Item — HN Reader

It's almost as if a cryptocurrency system used by the grey market and black market sections of the internet contained actual blackhats. What a surprise.

Much as I hate to link to reddit, for effective and biting criticism of cryptocurrencies: http://reddit.com/r/buttcoin

4 comments

This might serve as a future warning to NOT write your own VM.

Sure, it's probably a contract issue, but we'd have some much better contract code if the VM didn't require you to code defensively all the time.

Do you mean there are some existing VM designs that could have been used instead of EVM?

What grey/black market sites accept eth. Pretty sure most of them historically have been Bitcoin based.

eth is traded to and from bitcoin on various exchanges, so it's a parallel.

>eth is traded to and from bitcoin on various exchanges, so it's a parallel.

eth is also traded to and from USD on various exchanges, so that's a parallel, too?

Listen, I'm no ethereum fanboy here, but logic, let's use it.

So is the USD and a bunch of other currencies, what's your point? You can also trade ETH for USD on most big exchanges.

And USD are used for all kinds of illegal things; solutions include restricting paper transactions to $100 units of currency (so that large amounts of currency are bulky and heavy) and all kinds of restrictions on transactions over $10,000.

This wasn't the impression I got of Ethereum. Nor am I terribly shocked at their talk of a hard fork. They always seemed more "pragmatic" about these things than typical bitcoin fans, more of a "if a majority of the participants are OK with it, what's the problem?" attitude. Which is IMO more realistic.

The DAO, though, that always seemed slightly fishy to me. "A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is right now".

Buttcoin in my experience has been less about insightful criticism and more about ... well, the kind of criticism the name suggests.

Yeah, I mean, did anyone NOT see this coming? All these crypto currencies are a disaster already, then someone has the bright idea to have them execute code. Gee, what could go wrong.