ConsenSys, an Ethereum software company, publishes posts on smart contract development, enterprise Ethereum, and blockchain trends.
HN links it for the LLL smart contract introduction and for the Stabl stablecoin project; commenters give no strong opinion of the blog itself.
The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum".
The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company has increased trust, not decreased it. As the saying goes: "What does not kill you, makes you stronger."
More and more developers building applications on top of this platform. The MelonPort token sale ICO (on the Ethereum platform) sold out in 2.5 minutes yesterday.
It's not just independent Ramen-fueled startups, but "enterprise Ethereum" has become a thing. JP Morgan, Santander, Microsoft, Redhat, Cisco, Accenture, etc -- for better or worse -- are joining the Ethereum bandwagon.
I think it is still way early to call a winner in the blockchain platform wars. There are dozens of well-funded competitors trying to gain dominance over established platforms like the Bitcoin technology stack and the Ethereum platform -- including IBM-led Hyperledger Fabric and the bluechip banking consortium led by R3CEV.
But if there is one dog at the top of the blockchain platform heap right now, it is…
I think sharing control of funds is a weakness. Not just when it comes to smart contracts that will inevitably have bugs, but for organizations in general. Instead, we can create organizations without boundaries and govern them the same way we govern genres of art—if you do something that aligns with the brand, your action is part of the organization.
That's why I built Benefactory, a platform for decentralized nonprofits. We can weave individual efforts into an organization with a strong brand so it's easier to attract recognition and further contributions.
Here's an organization dedicated to making Ethereum easier to use and build on top of: https://media.consensys.net/2016/09/07/introducing-the-commonwealth-of-ethereum/
Join our Slack and help us build a commonwealth for every genre of public benefit. http://slack.benefactory.cc/
Me either. I had no idea that accessing a link to NFT-described content went through OpenSea for content that isn't even hosted by OpenSea. That's apparently a MetaMask thing. Supposedly a MetaMask wallet can connect to any willing node, but in practice they use the Infuria->OpenSea server.
Yes, you can run your own Etherium node and server, and connect a MetaMask wallet to it.[1] As Moxie points out, nobody wants to do that.
Worse, the blockchain does not, apparently, contain the hash of the data. You can't even prove you even have access rights to the data if the hosting service goes down. All you own is a link to a URL.
There are more Ethereum full nodes than two, but how many will accept web queries? That's a service.
[1] https://media.consensys.net/how-to-install-and-synchronize-your-own-remote-ethereum-node-5d875c684504
The main thing to keep in mind at this point in time is that these contracts have very little tolerance for inefficiency, since inefficiency in this case costs money. Even solidity is very inefficient. Sure it would be great to write contracts in Haskell or Coq but can you insure O(1) or at most O(n) run time with little to no constant overhead? For example LLL (Low-Level Lisp-Like Language) produces 70% more efficient code than solidity [1] and thus it is the chosen language for the ENS (Ethereum Name Service) registry smart contract (who wouldn't want to pay 70 less for interacting with a contract?). But no doubt, better languages will come with time :)
[1] https://media.consensys.net/an-introduction-to-lll-for-ethereum-smart-contract-development-e26e38ea6c23
One of the main Ethereum co-founders is working on a new experimental contract language targeting the Ethereum Virtual Machine called Viper which still seems to be under relatively active development[1].
Why pick Solidity if Viper and other languages like Low-level Lisp-like Language (LLL) by Consensys[2] are around the corner? Or is this just a matter of language flavour similar to how anybody can pick from a plethora of languages targeting the JVM (Clojure, Scala, Java, etc.)?
[1] https://github.com/ethereum/viper
[2] https://media.consensys.net/an-introduction-to-lll-for-ethereum-smart-contract-development-e26e38ea6c23
Sandcastle can generate smart contacts from SQL[0]. There may be clues around BigchainDB, IPFS, and Swarm which are leaders in storage[1], and Ardrive[2] is built on Arweave[3], which is an exciting project in the space that focuses on tools for developers to build databases.
[0] https://media.consensys.net/sandcastle-brings-sql-to-ethereum-smart-contracts-4addd1b351cd
[1] https://hackernoon.com/swarm-ipfs-and-bigchaindb-comparing-data-storage-and-decentralization-4a2o3wf8
[2] https://ardrive.io
[3] https://www.arweave.org