I’ve stumbled upon this article while researching the latest on MaidSafe and Ethereum.
These guys make the claim Ethereum is a fundamentally flawed concept. It would be interesting to get @dirvine 's take on this project. I wonder if MaidSafe could draw some inspiration from this. Concept seems pretty interesting.
Thanks for the link! I really like their new idea. It’s brilliant. I will have to research more but this is my response so far…
Ethereum is a Turing complete logic, per block. This means they can easily prove that they can compute any computable thing in one block, but at the cost of not being able to necessarily know how much resource it will take to do the block’s computation.
Because of this, they need to back their resources with a fixed token asset, and set a network-wide resource price on computations in order to avoid abuse of resource. Further, in order to secure exchange, they require everyone who is validating the block to effectively re-execute everything that has ever been executed.
Perfect conclusion on why ethereum did not lead up to expectations in certain protocol aspects, and resources. I been having difficult time to accept ethereum since they announced it. Now even more less likely that I’ll ever purchase ethereum. Sorry devs, but it is admirable to see individuals collaborating, to build a great product that never exist before. But the fact here is i don’t want to save useless bloat app blocks on my machine.
Tau is actually spot on this case.
Tau can prove its own execution path or execution of programs written over it: contemporary advancements in computer science give the ability to authenticate data types and program execution. Our method is based on Andrew Miller’s GADS (lambda-auth). Hashing large amounts of data, as
Bitcoin hashes the block transactions, is done by the so-called Merkle tree. On Tau, this tree (that is timestamped by the blockchain) can go down to authenticate data files over the DHT or execution of programs on remote and trustless machines.
Okay, this means blocks will be actually smaller than ethereum dapps! All because of bittorrent is enabled inside of that block. Fuse can be enabled too. I actually thought something like this back in February / March. Every block holds a header which contains magnet link. Inside of magnet link holds the data. It is being distributed by the users. Wow, really weird to perceive that their pdf was released at the same time I was thinking about that particular idea. Another idea popped up, zeronet on every block! This means each block could be catered to certain group of people. Or each block could suit like subreddits. This is impressive and leads to more possibilities than we thought of.
resource exchange can be negotiated by the users as they see fit.
Sweet. That even tops it off.
Edited: I think this is a major part that maidsafe should look into.
Ethereum client is fixed, meaning the network’s protocol cannot change with time. It is hard-coded, and if one day users would like to change its behavior, they will probably require a hard-fork of Ethereum’s blockchain. On the other hand, Tau client’s behavior and code is itself on-chain. Think open a GitHub repository with a code and all it is doing is downloading from GitHub its own code and executing it. This is exactly what Tau client is doing: every block contains its own code, including the conditions for accepting the next block. Therefore we get maximum flexibility not only for apps over Tau but for Tau itself.
My best guess: vaporware and possibly scam
I do think “GIT based anything” is going to be the way thing move forward…
It is going to assimilate everything.
“Because of this, they [Ethereum] need to back their resources with a fixed token asset, and set a network-wide resource price on computations in order to avoid abuse of resource. Further, in order to secure exchange, they require everyone who is validating the block to effectively re-execute everything that has ever been executed.”
In Ethereum, do all nodes need to recalculate the code in the contracts? That would work for simple calculations in contracts, but hardly for fully distributed and general computation. And that seems true even for the “light clients” described below.
“Fundamentally, the problem of scaling up something like Bitcoin and Ethereum is an extremely hard one; the consensus architectures strongly rely on every node processing every transaction, and they do so in a very deep way. There do exist protocols for “light clients” to work with Ethereum, storing only a small part of the blockchain and using Merkle trees to securely access the rest, but even still the network relies on a relatively large number of full nodes to achieve high degrees of security.” – Scalability, Part 1: Building on Top | Ethereum Foundation Blog
You appear surprised that you can’t get something for nothing.
I was surprised that Ethereum and maybe even Tau-Chain need so much duplicated computation. But it’s consistent with Bitcoin when I think about it. In Bitcoin the full nodes recheck the whole chain of a transaction down to the original mining of the coins. So the smart contracts with computation need the same kind of enormous redundancy I guess.
Each block in the blockchain is a “CPU” cycle. That’s interesting. But I wonder how slow it will be.
Also lol at “decentralized GitHub”… so they mean: git?
link to TAU Chain white paper http://tauchain.org/tauchain0.2.pdf
link to TAU Chain creator interview Stream LTB E261 - Understanding Tauchains by Speaking of Bitcoin (formerly Let's Talk Bitcoin!) | Listen online for free on SoundCloud