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Good luck guys! I'm incredibly excited. This feels like a modern day Apollo launch.
Forgive the downvoters Father, they know not what they do. I'm right there with you on the edge of my seat. There might be no visible rocket explosion, but this will have a similar explosive impact on humanity. Major congrats to the Ethereum team!
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How do you say Bitcoin didn't succeed? The currency currently has a market cap of about $4,300,000,000 USD, processes transactions equivalent to $300,000,000 USD daily and can be used globally by anyone. It's been running completely decentralized for 6 years without compromise. It has probably succeeded far beyond most expectations for it.
If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.
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Forgive the downvoters Father, they know not what they do. I'm right there with you on the edge of my seat. There might be no visible rocket explosion, but this will have a similar explosive impact on humanity. Major congrats to the Ethereum team!
I'm actually enjoying the downvotes. It'll make this comment all the better when I link back to it in 5 years.
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How do you say Bitcoin didn't succeed? The currency currently has a market cap of about $4,300,000,000 USD, processes transactions equivalent to $300,000,000 USD daily and can be used globally by anyone. It's been running completely decentralized for 6 years without compromise. It has probably succeeded far beyond most expectations for it.
If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.
https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
On the other hand, some people argue that reducing waste is counterproductive as it also lowers the cost of a history rewriting attack.
Ethereum's PoW, while requiring 1GB of memory for efficient mining, remains so compute intensive that it only runs well on GPUs. Its inefficiency on CPUs is a conscious design choice to deter botnets.
Just to chime in with the obligatory: sounds-interesting-but-for-the-love-of-turing-it's-infuriatingly-hard-to-find-a-basic-description-of-what-it-actually-is.
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Is 90% of the market still speculation? Call me when it's not.
What does that even mean? If I were to add up every single transaction involving USD, what percentage do you think would be HFT and other Wall St speculation?
All of that HFT and Wall St. speculation is using leveraged bank credits.
Blockchain tech is finally getting interesting. Of the part of the population that is reasonable well informed about the workings of bitcoin, there is a huge sub population that, for one reason or another, regards it as less than a full viable implementation to accomplish the goals set forth in the whitepaper. I am among these. Although the bitcoin whitepaper represents a compelling call to action and a mathematical…
How do you say Bitcoin didn't succeed? The currency currently has a market cap of about $4,300,000,000 USD, processes transactions equivalent to $300,000,000 USD daily and can be used globally by anyone. It's been running completely decentralized for 6 years without compromise. It has probably succeeded far beyond most expectations for it.
Bitcoin did, however, succeed in proving that a distributed consensus mechanism can exist as a store of value. As you point out.
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Ditto, after reading several of the about pages, I'm still not sure what Ether is, or how it's used, or who the target audience is. Something in there about a decentralized platform for running apps, but I don't want to guess too deeply about what this means. Is it a cloud hosting platform that runs on Ether? Is the platform going to be used primarily for mining Ether? I'm not even sure, if anyone has a short descrip…
Ether is a "computational currency." You earn it by running computations on your computer. You spend it by purchasing processing power on other people's computers. The computation is software defined, so that customized "distributed apps" are possible. This is my outsiders understanding. I think there are potentially a lot of things that could be gotten wrong here - from the specific implementation and security measu…
1. A program written in ethereum can execute code at a predetermined point in the future, and there is as close to 100% certainty as possible that the code will execute as written (i.e. as long as a single ethereum user remains in the world at that date everybody's code is guaranteed to run exactly as written, even if it involves moving money between accounts.)
2. All computer programs are "open source" not just before a program is launched but also WHILE THE PROGRAM IS RUNNING- Nobody can run any code without having full transparency.
3. Users accounts are provably always in a state of complete anonymity (unless of course they do something to purposely reveal their identity) and can use all programs on the platform in this fully anonymous state.
4. Program authors are forced to explicitly document ahead of time all situations in which their program code might be modified in the future, making it much harder to have the "screw your user after they've committed to your platform" business model that's so popular among startups these days.
Those are just some of the properties of ethereum that come to mind.
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How do you say Bitcoin didn't succeed? The currency currently has a market cap of about $4,300,000,000 USD, processes transactions equivalent to $300,000,000 USD daily and can be used globally by anyone. It's been running completely decentralized for 6 years without compromise. It has probably succeeded far beyond most expectations for it.
If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only we could harness the computational power wasted on Bitcoin mining as heat, for useful distributed computing.
I don't understand this recurrent point: computer power is "wasted" almost everywhere. At least Bitcoin use this power to build a decentralized currency.
Pinning a GPU or ASIC at 100% undeniably draws more power than an everyday user idling around Facebook on their Macbook Air (~21W MAXED, so likely 7W)
Whether it's worth it is the question.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me $12Mn USD per day as the approximate global cost of electricity given the current global hashrate of 375Mn GH/s, for 0.05¢/kWh, assuming everyone is using reasonably modern, efficient (?) ASICs like a Spondoolies SP35 Yukon at 5.5TH/s for 3850W.
If that's for a $300Mn USD daily market, that's not particularly efficient. Nor particularly inefficient either, admittedly. Democratic, for sure ;)
EDIT: initially forgot to include some time units, thanks jsprogrammer!