Hey @/all,
Who is still looking for answers? Will be here for a bit.
RE: Clock-syncing, yes, this appears to be something which bites people a fair bit, especially on Windows. You need the network syncing, and sometimes the actual time server you use seems to matter too. I thought this stuff get solved decades ago, but seemingly not!
RE: Getting stuck can be caused be a lack of peers. What is your peer count at the stuck point, anybody? Maybe also try rebooting and starting again?
RE: @smasma. At the moment we only have "full node" clients, which do need to download the whole blockchain. There has been work underway for months on "light clients", but it isn't complete yet. It will be orders of magnitude better soon. Just not today.
RE: "the way the apps will work". Most dapps will just look like normal web apps, or mobile apps, and use this stuff in the background. They might execute within a dapp browser (like Mist) or web browser (like MetaMask) or as normal mobile apps (with an embedded JSON-RPC client, or light client).
RE: "mining on laptop is so slow". I assume you actually mean blockchain sync, and see above. Actual mining requires a decent GPU, and will mainly be happening on desktop machines or servers. Until we switch to Proof of Stake, at which the computation requirements drop right down, so "staking", the new equivalent, will be able to run on a broader range of "always-on" devices.
@smasma RE "Would they need cryptocurrency to operate". Yes, they would. Every transaction on Ethereum has a cost, though that cost can be very low. It won't be zero, though. The caller always pays to call a smart contract.
That is very intentional, because it is a direct payment for the cost of running the network. With our existing "free" centralized services like Facebook and Google, free isn't really free. The price we pay for using the "free" services is advertising, surveillance, and the creation of these huge monopolies which control our lives. Just the growth of Google in itself, I think, shows very well how much value we give away by using "free" services.
There is, I believe, a proposal to add an option to allow for smart contracts to pay for their own "gas", ie. receiver pays model, so you could have services which ARE free to call. Those contracts would need to "topped up" from some other source, and could look more like traditional Internet services.
For storage, lots of people are using IPFS right now. The Foundation is also working on a new solution called Swarm, which would be like IPFS, but with an incentives layer too, to avoid tragedy of the commons and so you could pay for guaranteed storage.
basic proposal section, but wasn’t able to replicate the others. I am sure that I am doing something wrong but haven’t been able to figure out why. I am wondering if there are some sort of integration testset which I can read and understand how I can manually follow the same steps.