Date: October 1st, 2017 12:38 PM
Author: Balding Mauve Heaven Gunner
https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/white_paper.pdf
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.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3749445&forum_id=7#34339423)