Random sample for Ethereum usability 2018.09.01

So I said to myself… Hey! Let’s install two important pieces of software related to Ethereum, Parity and Augur, and let’s see the state that they’re in! (I selected them randomly out of names seen on Reddit)

• Parity’s goal is to be the fastest, lightest, and most secure Ethereum client.
• Augur is a decentralized oracle and peer to peer protocol for prediction markets.

I first downloaded Parity from GitHub. Here’s Parity!

It showed a command line, and without explaining anything it just started doing stuff there. 30 minutes later it was still doing stuff there. I had to restart the laptop. After opening “parity.exe” again, it started from 1/1983, therefore it doesn’t seem to save progress. Anyway, this time I’ll wait until the end because I’m curious to see what happens at 1983/1983. I’m at 411 now.

Here’s Augur!

It’s a Windows app that I had to install.

It showed some inputs on which I didn’t modify the text, and then I clicked “Connect”. It started doing this (photo), and then at about 10 minutes in, it got stuck at around 5% while saying “server error” or something.

Next Ethereum sampling in 7 to 10 days.

From sampling done in the past, I tend to believe that the main current usage of ETH is as a cryptocurrency, and not as an utility token (because of the many clicks that you need to do in MetaMask in order to use it for dapps). But even as a cryptocurrency, it bothers me that I always need to check ethgasstation.info before sending a payment (I’ve sent at least 100 payments until now), because otherwise I won’t use the optimal fee. I wish transactions sending value without data had a fixed fee, like Stellar.

Update on Parity: It got to 1983 and then it just restarted from 1.

FFS :/

And it lost some peers in the process.

Update on Augur: I did end up managing to install and use it for a while. The disturbing bug that I found is that it didn’t work for me with Ledger Nano, even with SSL active.