Educational transcript / lab reports / gov transp.: How is it an efficiency for this to be on a blockchain. Do we now not trust archive.org?
And if you do end up trusting some non-blockchain entity, then the whole effort is pointless. (You might just as well directly trust them with your patent filings, reports, etc instead).
A service for coordinating resistance against central american drug cartels.
These kinds of things are liable to get you killed if you attach your name to them. Better to just write the recipe and let the network do the administration.
I like that one. Anyone know any widely adopted languages that do this?
Overflow checking is a bit more rare:
* Swift has it by default (error)
* So do Python, Ruby, Erlang (promotion to arbitrary precision)
* C# has an optional Checked Context though I don't know how common it is
* Rust has checked operations (opt-in, both error and saturating), will check (error) by default in debug mode, it can optionally check (error) in release mode
It is a pretty special case though, you have to jump through a number of hoops using dependent types to get it.
GCC: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Integer-Overflow-Builtins...
clang: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#checked-...
C# has the ability to opt-into default checked arithmetic. I don't know of anyone that uses it...
Sorry, since the DAO fiasco I don't see Ethereum having any purpose. If a poorly written/unfair contract should be invalidated, I would rather have e the judicial system with hundreds of years of jurisprudence make that decision, than a few people at Ethereum.
The fact that the people running the nodes stopped seeing that fork of the chain as the interesting one is distributed consensus at work. Anyone that wants to keep observing that original fork can do so, that fork is actually alive in the form of Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum was forked after the DAO fail because people saw more value in a forked chain with new rules. Speaking about contract reversals or invalidations is misleading. That is simply not possible, because Blockchain. And while anyone can decide to fork a blockchain, building consensus around the fork is what gives it its value.
The DAO was a marketing horror because it promised a world ruled by code, built on top of blockchain tech. Blockchains, though, don't run on code but on consensus.
Which hard social/computer science problems are solved through a "consensus" algorithm that essentially constitutes denying the existence of those who disagree?
With Bitcoin, determining whether a fork is successful is very simple: are the tokens on its blockchain as liquid as those on the Bitcoin one? If they are, they are just as useful for transferring value as the "original" Bitcoin.
What metric would we use to determine whether an Ethereum fork is successful or not? If nothing is lost when a consensus algorithm fails to establish consensus, what value did it provide in the first place?
Market cap is an arbitrary measure because, in and of itself, it solves nothing. At any time, I can fork Ethereum with a buddy of mine, trade the resulting tokens at whichever price the original Ethers trade at, and the market cap would be the same. Or, alternatively, trade them at 1/1000 the Ether price, but change the protocol such that 1000 times as many exist.
If you have two consensuses, you don't have consensus.
(Edit: Yes, I know, my quote is misleading, but I claim that this distorted version does somewhat represent the gist of the author's words.)
From the point of view of speculators in Ethers, the purpose of Ethereum's continued existence is to avoid losing money. Exactly the same motivation that caused them to redefine the core protocol, in order to accommodate those who invested in a badly written contract.
Also, to be fair, Ethereum Classic still exists. Just because some couldn't accept reality doesn't mean the benefits of a Turing-complete blockchain are gone.
You should also be aware that Ethereum Classic did not implement the DAO hack fork and continues to be used, and that this language should work just as well there.
Not to say that this language is known to not have important bugs (idk), but, y'know, it is definitely work towards contract safety.
If I recall correctly, Pascal-style languages have counting for loops where you cannot modify the loop counter or the loop bound inside the loop. That is, you must use a while or repeat loop or recursion to have non-termination. A Pascal compiler would be trivial to extend with syntactic checks for the absence of such loops and recursion. But I don't think it's been done.
You could go towards more programming flexibility but a higher proof burden and use Spark/Ada (for Ada) or Frama-C (for C), but you would need to annotate loops with variant expressions to help the system prove termination.
Note that if you find languages without general loops and without recursion impractical, you might be disappointed by Viper as well. According to the grammar given on GitHub, Viper only has counting loops and no function calls at all except to a few built-in functions. The latter might just be an oversight, though. Functions are too useful to get rid of completely.
Specifically, Viper has two glaring flaws, both of which are not suffered by E, Monte, etc. The first is a lack of correct encapsulation. Viper appears to have a Python-style object model, which means that it's not possible to closely hold a value. As a test, how would you build an object with a value in its closure which no other object can access?
Second, Viper doesn't have mitigation for plan interference, which means that it's possible for certain kinds of recurrences to alter your program's security guarantees. As a test, how would you mitigate the DAO attack in Viper?
Finally, I fear that these flaws may be inherent to Ethereum, meaning that any language on Ethereum inherits these flaws structurally and cannot mitigate them. In that case, maybe it's time to design a capability-safe Ethereum!
It could be that they're making it a little safer, and a little easier, but not really too much safer. The features are described, and they look mostly like security?
What is wei? Another name for gas?
o_O twitch
