I have been wondering how much Tezos needs to reinvent the wheel compared to Ethereum. Ethereum has had a big headstart in the mindspace, but presumably much of the same concepts can be utilized in Ethereum.
Tezos's whitepaper isn't much in comparison to the volume of Ethereum papers that have been written over the past few years. However, an apples-to-apples comparison between it and the original Etherum whitepaper makes them seem much closer in quality.
Other than the voting aspect of Tezos (which will become more of a factor in the longer term), I found the most interesting part of the Tezos whitepaper to be how they handle limitations on smart contracts.
In 3.3.6 the paper imposes a hardcap on the length of Smart Contracts. This is a clear contrast with Ethereum's goal of maximizing contract flexibility. The Tezos position is that the most promising Smart Contract concepts would not benefit from length. If that holds true, then longer Smart Contract length would pose more of a attack vector risk to the system than it would be worth.
Two big issues with Ethereum Smart Contracts relate to this. First, because Ethereum enables maximum freedom for Smart Contracts, it is very expensive to audit the contracts to ensure they will behave as expected. Second, it is not clear to me that Ethereum provides sufficient incentives to users for verifying complex Smart Contract transactions.
In the short term, ease of auditing Tezos contracts will be Tezos's primary technical competitive advantage.
Date: October 1st, 2017 10:23 PM Author: Racy insecure field
Technically speaking, that sounds correct. However, I think the voting aspect will make it fundamentally different from ethereum and create secondary markets on which people trade their voting rights via smart contracts (or some similar mechanism). The future will be really interesting, because it'd be cheaper for the financial titans to work with tezos rather than duplicate it.
The voting mechanism is certainly exciting. I think we will see increases in Tezos prices once Bitcoin or Ethereum have the next contentious hardfork. Something where it is apparent that they would have been better off with a Tezos voting system to manage the social consensus.
The upcoming hardforks might not have as much of a boost to Tezos. Bitcoin profited big league from their last hardfork, so their next one will likely not spook the markets. Ethereum hardforks will be relatively drama-free as long as Vitalik remains influential.
Date: October 8th, 2017 12:37 PM Author: Yellow Cruise Ship
I feel like voting is a mechanism to avoid hard forks but because the owners retain so much of the issued xtz they can basically sway the vote in whichever way they want.
So it's good that they can avoid hard forks but i'm not so sure the voting rights attached to the coins will have very much value.