[mikedouglas]

Funny that you mention the 19th century, because another example of a system that required an ever-increasing series of hacks to solve major flaws is the internal combustion engine. Whether the problem that Ethereum solves is anywhere near as valuable as the problems solved by ICE remains to be seen, but this just seems like the engineering process to me, especially for a young technology.

[pavlov]

Right! There was widespread public enthusiasm about engines in the latter half of the 19th century. Both John Keely and Karl Benz created engine startups, among hundreds of others around the world. Keely ripped off gullible investors for decades with faked demos, while Benz's company is still going strong.

But if we're going to make the analogy to the present day, it's important to frame it right. Blockchains are just a subset of distributed databases, and the lasting "Benzes" of the field might be projects like FoundationDB rather than blockchain-anything.

[tfha]

Internal combustion engines didn't have research papers explaining why they were impossible.

[ajkjk]

Internal combustions work, really well, today, and are not theoretically impossible. Not really the same.

[smallnamespace]

Well, you haven't proven Ethereum's theoretical impossibility either. 'I think this might be a scam' is not a proof, no matter how many heuristics are on your side.

[tfha]

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

This paper does a pretty good job of laying out a formal, mathematical proof that pos doesn't work

[mikedouglas]

They work really well thanks to the invention of the spark plug, the carburetor, the supercharger, and decades of iteration. For many years, they were objectively terrible.

Ethereum is three years old. ICE is 200+.

[beefield]

Somehow I think that at 3 year anniversary of ICE people had some actual real world use cases for ICE where ICE was still somehow better than steam engine and animals, even if ICE itself was objectively terrible?

[tuesdayrain]

Ethereum is objectively better in some cases. What if I want to gamble somewhere, but I don't trust websites to be honest about their odds? With Ethereum I could check the source code of the contract and be confident that it's legitimate.

[ecocentrik]

Not only can you verify the code, you can verify that the code and the output wasn't modified during execution by some external actor.

[blattimwind]

A 1910s ICE might have been terrible compared to a modern computer-driven engine built on one or the other dozen million man-hours, but back in the day it was still a very useful thing that powered machines and vehicles and even had broad military applications.

[fastball]

ICE didn't work really well in 1910.

Ethereum works today as well.

I think you missed the point of the analogy.