Please forgive my ignorance, but what possible intersection is there between blockchains (method of immutably storing small quantities of data in a distributed fashion currently limited by power waste, slowness, and needed storage amount) and providing real data about real stock markets to real people (getting data with proper license and providing it to others on request, currently limited by legal means)?
Coin exchanges are dealing with plenty of real money for plenty of real people and have real licenses and very real government oversight (at least in places like the US and EU) , so your snark is not very appropriate.
Regarding your actual point, I can't see the connection either.
1) one can introduce a human component by having an escrow. That way one can deploy contracts which can be changed at runtime. Correctness is important, but it is always the question to what criterium? A program can be "correct" and still fail. Actually pure notions of correctness are maybe counter productive here. If we would start to see these things use in the real world we would discover quickly that there is an element of modeling here.
Yeah, this "language" is really not going to be useful anywhere. A big company raising many millions of dollars should have tested their academic ideas in the field before releasing sth like this. I'd be far more impressed by some actual use cases.
I can program a contract that can be parameterized with an address of some other sub-contract (then, say, store it in variable), which I call to do some particular logic. If I change that sub-contract address, I can effectively change my contracts logic. Is that what you?
I would like to mention an interesting paper regarding the topic:
Marino, Juels - Setting Standards for Altering and Undoing Smart Contracts (2016).
I see your point about 'pure notions of correctness'. While I agree that some interesting properties of a contract is not easy to come up with (and hence verify), I still believe that there are some 'safety' properties which are far easier to articulate.
I also believe that there is an element of modeling: it may be a viable way of validating properties.
Clojure growth is just fine. If average devs have to add something there is Java. In our experience maintenance of Clojure code is orders of magnitude better than average languages (Python, Java, etc). Yes, object orientation in large organizations leads to the most unimaginable mess. People mostly get paid for unproductive behaviour. Clojure is great for startups where you can do things right.
You might also be interested in the story of SISCOG (http://www.siscog.eu/upload/GESTAO-DE-LISTAS/News/PDF/eclm-2...) - a massive transport infrastructure system designed in Common Lisp. I'm sure Clojure would have been chosen if it was developed today.
2013 is just the publication date. The document cites an implementation of their London Underground system which has been in production since 2008 and a another within the Dutch rail system dating back to 1998.
We're building a global exchange and expanding our business. Looking for Clojure developers based on blockchain based protocols and opensource. Knowledge in blockchain, cryptography, distributed systems, ethereum is a plus.
The WWW uses DNS. Think about it: DNS evolved as an upgraded distributed hosts.txt table. Fundamentally in an entry in that name-ledger is a point to a machine which you would log into. Who gets to change that ledger? Its static.
Now we have blockchain tech where names can point dynamically to content or cluster of machines. Ethereum ENS is an early version of this.
Imagine you would want a global map of places on the Internet itself. Like Open-map but so secure you can rely on it, so that self-driving cars can use it. Technically its not impossible anymore. The Web can't do that, because of single authorship of data (way less secure than multi-party authorship).
Ironically Mike Hearn has suggested such system with TradeNet [1], but apparently has missed what is happening with the evolution of blockchain tech.
The next web will be a transaction system, not a communication system - the former is a generalization of the latter. If you're interested in building these kinds of systems - we are startup building the foundations and are hiring.
My day job is working on Corda, which is a distributed ledger platform. So I haven't missed it.
When an app identity is based on a public key, you can start to do things like load them from a BitTorrent style network (if you want to). Or define a traditional CDN as the primary entry point but have slower/more decentralised systems as backups. App identity doesn't change so locally stored data and sessions are not lost.
Szabo reposted this blog post [1] on December 27, 2008
The Bitcoin genesis block was created Jan 4, 2009 [2]
At that time there was about say 3 people in the world interested in these ideas. Make your judgement and consider the probabilities for P(Szabo = Satoshi) and P(Szabo != Satoshi).
I think if you read up on all the articles and convince yourself. In [3] Szabo said there is a lot similarities with Bitcoin and Bitgold, and he talked about the differences in interviews.
Bitcoin has smart contracts. That's what people usually don't understand about ETH - its much more of an extension of Bitcoin and ColoredCoins than most people can ever realize. In fact this article shows exactly in what way this extension came up. Ethereum's history in two steps: 1) try to generalise Mastercoin 2) the same on its own blockchain. Grasping the internals of Bitcoin and its smart contracts capabilities is almost an requirement to understand ETH. Actually its very similar to going from assembly to a higher level language.
I worked on a Bitcoin project which in a strange turn of events led to Nick Szabo becoming an advisor there. But the limitations of Bitcoin are so large that all the attempts failed - Counterparty and Mastercoin were clearly never as succesfull as ETH for very good reasons.
Just to add: Mastercoin isn't the Bitcoin protocol. It uses Bitcoin as a data layer, but has an independent contracting system that doesn't interface with Bitcoin script.
unfortunately our current global network doesn't allow for proper delegation of trust, so your vision is more like a dystopia where a few single corporations and ultimate governments have ultimate power. homomorphic encryption is way too limited to allow these things. traditional encryption is only about encoding channels, its not about solving runtime and delegation problems. it seems more like its going to be the other way around. giant institutions will be replaced with DAC's which perform the desired functions of users/citizens. I'd be happy enough if iPhone would be an open system where I can run my desired OS of choice, with open hardware components and profits going not to already rich investors, who pay close to 0 tax using Irish/Dutch shell companies, but also more to employees and customers.
We're looking for Clojure developers to build our crypto-asset exchange and open blockchain based protocols. Knowledge in blockchain, cryptography, distributed systems, ethereum is a plus.
