A cryptocurrency is basically a distributed database, except that you are getting different actors who don't necessarily trust one to run it cooperatively.
Yeah, worlds slowest and most in-efficient write-only database. And as soon as you need to interact with goods or services in the real world, then you still need trust anyway.
All these people harping on about: "Bro I just need to move my money without trusting anyone!, I just need a trust-less way to send currency bro!"
Trust is a good thing! Banks and financial middlemen aren't the devil. Look at how many TPS the visa network can do thanks to trust.
If it weren't for some minimum of social/institutional trust the whole of society would collapse anyway and your digital coins would finally converge to their true value (zero - or actually negative once you add in the externalities).
confidendtial transactions and NFTs don't really change the consensus mechanism. They just make the currency fungible or expose the latent non-fungibility.
Etherium is a database. It's a database that contains scripts (not unlike bitcoin) that some computers can run if they want to determine the balance of accounts.
Etherium itself is not a computer, that's marketing speak.
You are wrong; if a smart contract is successfully deployed to the Ethereum blockchain, a thing that happens all the time -- it is not as if individual computers have the choice to run that code (or to make the app available). The action is objectively run, Blockchain-style.
In other words, I can unilaterally and without permission deploy code to the Ethereum chain, at the price of "writing the code" and "paying the Ethereum fees to do so." And when I do that, the ENTIRE CHAIN must follow.
That's closer to "a computer" that just "a listing of optional scripts."
but how does ethereum enforce that nodes run the scripts? right now it sounds like is just the protocol definition plus what normal node codebases do, but what if they dont want to?
All the code and calls to run it is stored on chain. When it's committed to chain every single validator node suppose not just record results of the execution, but run the code.
To host validator node you stake ETH which is serve as collateral in case your node misbehave, go offline, etc.
If specific validator cheats at any point and end up approving bogus data he'll be punished by loss of staked ETH and penalty grows with each attempt to cheat. If multiple validators commit the same bogus data they'll get even more severe punishment for coordinated attack on chain.
It doesn't take a supercomputer to host ETH node so there is absolutely no incentive to cheat unless you actual bad actor who is attempting 51% attack. And to perform said 50% attack you will need like $75-100B+ of ETH stacked since currently there is $150B of ETH stacked for Proof of Stake. So this kind of attack really doesn't make any financial sense.
Stripe kinda does have use for this it turn their platform into a much more powerful tool where you can do extremely sophisticated economy based financial automation on your funds held with stripe. Essentially you get some crazy good developer experience which is not possible on tradfi rails.
udev is probably referencing smart contracts(which turn blockchains from shared dbs to shared state-machines), and zk(which allows for cryptographic guarantees of arbitrary computation, and facts about said computation without revealing details of computation). Those are two major innovations on the tech side, there's also rollups, blobs, and a whole host of other interesting developments in the EVM(ethereum virtual machine) ecosystem.
