Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#111

Post by headcanon » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 7:50 PM UTC

pazimzadeh wrote: post #22

Between this and Fred Wilson's recent comments, it's pretty neat seeing a meme take shape right before our eyes. I'm not saying this article is wrong, but that it offers little substance. My pet theory is that Ethereum will transiently surpass Bitcoin in market cap in the next weeks, triggering a 5x surge in Bitcoin's price. Ethereum will then follow, and what happens next is anyone's guess. Why do I think that? Uh..…

why would it trigger a surge in bitcoin's price? The event is unprecented, and will happen during a time of uncertainty in BTC's future, due to the impending hard fork. It would seem to me that the event would cause ETH to surge instead.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#112

Post by komaromy » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 7:53 PM UTC

pdog wrote: post #97

komaromy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of all ETH is currently held in ICO accounts?

There are approximately 92 million ETH outstanding. It's much harder to measure market liquidity on the various exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) markets. With hundreds of ICOs popping up, it's difficult to say what impact they have on the market. Bancor raised approximately 400,000 ETH in their recent ICO, or 0.4% of all ETH outstanding, and the BAT sale raised 156,250 ETH. Prior to the attack, the DAO had attrac…

Hundreds? I'd struggle to name twenty and I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about the scene.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#113

Post by root_axis » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #106

root_axis wrote: post #37

> As a “hard fork” looms, which looks set to split Bitcoin into two separate currencies that will have to fight for custody of the Bitcoin moniker This already happened to eth when the creators hard forked the chain in an effort to roll back operations of an eth application that was used in a way that the creators did not anticipate. If this didn't kill ethereum why would it be a problem for bitcoin? Fortunately for…

> just toy applications that have no practical purpose What? Look at all the ICOs: https://mona.co/ and this: http://www.coindesk.com/150-million-tim-draper-backed-bancor... and here more: https://www.coingecko.com/ico?locale=en

> https://mona.co

Sound great, like most cryptocurrency marketing hype... where is the product? How do I get my hands on it? Let me guess "coming soon".

> http://www.coindesk.com/150-million-tim-draper-backed-bancor...

Ok, so a bunch of people spent their money on eth internet tokens... what exactly is the practical use case here?

> https://www.coingecko.com/ico?locale=en

So you've linked to a huge list of projects begging for donations. If you don't mind, can you pick just one project out of that list that actually has a product or service I can use today and explain to me why this wasn't already possible without cryptocurrencies?

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#114

Post by theptip » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 7:59 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #76

theptip wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two ways of interpreting "online payments" here. Through the lens of ACH/wire payments, your point is spot on. However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc.; that's certainly how I interpreted the sentence. I'd argue that those services are better comparisons for P2P payments, especially in the US, where most consumers are not able or inclined to give out their bank information to receive an ACH payme…

"However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc." And my remark is still applicable there, since they're basically just frontends to the traditional ACH/wire payment system (at least in the case of Paypal; I haven't used Venmo much, so I'm not as familiar with how it works). Unless Paypal is paying the seller before receiving actual funds from the buyer, I'm not really seeing how this would be any different of…

Well, in that case I disagree with your point ;)

From a user's perspective, the transaction is confirmed when the app says "transaction confirmed", i.e. the second you press the "send money" button. I think that's what the OP was getting at.

As you correctly point out, the transaction could still bounce if the user has insufficient funds, but that's not in the happy path. Most users' experience with Venmo/Paypal is that they get a "confirmation" immediately, and then they move on. The happy path for a BTC transaction involves minutes to hours of time without even getting a _provisional_ ACK from the network, at any point in which your payment could fail and require a retry, or the payor could cancel.

(The time taken to finalize the payment is much less with BTC, but since modern payment systems paper over that detail, I argue it is not relevant to the user-facing concern that the OP is commenting on. Perhaps it is something that users _should_ be more concerned about, but consider the use-case of trying to buy a cup of coffee with BTC. Nobody is going to wait 2 hours for a transaction to complete in that use-case.)

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#115

Post by avaer » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 7:59 PM UTC

wayn3 wrote: post #66

avaer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the value of the computation is strictly less than zero, because I could do it cheaper without using Ethereum at all.

thats like saying that the value of gasoline is less than zero because you could just walk the distance without polluting the environment. computing power is inherently valuable. the value of AWS is less than zero because you could just buy a computer and do the computation cheaper at home. duh.

The value of the trickle of gasoline to get me to my kitchen is less than zero. To use it I would have to waste considerable money architecting a way to get my car indoors.

The value of AWS is greater than zero because spending my day monitoring my server would be exponentially more costly than paying Amazon to do it at scale.

And Ether is worth less than zero (as a computation engine) because I could develop and run the computation in less time by opening vim, even if the Ether was free.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#116

Post by Jenya_ » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #58

DiNovi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say that about the internet 30 years ago...

And? You're remarking on a surface-level resemblance to the greatest communication and economic innovation in human history. It's a disingenuous comparison.

Judging by the size of financial industry, the electronic money which could be programmed to do things with money without human help 24 hours per day is a serious threat to many companies in finance.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#117

Post by headcanon » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 8:10 PM UTC

polskibus wrote: post #71

cap3 wrote: post #43

the only way to be in on ether is to hold it. That's true for individuals and for large institutions joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Behind the scenes, large institutions are buying up Ether and anticipating that it will become a part of the financial system (either that or it will become a shadow financial system, and they are therefore incentivized to be early adopters). There's no way to short ether or b…

Do you have a citation for large organizations buying up ether? I only came across articles mentioning corporations forking ethereum code and testing it out for other purposes.

https://entethalliance.org/members/

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#118

Post by F3L » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 8:18 PM UTC

I have a question regarding the morality of buying these coins: 1. In buying I provide liquidity and add to the perception they have value. 2. I am aware they are a big Ponzi scheme and vulnerable people may lose money they cannot afford to. 3. However altcoins may be a "too big to fail" Ponzi scheme, which like the property market, will rise seemingly forever. 4. I would rather be on the inside than the outside if it does. I'm on the outside of the property market in the UK after correctly assessing it was a pyramid, but wrongly believing it would crash and not be propped up. 5. Good and vulnerable people might lose their savings because I have enabled a perception that these markets are not pyramid schemes.

Please advise.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#119

Post by root_axis » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 8:22 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #109

root_axis wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pointless observation because you could have also said the same thing about all the useless crap that never amounted to anything.

Your observation is equally pointless. You're the one using it as an argument though.

My observation is not pointless, it is literally the point of the argument, namely that crypto projects blast out tons of hype but never pan out into anything useful. Your rebuttal was "well, other things that people said were overhyped turned out to be paradigm shifts", but what I'm telling you is that your rebuttal does not tell us anything meaningful because it is equally true of all the failures as well.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#120

Post by zby » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 8:27 PM UTC

marcell wrote: post #40

opportune wrote: post #2

Could someone that understands crypto better than me explain why Bitcoin's fees and transactions times have become so high all of a sudden? Is it just a matter of network congestion, or does it have as its root some underlying mathematical factor instead? Hoping to get a better answer here than on reddit. /r/bitcoin and /r/btc are both biased echo chambers.

Bitcoin blockchain has a limit of 1MB of transactions in a block. This was set in 2013, when Satoshi put it in place. He didn't give much explanation for it, but it was probably to avoid a spam attack. He said it could be raised later: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg151... There are arguments for and against increasing the blocksize. For: - Support more transactions per second - Lower fees f…

"Lower fees mean that miners make less money" - not really. There are two mechanisms:

  1. The congestion would mean bigger fees
  2. In bigger blocks there will be more transactions - so more fees in the block

The most probably cancel each other.

Actually the big miners seem to be in favour of the Bitcoin Unlimited big blocks. What they want to stop is SegWit which is needed for scaling bitcoin off chain with Lightning etc. There is a conspiracy theory about that - and it actually makes sense to me - which is that SegWit would eliminate ASICBoost (which is an optimization technique that is implemented in some ASIC miners). But there is also another narrative that Lightning would mean banking entering the Bitcoin community - and that is why it should be stopped.

Bitcoin can never become a good payment processor - this would require many orders of magnitude bigger blocks (now bitcoin can process about 7 transactions per second, VISA can process 50K transactions per second). And while storage for bigger blocks grows linearly - the other algos have probably worse complexity.