No I don't think you need to do that to get interested in it. If you want to see it in action and spin up a playground really quickly, I suggest using Embark (https://github.com/iurimatias/embark-framework). (I contribute to this project)
No you don't have to. You just have to trust that the community has provided you with a secure, usable tool.
It is unreasonable to expect you to understand the engineering that goes into this kind of thing, if you are not a computer science educated individual. That is not the point of participation though. Developers don't have an intrinsic right to participate.
The exclusion because of complexity is unfortunate, but necessary. Making something that is decentralised, distributed, trustless, useful, simple (in terms of contract execution) and secure is nearly impossible without technical feat.
But you don't need to understand the mechanics of Ethereum or the EVM. The minimum you need to understand is tha Ethereum is used like fuel to pay for contract execution (GAS).
Solidity is not a hard language to grasp. It has simple inputs and outputs. Why not try playing with solidity code on the testnet compiler if you don't want to read the whitepaper.
Judging by the frequency which which catastrophic bugs seem to appear within smart contracts, it appears that most users of the platform also don't grok the complexity of the Ethereum network and it's vulnerability to bugs.
This argument can get dangerously close to 'clever people have invested a lot of time and effort into this, so you should either invest the same amount of time and effort or trust that the whole thing is safe.'
Not sure this holds up, especially when increasingly people are being asked to trust Ethereum, but anything, like Parity, that interacts with it.
Have you flown anywhere lately? Inspected the plane before you took off?
It's true for the risk you take you must be assured that engineers are making things safe.
Lots of planes crashed before we got to the incredible safety record we have today, which is paid for by people having trust in airlines, who employ competent engineers.
The only difference here is that the organisation is a decentralised one. The engineers are not paid but are incentivised by the network.
It will take time to remove errors from the network and for best practices to emerge. As for novices making basic errors and losing money. The internet is littered with problems like that in all languages.
This is not a reason to not attempt to do something new.
> Lots of planes crashed before we got to the incredible safety record we have today, which is paid for by people having trust in airlines, who employ competent engineers.
> The only difference here is that the organisation is a decentralised one. The engineers are not paid but are incentivised by the network.
ETH Engineers are also disincentivized from refactoring code / doing CD, as they have to pay a fee for every deploy. I'd imagine that the safety record for airlines would not look as it is today if engineers had to pay a small fee for every safety modification they wished to make.
The analogy with airlines is also faulty. There is no real financial incentive for a bad actor to find a software bug that is capable of crashing an airliner. There's nothing financially they can gain out of it. However, with the amount of money bound up in the ETH network even currently, any bug found by a bad actor could potentially land millions of dollars. Almost any amount of time spent pen-testing is trivial compared to that, so you will find a lot of bad actors actively seeking to find software vulnerabilities.
>There is no real financial incentive for a bad actor to find a software bug that is capable of crashing an airliner.
Not heard of plane hijacking?
ETH engineers are totally incentivised to write the most perfect code possible. With a world of people wanting disintermediation, the rewards for getting and keeping it right and safe are incredible. Partly because the penalties are too.
The compensation for running and maintaining good secure contracts is exactly the incentive needed. You should try and understand the workflow before blindly critiquing it. CD is not a real feature of blockchain technology, and neither should it be. Does NASA run CD on satellite software? Can you run CD on a plane in mid flight?
It is exactly the same thing as flight and space software. You get one chance to get it right. You get paid for doing good work - by the network.
I've never ever heard an ethereum developer complain about the cents they have to pay to deploy a contract, after having extensively tested it on the testnet for free.
