If you haven’t done so yet, I highly recommend reading Vitalik Buterin’s overview of Ethereum published earlier today. It is very lofty, seemingly feasible and I don’t detect much hyperbole. He is clearly aware of the short-comings of all the different 1.0/2.0 projects and is pretty much trying to make this stand out by otherwise fulfilling Newton’s, “standing on the shoulders of giants.” I’d be interested to see what other project leaders from 2.0 initiatives have to say.

A few technical concerns I haven’t really seen addressed but I’m sure are being discussed somewhere:

1) Botnets. While ASICs do create potential long term centralization problems, Botnets will jump all over the ability to use CPUs again to mine. How can this be prevented/mitigated? Can it? Is there a way for Ethereum the org to prevent miners from participating (if so, can it be abused?)? [Note: I have discussed mining previously in the Litecoin category.]

2) Even though the money supply is mathematically known, I’m not entirely sure the linear money supply will necessarily have the zeroing effect apriori. It could, and probably will but obviously this is aposteriori. For perspective, the token supply in LTC and BTC are significantly higher the first decade than Ether is.

3) While Script is not Turing-complete this also prevents viruses from being created and wreaking havoc on the blockchain. CLL sounds great on paper in terms of robustness and utility, but how do you fight HNWI hackers who want to cause mischief?

Two other points of interest regarding the business side of this project:

1) I do think that eventually someone, somewhere will create a distributed, encrypted dropbox for global use. How that is incentivized, or rather, how individuals pay for the resources (bandwidth & space) obviously will be another matter altogether. Bitcloud is one project that is trying to tackle that (through proof-of-bandwidth). Perhaps, as part of what Mike Hearn described 2 years ago, users will eventually be able to use microtransactions (e.g., 0.01 BTC) to pay random WiFi hotspots to create adhoc mesh networks — distributed encrypted dropboxes could just as easily follow similar paths in terms of payment/compensation. Shades of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age…

2) Even though I am pretty pro-alt coin/chain/ledger/etc. I do think parts of the Humint project are probably not going to work as initially planned in their press releases this week. Assuming that Cocacolacoin is not part of the Ethereum blockchain but rather uses its own independent blockchain, it’s hard to imagine how to incentivize network hashrate (which creates network security which prevents a 51% attack). I’m not saying it won’t work apriori, but from a business model it is difficult to believe that Bob the Miner will want to exchange hashrate for Coca-cola swag. Obviously stranger things have happened, like the recent “success” of meme-related Dogecoin (wow! so cool! much awesome!); I do think not using the term “coin” will be a better marketing strategy as it is too loaded at this point (I prefer token or ducat). Other obvious uses within the Ethereum blockchain are Frequentfliercoins from Alice Airlines, could probably help prevent and mitigate the risks involved in travel hacking (FYI: United Airlines frequent flier miles were downgraded effective February 1, 2014 due to rampant inflation).

For example, I think Alice Airlines could utilize the “contract” system by using some amount of Ether (0.01), creating a “contract” which defines a set amount of Mileage (which itself will likely have some predefined expatriation dates). Assuming this is in the future and flyers are using Ether wallets (oh the 19th century irony) and provide the airline with their wallet address, the user will be able to receive the Mileage amount in their wallet (more than likely it will be an embedded URL that sends you to a screen on Airline Alice with the actual amounts + Terms of Service). This is what colored coins are, but Ethereum seems to be both more elegant as this is native built-in functionality and in terms of transfer speed (3-30 seconds is the stated goal versus 10 minutes for 1 BTC confirmation). This is subject to change, but just one potential use of the platform.

It will also be interesting to see how Dark Wallet and Zero Coin projects will react to this announcement (Ethereum is currently stating it is not an anonymous solution though through the “contracts” system this can be obfuscated).

Other resources to peruse:

– Ursium has a live update of publicly known tidbits.

– The Ethereum blog has some interesting info, especially about DAOs

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