@mdw
@shawnj
@mdw
Is building bulky layers of duct tape and bungee cords on top of Bitcoin really the way forward?
so is http just a bulky layer of duct tape on top of tcp/ip?
Not so bulky, no. Ma Bell and others kept trying to build smart networks for many years, maybe they still do. They kept insisting there's no reason we can't stuff all the fancy features in there. But a generic transport layer is the most useful, devoid of any intelligence except what's actually needed to route traffic. They wanted to bake some of the HTTP functionality into the transport layer! In fact, they knew that everything could be stuffed into the networking layer. Doesn't mean it should though.
If they built a network that knew all about email and FTP and BitTorrent and so on, would it be better? Well in some ways life would be easier. But our Internet would be brittle. This is not a good design.
Ethereum has the same philosophy - They're all about that chain, 'bout that chain, no features. For people to imagine and create the next generation gee-whiz Dapps, they could really use a featureless chain, built for applications. The right tool for the job. Dapps'll be primitive until they start to be developed on the 2.0 platforms; low-hanging fruit only IMHO.
I know you weren't really talking about Dapps or DAOs, but only smart contracts. They can be done on any chain, even Bitcoin, if you grunt hard enough. But we clearly need something more suitable for running applications on. We can try to make Bitcoin be all things to all people, but it won't be good at all of it. That's my 2 millibits :)
ultiamtely we don't know if these higher layers will work, we'll have to try em & see. in the early LTB interviews with vitalik about etherium, they brought this point up. bitcoin was intentionally left as a basic transfer protocol. satoshi could have allowed full programming/scripting in bitcoin core, but chose not to.. to keep it simple, to limit the attack vectors. adding these new layers will add in that functionality, but will also add in the bloat & the risk. maybe they'll work, maybe they'll have to be changed in some way, maybe they won't work at all.
