61–70 of 95 posts
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> Because Ether is actually usable (even without smart contracts) as a form of money I'm curious, how many drug dealers do you know that accept Ether?
I'm curious, why does this matter? How many drug dealers do you know accept cash?
Any time I read about Ether I think about this - "12 Million ETH were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers..." At today's rate that's $5,860,200,000 USD. Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? How is that a fair currency? I've read there were only 60 some "early contributors". Where's…
Back in 2014 it made sense to divest a small proportion from bitcoin if you made significant gains. Fresh, crypto-wealthy people with little to no investing experience (or even basic wealth management) tended to look to new cryptocurrency projects rather than fiat vehicles for divestment. Say what you will about that line of thinking, but it paid off for anyone that held onto their presale ether. At the time there were many new similar projects running presales. Some of those are now at a loss based on bitcoin's value, others are breaking even or failed and ethereum has gone parabolic.
The going rate if you participated near the beginning of the ethereum presale was 2000ETH/BTC which was ~$600 at the time. This was an easy gamble for anyone with double digit bitcoins and the foresight to invest conservatively. One bitcoin invested in the ethereum presale is now worth nearly $1M.
Does it make sense invest in this space now as an independent investor? Definitely not. The signal to noise ratio is god awful, the economics don't make sense (to me, at least), the sharks are circling and it is going to take a long time for the technology to catch up with the hype.
When we see crashes of epic proportions I believe it is going to bring heavy-handed regulation and many are going to lose everything. People will be looking for blood and they will look to projects like ethereum for their pound of flesh.
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> $5,860,200,000 USD This value is influenced by free decisions of people, like you, who decide to invest in it. If those people (just like you) would decide that the developers are getting an unfair share and therefore, the currency is not valuable for them, Etherium wouldn't have such valuation. But for some strange reason, people don't care about how much do developers get and how "fair" their compensation is, as…
Life isn't fair. Do I think its fair some people get born with billions of dollars to their name? Probably not. Do I care? I honestly don't. Find and create your own path.
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> Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? Why does Larry Page or Google Engineer #1 own billions of dollars of Google stock? Because he was there on day 1 and you weren't :)
I know the US Government oversaw the Google IPO and the stocks weren't printed out of thin air. In the Ether ICO, a big whale friend of Vitalik could have sent his Bitcoin in during the ICO sale, got Ether for it, then Vitalik sent him his Bitcoin back. Poof, Ether printed out of thin air - there is no way to prove this did not happen. That is the problem with these ICOs vs. using Proof of Work to fairly distribute t…
It becomes notibly problematic if the total distribution is produced within a small window of time, locking out entire swaths of the population to be at the whim of horders (assuming there would be a genuine demand for the supply).
Any time I read about Ether I think about this - "12 Million ETH were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers..." At today's rate that's $5,860,200,000 USD. Who were these early contributors, how much did each get, and why do they get to have 12.5% of the entire economy on day 1? How is that a fair currency? I've read there were only 60 some "early contributors". Where's…
Early developers used this 12.5% to bootstrap projects and also to sustain themselves using ETH as a salary. On the early days ETH was pretty cheap so you can imagine them burning through a lot of it. I would say they hold much less nowadays. Lets say 4%. And the more they hold, the better for the community as a whole as they have more at stake for the project to succeed.
Even if one provided blockchain transaction logs, they might just be moving funds to wallets owned by the same user.
It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead, setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required to move it forward. Because everybody and…
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In cryptocurrencies this coin was essentially a pre-mine which is done specifically to enrich the creators without any expense to themselves. Say what you want about bitcoin, but Satoshi Nakamoto earned his coins fairly (even though he may never access them) and created a fair and level playing field for everyone who started mining alongside him. Further the vague wording about the supply size means it is unlikely th…
huh? btc was premined by Satoshi and early contributors too. while nobody can confirm which of the early wallets are his, the value of the premined btc coins is likely higher than the Ethereum premine. this is the nature of all the PoW coins. The early contributors take the most risk and the most reward (if the coin succeeds).
The difficulty curve often further benefits early miners to be taking minimal risk when the design is reverse logarithmic.
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Afaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin, very cheaply, and near instantaneous (e.g. little to no transaction backlog). The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network.
> Afaik Ethereum is already processing double the transactions of Bitcoin I was talking just about Ether, what happens to time/fees if number of transactions goes 1000x? > The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network I don't think it's a problem of Bitcoin. It has its pros and cons,…
At this rate we'll have 10 forks with minor changes in 5 years, and that just isn't good. Some pragmatism in working towards a common goal should be expected.
Unless people believe the current state of Bitcoin is good enough to be digital gold. It might very well be.
It strikes me as an (non-invested) outsider that Ethereum seems to benefit from having a figure like Vitalik who can act as a Torvalds-esque figurehead, setting the project's technical direction. And that, in contrast, the non-participation of Satoshi Nakamoto has left a power vacuum at the heart of Bitcoin, which results in the kind of bloody and attritional battles required to move it forward. Because everybody and…
But they are not really competitors. Bitcoin is digital gold. It may survive without any innovation in the future. For payment it is being distrupted by currencies like Dash. Ethereum is supposed to be a DApp platform, but because of its scalability problems there is a high chance that it will be distrupted by something like EOS. (The price of EOS skyrocketed after Vitalik's presentation about Ethereum scaling plans.…
Do they have something up and running yet?
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But they are not really competitors. Bitcoin is digital gold. It may survive without any innovation in the future. For payment it is being distrupted by currencies like Dash. Ethereum is supposed to be a DApp platform, but because of its scalability problems there is a high chance that it will be distrupted by something like EOS. (The price of EOS skyrocketed after Vitalik's presentation about Ethereum scaling plans.…
I'm not voting you down, but can you explain to me why EOS is (or could be) better than Ethereum? Everything I've read has been more negative than positive. Do they have something up and running yet?
EOS uses DPos (delegated proof of stake). This means that token holders vote for block producers: 21 block producers are voted in to produce blocks in a round-robbin manner. In the future these block producers will be huge computer clusters in data centers. The whole network has only 21x redundancy in it, and there is no proof of work. Ethereum currently has Nx redundancy, where N is the number of nodes, and nodes are supposed to be as small as laptops. This way currently EOS is the only blockchain that can reach VISA level transactions/second. There are tons of things I am excited about in EOS (like contracts are written in WebAssembly instead of Solidity.)
They have working software on Github, people are running their own testnets. There will be a public testnet in December. But what is more important is that the CTO is the creator of already working high-performance DPos blockchains: BitShares and Steemit. The Steemit blockchain has the highest traffic currently among all blockchains.
The only technical critisism against EOS I heard is that some people say that DPos easily becomes centralized. I think proof of work can become much more easily centralized because in the end if one entity can get the electricity even slightly cheaper than others, it will be the only entity that can be able to mine profitably. This is explained by EOS CTO in more detail here:
https://steemit.com/eos/@dan/in-defense-of-consortium-blockc...