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Vitalik Buterin compares bitshares vs ethereum like ASIC vs CPU. Thoughts?

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JoeyD:
There does seem to be a market for the term "Turing-complete" in _the crypto market_. A large part of the market seems to think that all other cryptos, must be "incomplete" and rather have them some of that "complete"-stuff, somewhat similar to the bitcoin-2.0 thing. I wonder what version-number the internet is supposed to be now, is it time to upgrade my e-mail?

Nevertheless it does seem to be a rather clever marketing move to use the of lack of understanding of the crypto-masses. I doubt that calling themselves the java-vm of the crypto-world, would have garnered them the same attention. However I personally don't feel very comfortable when such a method of marketing is being used and I hope bitshares and I3 will use other methods.

xeroc:

--- Quote from: sschechter on March 27, 2014, 07:02:35 pm ---Let us not forget that the ASICs are dominating the market  8)

--- End quote ---
... of bitcoin MINING ..

take a look at other PoW schemes (ie, primecoin, gridcoin, quarkcoin, ..... lots more) or even PoS coins (ie, nxt, peercoin, mintcoin, ... lots more)

there is no _the market_ in crypto

sschechter:
Let us not forget that the ASICs are dominating the market  8)

JoeyD:
I had trouble making out all that was said in that video, the audio was terrible on my laptop.
I also tried listening to it without any prejudice and there were a couple of things I noticed with regards to comparisons of Ethereum to Bitshares.

If I heard correctly the first part seems to be an attempt to describe ways on how to recreate something like bitsharesX on top of Ethereum. However the way Vitalik described it and the words I could catch, I was unable to figure out how his version was easier or more efficient in anyway (the requirement of external feeds also did not sound very safe). To be perfectly honest his proposed solution sounded like the exact same thing as Bytemaster is doing now, but with an extra layer of complexity, uncertainty and inefficiency, which leaves me questioning if I missed something.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but did they explicitly say that not all essential parts for Ethereum to work were solved or even figured out and that they hoped for solutions via bounties or workgroups? Did they also say that for those solutions to be implemented they absolutely need a complete replacement and migration in the form of Ethereum2.0 (or more) by design? Should those things not be solved before launch and presale? Wouldn't such a design be disastrous for all the separate DACs on top of Ethereum? To me that made the whole proposition sound dangerously interdependent and fragile and I don't understand how their solution would be preferable to having independent separate DACs. At the very least it did not sound like a very strong argument to build any serious DAC on top of their system.

Talking about computer analogies that made their proposition sound an awful lot like having to periodically reinstall your entire OS plus all applications and then hope everything still works as expected.

It's probably because I'm to stupid, but after watching that video I'm having more trouble than ever seeing how their solution is any more elegant or efficient or "general purpose" than separate alt-coins, merged mining or bitshares. Calling Bitshares Asics made their solution sound like simulating asics on their cpu. I'm starting to suspect that their ambitions are too high/broad (feature-creep?) and that their focus should be more on creating a more elaborate scripting engine than is currently available in Bitcoin.

EDIT
Missed a couple of post above this one, that seem to answer some of my questions. Stans description was especially to the point and well worded.

toast:

--- Quote from: dannotestein on March 27, 2014, 05:35:55 pm ---I think Vitalik's original point here just shows the weakness of trying to explain things too much in the form of analogies. While it can be helpful, such analogies often lead people to false conclusions when people try to attribute all kinds of characteristics of the analogous system to the actual system. In practice, there's very little involved in either design or execution of a BitShares DAC that is similar to the design or operation of an ASIC (I can say this with confidence, having been involved in both software and FPGA/ASIC design for most of my career).

Also, I suppose one of the ideas being promoted by the original analogy is that the logic of a bitshares DAC isn't changeable once a blockchain is started (ASICs are, to a large extent, fixed function devices), but there's nothing in the Bitshares technology that prevents changes in DAC operation based either upon agreement by individuals or by groups. We're just not explicitly building such out-of-the-box capability into the initial "DAC toolkit". Individual DACs could certainly build in "runtime-changeable" parameters.

Stan's analogy is actually by far the closest comparison, in my opinion, based on what I've heard about Ethereum so far. As I understand it (and I confess I haven't read about it depth, because the initial concept just didn't seem efficient to me), Ethereum is basically going to be running a scripting language interpreter on each peer that processes script commands in a blockchain block.

--- End quote ---

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