[ExI] Thoughts on Ethereum?

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Fri Mar 14 07:06:16 UTC 2014


Adrian, you sound like a problem looking for a solution ;-) ;-)

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 8:03 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:30 PM, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Adrian - It's yet another solution looking for a problem at the moment."
>>
>> Well, it's a platform, it may open ways to develop many solution to
>> many problems.
>
>
> You do not appear to be familiar with that phrase, so I shall explain.
>
> A "solution looking for a problem" is a capability to do something, but it
> is ill-defined or not defined exactly when and why someone would use it.
> This results in little to no thought given to existing alternatives, and how
> to make this new capability improve upon them.
>
> "People can use it for contract-based programming" does not suffice, because
> "contract-based programming" is the new capability this brings.  That's
> basically a circular definition.
>
> "People can use this to write programs that don't need to run on a central
> server" is better, but then you need to define when and why people would do
> that.  (And there are already things that can do this.  How does Ethereum
> compare to those?)
>
> The providers seem to be unaware that there are alternatives.  This almost
> always means that the new offering sucks, and usually means that it could be
> improved by incorporating best practices from existing alternatives -
> possibly to better than them, if the new offering does anything better.
>
> (Thus: it is not my job to find and list alternatives to Ethereum.  It is
> the job of those who promote Ethereum.  "Burden of proof" and all that.
> Notably, they must find the closest ones that most decrease the perceived
> uniqueness and value of Ethereum.  This can be hard to accept!  But if they
> do not, it will be done - mostly silently - by the people they try to
> promote it to, they will fail to gain much traction, and they will lack the
> data to see why they failed.)
>
> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/solutions_looki.html
> does a good job of explaining "solution looking for a problem" further.
>
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