You know how twitter killed off all those nice third-party twitter clients a while ago? With this tool, even the creators of the app can't stop people from creating alternate UIs for chat/payments/etc.
You know how AWS went down a while ago and github (and a zillion other sites) stopped working? With this tool, you could log into a repo manager (several are in the works) and there is no single point of failure that can take it offline.
You know how you wanted to send money from Taiwan to the US and the bank wire was declined despite repeated attempts and without any clear explanation and your money was trapped in a bank account in Taiwan? (might not have happened to you, but is happening to me at the moment) with this tool the exact rules for how a particular currency can move around is specified ahead of time in clear turing-complete computer code.
>You know how twitter killed off all those nice third-party twitter clients a while ago? With this tool, even the creators of the app can't stop people from creating alternate UIs for chat/payments/etc.
The only reason Twitter can stop that now is because the force of law stands behind their admonitions. How would Ethereum stop Twitter from suing a big alternate app vendor? The barriers that exist to prevent this are already non-technical.
>You know how AWS went down a while ago and github (and a zillion other sites) stopped working? With this tool, you could log into a repo manager (several are in the works) and there is no single point of failure that can take it offline.
Ethereum is an append-only system such that data inserted cannot be revoked? I know how btc works but have only glanced at Ethereum. I know programs are registered as parts of the blockchain, but all data and assets? If not, how do you ensure there is no point of failure for an interface like GitHub, or do you just mean the code to run it will always be available since it will be in the chain?
>You know how you wanted to send money from Taiwan to the US and the bank wire was declined despite repeated attempts and without any clear explanation and your money was trapped in a bank account in Taiwan?
Again, this is not a technical limitation. The banking system has every ability to move those numbers around. They are declining to do so without disclosing the reason. In this case, Ethereum/Bitcoin are not functionally different than using any other non-seized liquid asset. Someone could refuse to honor your ETH/BTC transfer just as easily as they could refuse to accept your USD transfer.
Great explanation! I would also add that the code does not necessarily have to be turing complete. There is a new language that complies to EVM bytecode that is decidable (not turing complete) https://github.com/ethereum/viper
It's a little less expressive, which makes it safer. Easier to reason about the code, for example)
