing will still be called Ethereum but it's hard to say.

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kayis profile image
K

True.

Today I read the term Edge Computing, which seems to be the new buzzword for doing things decentralized on the edge of the cloud (Desktops/Smartphones etc).

Question is, which tech will prevail?

There is Ethereum, there is dat, there is IPFS...

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mveytsman profile image
Max Veytsman

Honestly, I have no idea, and that's okay.

I view this as a technologist not as an investor, and I'm excited to play with all of it!

(So far, we've tried putting the DApp on IPFS and serving images from there.)

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michaelhonan profile image
Michael

Haha! Not happening with its recent security issue.

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Max Veytsman

Thanks, I haven't seen dat yet.

Do you know examples of good dat dapps?

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AJ Ostrow

Great article Max! Lots of exciting micro opportunities in the future.

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Lauri Elias

One of the very few use cases for ETH.