What does $100 Ether mean?

> What do you think about the idea that people in failed states with unstable currencies would want to store their wealth in Bitcoin?

It's a stupid idea because there's always two parties to any transaction.

You know why they don't just store their wealth in dollars? Because nobody is insane enough to sell them dollars for a worthless piece of paper.

Bitcoin works the same way. How much Bitcoin would you give for a Zimbabwe Dollar during hyperinflation? Obviously none.

So you have yet another hard currency that nobody can get ahold of. What's the point, again?

> Or the idea that people would want to use it for international money transfers?

I buy things internationally all the time. It works pretty great, it costs me nothing and it costs the recipient 4.4% plus a fixed $0.30 per sale.

Plus if they try and screw me over somehow I get all my money back and try someone else, and they get slapped with a big-ass chargeback fee for being an asshole. How much are the chargeback fees in the Bitcoin model? Who do I call to get my money back?

Also, I can tell you for sure that Bitcoin costs quite a lot in fees to buy, sell, or trade. Each transaction is what, $0.50 in fees nowadays?

Insofar as Bitcoin represents a single world currency, the problem is that on a macro level this isn't a good idea. Separate currencies that can inflate/deflate (i.e. "appreciate" and "depreciate") are a way to levellize structural imbalances, and without this relief valve you can end up with total collapse instead of just workers who are upset that an iPhone costs $1000. Inflation is good, it reflects a growing economy, it's only when it turns into hyperinflation that this is problematic.

For a microcosm of this problem, you can see the ongoing problems with the structural imbalances between Greece and the high-earning German economies over the last 10 years. If they had currencies that could appreciate and depreciate, Greek labor would be very cheap on the international market. But since they're stuck in the Euro together, they can't do that.

The growth function for the money supply probably isn't optimal either, for these reasons. The ability to adjust the supply is critical for controlling both inflation and deflation, under various circumstances.

Because in practice, I'm trying to reason about the consequences of submitting a given transaction. A transaction can invoke many smart contracts in addition to mine. It's not enough for my code to be correct; every piece of code the transaction causes to run has to be correct as well.

>As soon as you actually try and sell your coins into the market, you see that you've eaten through the order book and driven the whole market down 10 percent. With

There is no way you could push down the market 10 percent today. Maybe back in 2011, or maybe in one of the lesser known cryptocurrency markets. But in Ethereum, you could unload a huge number of ETH and the price wouldn't budge. I'm assuming of course you're not an institutional trader, in which case of course Ethereum trading volumes are insufficient to absorb large trades without significant price movements.

>Smart contracts are seriously entirely useless unless you solve oracles.

Even a basic cryptocurrency transaction (sending ETH from Account 1 to Account 2) utilizes smart contracts. Having Turing Complete script evaluation just means the range of smart contracts possible becomes larger. So for example, schemes like Lightning Network are possible with Ethereum, without any changes to the protocol.

Besides explaining how we are looking for a nonce, I find it both difficult as well as elucidating to explain how whomever mined a block is rewarded.

The main point of block-chain is decentralization. It is thus important to emphasize that there isn't a central authority that rewards the mining of a block, but instead that the miner includes his reward in the block. It is also important (though less relevant) that the challenge of mining a block is a mathematical result of the last block. It too arises without a central authority.

Moving to even less relevant and yet interesting thing is that not all miners need be mining the same block. This is already the case for the 'reward' they are mining, but miners are free to exclude a transaction from their mining attempts. This then begets the matter of fees as a secondary incentive for mining besides the block reward.