15 ms·

Ethereum Cloud Mining for Dummies

35 points by cdvonstinkpot 11y ago

davidgerard 11y ago
The Ethereum scam is detailed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3g5sk8/anyone_payed_attention_to_the_ethereum_trading/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3g5sk8/anyone_pay... tl;dr it's a pretty standard premined altcoin scam. All the "smart contract" babble is a cover for the premined altcoin scam. see also: Stellar.
- throwaway19345 11y ago
  Indeed Ethereum is a scam. Investors who purchased Ether credits from Ethereum were in fact purchasing what amounts to equity in the Ethereum company. If there was any doubt that this was illegal they went to great effort to create a Swiss company and then immediately dissolve it. Kraken and the CEO Jesse Powell are accessories after the fact.
  - yc1010 11y ago
    I was surprised Kraken (US company) are getting involved with Ethereum trading The whole project should be looked at by SEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfunding_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu... $18,439,086 raised, yet no legal company exists, no filling were made, the programmers all have Eastern european names and everything in shrouded in mystery but at least there is as sleek webpage to sucker people in like has happened with Stellar (how is that getting on?)
    - 13 11y ago
      > DEFINITELY NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE: Personally, I think $2.80/0.01 XBT is low and I would not be in a rush to sell at this price. But, I do understand if you're bearish and you wanted to dump in to the bulls ahead of everyone else. That's so financial advice, coming from the CEO of the Kraken exchange.
      - waterlesscloud 11y ago
        And bad financial advice at that, as the price is quite predictably half that at this moment and probably going much lower. There has to be a shakeout period in the price, no matter what. But as far as Ethereum itself being a scam... They raised money to produce a product and they've produced it. It's real. It exists. They've done what they said they would do. Whether it was worth the amount raised or not is fairly irrelevant at this point. They've delivered on what they promised.
        joosters 11y ago
        Is there any evidence that it actually does what it promised? There's a online blockchain to follow, and we can see that digital currency is changing hands, but that's like every other altcoin out there. The selling point of Ethereum seemed to be its "digital contracts" but has anyone made any significant contracts yet? The other day, there was a post on HN about a 'simple' example Ethereum contract, but it turned out to rely on lots of validators and oracles that 'would exist in the future'. So, it's not clear to me that they've delivered on their grandiose promises yet.
        13 11y ago
        That's been fairly clear from the start. Almost anything actually useful needs an oracle, and then you get back to the problem of wait, didn't Bitcoin already solve this problem half a decade ago? Once you get past the marketing you've got a rather faulty and expensive clone of Bitcoin with a fairly sketchy history.
    - dang 11y ago
      > the programmers all have Eastern european names That's at best a borderline slur and you don't need it to make your point. HN is an international site, and nobody here deserves to be categorized based on their name.
    - Quiark 11y ago
      As an Eastern European programmer I'm actually offended by your 'argument'.
- abrkn 11y ago
  If it's a scam, why do they have a Github organization with 50+ repos? go-ethereum alone has 6469 commits by 59 authors[1]. Would be the most elaborate and time consuming scam ever. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
  - yc1010 11y ago
    For 18 million bucks people would go to great lengths...
  - 13 11y ago
    Money buys a lot of commits. Give me a few million dollars and we'll get together a group of people that will build an entire computer from discrete transistors. People involved and amount of work doesn't make something worthwhile, reasonable, or viable, it just means that people work for money.
    - JorgeGT 11y ago
      I would give you a few million dollars to see that if I had them! It would be an incredibly useful project for education :D
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    "If it's a scam, why do they have [trappings of an organisation]?" - every dupe of an MLM, Ponzi or pump'n'dump ever, trying to reassure themselves. There's a reason scammers put up fronts.
    - semiel 11y ago
      It's not the _trappings_ of an organization that are important, it's the fact that they have lots of working code. The Ethereum network does exactly what it claims to do, and does it well.
      - davidgerard 11y ago
        You're saying you've verified this yourself then? This comment notes the curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
- DennisP 11y ago
  The Buttcoin post details the actions of one exchange. In a decentralized system you can't control everybody's actions. The "premined" coins mostly went to the people who pitched in for the crowdfund. That was open to anyone and well-publicized, and the money went towards Ethereum's development. They hired about thirty people. The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology, and it's the niftiest thing I've seen since Bitcoin. Ethereum is also the first production implementation of GHOST, which gives the same security with a 15-second block time that Bitcoin's algorithm gets with 10 minutes.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    > The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology As noted above, there's a curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
    - DennisP 11y ago
      You can actually download tools and run the contracts, and during the public stress test people posted contracts to the test network. Not every contract needs external data. A simple crowdfunding app, for example, doesn't need one. Hit the funding target by the deadline, forward to the fundraiser, otherwise return to donors. You can try out several sample contracts by going through the tutorials at ethereum.org. The only reason oracles are complicated at all is that people don't want to trust them. If you're willing to trust a particular account for some purpose, it's trivial. Trusting a majority vote among several named accounts is also simple. It's the fully decentralized and low-trust solutions that may take some effort, but that's not an issue with Ethereum's core technology.
joosters 11y ago
Bonus scam: Ethereum introduces the first ever verified pyramid scheme! http://pastebin.com/AGDsJL6j http://pastebin.com/AGDsJL6j
Paul_S 11y ago
This is as much of a scam as any product ever sold. The creators sell you a product that will make them money. You know that you are paying more than its cost because you want it. Am I describing ethereum or a toothbrush? The point is: even if they get stupid rich because of the block premined for the presale doesn't make the system better or worse.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Nobody buys toothbrushes on the basis that the toothbrush market will go to the moon. This is, however, the standard selling point for cryptocurrencies. As is claiming the selling point is something other than a claim it will go to the moon.
mkstowegnv 11y ago
Skepticism of individual cryptocurrencies is advisable as is skepticism of their critics. A lot of the vitriol and guttersniping is the product of rivalry between them, bitterness over the fall in value for many of them, and an almost religious division of opinion on the merits of sidechains versus separate currencies. At the moment the Wikipedia page for ethereum has no criticism section, as most controversial subjects do.
- brighton36 11y ago
  All currencies are religions.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  > At the moment the Wikipedia page for ethereum has no criticism section, as most controversial subjects do. At the moment the Wikipedia page reads like an advertisement.
ThomPete 11y ago
A lot of claims about this being a scam. As someone who have had same idea as Ethereum and not to scam people, can someone explain to me what makes it a scam.
- yc1010 11y ago
  Premining, Satoshi releases Bitcoin quietly to the world and doesnt ask for a red cent in advance from anyone despite creating one of the most important/innovative technologies of the last decade, and then disappears with his mined coins remaining for years unused and presumed lost. Ethereum guys sell Ether(s) in advance (why for bitcoin of course) promising the moon and the stars in the form of a cryptocurrency + scripting They put the horse before the cart IMHO, imagine if all those years ago Linus asked everyone to give him 18 and half million to develop Linux, would it be where it is now?
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Thats like saying the dotcom bubble was a scam isn't it? You can certainly phrase it like that but is that really whats going on. An actual scam?
    - brighton36 11y ago
      Many dotcoms were very scammy.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        A few were but most were just naive. Point is that calling Etherum a scam seem based on claiming to know the intentions of the creator, rather than an actual description of what Etherum is.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    So I take it you're against crowdfunding in general?
  - patcon 11y ago
leashless 11y ago
facepalm Bitcoin fundamentalism doesn't really change what we've shipped, and as you see products coming out based on our technology over the next few weeks, these questions will be settled, cold, hard and clear. Enough.
- leashless 11y ago
  (I should note that I'm the release coordinator for Ethereum)
- davidgerard 11y ago
  I look forward to you explaining this one: http://cointelegraph.com/news/115034/ethereum-launches-but-leaked-chat-says-project-needs-years-more http://cointelegraph.com/news/115034/ethereum-launches-but-l... If you look at how the money actually flowed, it went from the suckers to the premining pumpers who dumped it, and the devs will be paid another seven months before leaving the bagholders high and dry. Note the irrelevance of the promised smart contract/distributed botnet functionality - which, as that post notes, at present rates won't be working properly for years - to the actual, observed flow of cash. This is a repeat of Paycoin and Stellar. Totally standard premined altcoin pump and dump.
chrispeel 11y ago
Vitalik Buterin and others have been very clear that Ethereum may fail completely and that it's an experiment. Others (https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/495300992049479680 https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/495300992049479680) widely acknowledge that Ethereum is the most technically ambitious cryptocurrency since Bitcoin; it's not in the same category of coins which changed a parameter and created a new coin. I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I've offered a chance to Greg Maxwell, and Austin Hill the chance to talk to us and give a coherent critique of Ethereum; they did not take me up on the offer (We had Matthieu Riou give a brief critique of Ethereum at our meetup; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y). I'd be very happy for a coherent and respectful critique of Ethereum from one of you at one of our meetups; you're welcome to contact me; see http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/ http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/
davidgerard 11y ago
Looks like word got out about the premine: it's straight-up imploded upon hitting the exchanges, losing 75% in a day and still dropping. http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ Paycoin 2.0! (And as soon as it stabilised against Bitcoin, Bitcoin went down $20.)
- negamax 11y ago
  It was sold for 2000 per BTC. Still 10 times higher!
- DennisP 11y ago
  The first prices were posted while Kraken only allowed a few users to sell (Level-4 verified with collateral). It's not surprising that the price went down when the supply went up.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Graph still flat. So, when do you predict it will start going up uP UP? Please make a checkable prediction as to this.
    - DennisP 11y ago
      Not before there's a convenient gui with a nice collection of apps.

35 points by cdvonstinkpot 11y ago

The Ethereum scam is detailed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3g5sk8/anyone_payed_attention_to_the_ethereum_trading/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3g5sk8/anyone_pay... tl;dr it's a pretty standard premined altcoin scam. All the "smart contract" babble is a cover for the premined altcoin scam. see also: Stellar.

throwaway19345 11y ago
Indeed Ethereum is a scam. Investors who purchased Ether credits from Ethereum were in fact purchasing what amounts to equity in the Ethereum company. If there was any doubt that this was illegal they went to great effort to create a Swiss company and then immediately dissolve it. Kraken and the CEO Jesse Powell are accessories after the fact.
- yc1010 11y ago
  I was surprised Kraken (US company) are getting involved with Ethereum trading The whole project should be looked at by SEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfunding_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfu... $18,439,086 raised, yet no legal company exists, no filling were made, the programmers all have Eastern european names and everything in shrouded in mystery but at least there is as sleek webpage to sucker people in like has happened with Stellar (how is that getting on?)
  - 13 11y ago
    > DEFINITELY NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE: Personally, I think $2.80/0.01 XBT is low and I would not be in a rush to sell at this price. But, I do understand if you're bearish and you wanted to dump in to the bulls ahead of everyone else. That's so financial advice, coming from the CEO of the Kraken exchange.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      And bad financial advice at that, as the price is quite predictably half that at this moment and probably going much lower. There has to be a shakeout period in the price, no matter what. But as far as Ethereum itself being a scam... They raised money to produce a product and they've produced it. It's real. It exists. They've done what they said they would do. Whether it was worth the amount raised or not is fairly irrelevant at this point. They've delivered on what they promised.
      - joosters 11y ago
        Is there any evidence that it actually does what it promised? There's a online blockchain to follow, and we can see that digital currency is changing hands, but that's like every other altcoin out there. The selling point of Ethereum seemed to be its "digital contracts" but has anyone made any significant contracts yet? The other day, there was a post on HN about a 'simple' example Ethereum contract, but it turned out to rely on lots of validators and oracles that 'would exist in the future'. So, it's not clear to me that they've delivered on their grandiose promises yet.
        13 11y ago
        That's been fairly clear from the start. Almost anything actually useful needs an oracle, and then you get back to the problem of wait, didn't Bitcoin already solve this problem half a decade ago? Once you get past the marketing you've got a rather faulty and expensive clone of Bitcoin with a fairly sketchy history.
  - dang 11y ago
    > the programmers all have Eastern european names That's at best a borderline slur and you don't need it to make your point. HN is an international site, and nobody here deserves to be categorized based on their name.
  - Quiark 11y ago
    As an Eastern European programmer I'm actually offended by your 'argument'.
abrkn 11y ago
If it's a scam, why do they have a Github organization with 50+ repos? go-ethereum alone has 6469 commits by 59 authors[1]. Would be the most elaborate and time consuming scam ever. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
- yc1010 11y ago
  For 18 million bucks people would go to great lengths...
- 13 11y ago
  Money buys a lot of commits. Give me a few million dollars and we'll get together a group of people that will build an entire computer from discrete transistors. People involved and amount of work doesn't make something worthwhile, reasonable, or viable, it just means that people work for money.
  - JorgeGT 11y ago
    I would give you a few million dollars to see that if I had them! It would be an incredibly useful project for education :D
- davidgerard 11y ago
  "If it's a scam, why do they have [trappings of an organisation]?" - every dupe of an MLM, Ponzi or pump'n'dump ever, trying to reassure themselves. There's a reason scammers put up fronts.
  - semiel 11y ago
    It's not the _trappings_ of an organization that are important, it's the fact that they have lots of working code. The Ethereum network does exactly what it claims to do, and does it well.
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      You're saying you've verified this yourself then? This comment notes the curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
DennisP 11y ago
The Buttcoin post details the actions of one exchange. In a decentralized system you can't control everybody's actions. The "premined" coins mostly went to the people who pitched in for the crowdfund. That was open to anyone and well-publicized, and the money went towards Ethereum's development. They hired about thirty people. The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology, and it's the niftiest thing I've seen since Bitcoin. Ethereum is also the first production implementation of GHOST, which gives the same security with a 15-second block time that Bitcoin's algorithm gets with 10 minutes.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  > The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology As noted above, there's a curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
  - DennisP 11y ago
    You can actually download tools and run the contracts, and during the public stress test people posted contracts to the test network. Not every contract needs external data. A simple crowdfunding app, for example, doesn't need one. Hit the funding target by the deadline, forward to the fundraiser, otherwise return to donors. You can try out several sample contracts by going through the tutorials at ethereum.org. The only reason oracles are complicated at all is that people don't want to trust them. If you're willing to trust a particular account for some purpose, it's trivial. Trusting a majority vote among several named accounts is also simple. It's the fully decentralized and low-trust solutions that may take some effort, but that's not an issue with Ethereum's core technology.

joosters 11y ago

Bonus scam: Ethereum introduces the first ever verified pyramid scheme! http://pastebin.com/AGDsJL6j http://pastebin.com/AGDsJL6j

Paul_S 11y ago

This is as much of a scam as any product ever sold. The creators sell you a product that will make them money. You know that you are paying more than its cost because you want it. Am I describing ethereum or a toothbrush? The point is: even if they get stupid rich because of the block premined for the presale doesn't make the system better or worse.

davidgerard 11y ago
Nobody buys toothbrushes on the basis that the toothbrush market will go to the moon. This is, however, the standard selling point for cryptocurrencies. As is claiming the selling point is something other than a claim it will go to the moon.

mkstowegnv 11y ago

Skepticism of individual cryptocurrencies is advisable as is skepticism of their critics. A lot of the vitriol and guttersniping is the product of rivalry between them, bitterness over the fall in value for many of them, and an almost religious division of opinion on the merits of sidechains versus separate currencies. At the moment the Wikipedia page for ethereum has no criticism section, as most controversial subjects do.

brighton36 11y ago
All currencies are religions.
davidgerard 11y ago
> At the moment the Wikipedia page for ethereum has no criticism section, as most controversial subjects do. At the moment the Wikipedia page reads like an advertisement.

ThomPete 11y ago

A lot of claims about this being a scam. As someone who have had same idea as Ethereum and not to scam people, can someone explain to me what makes it a scam.

yc1010 11y ago
Premining, Satoshi releases Bitcoin quietly to the world and doesnt ask for a red cent in advance from anyone despite creating one of the most important/innovative technologies of the last decade, and then disappears with his mined coins remaining for years unused and presumed lost. Ethereum guys sell Ether(s) in advance (why for bitcoin of course) promising the moon and the stars in the form of a cryptocurrency + scripting They put the horse before the cart IMHO, imagine if all those years ago Linus asked everyone to give him 18 and half million to develop Linux, would it be where it is now?
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Thats like saying the dotcom bubble was a scam isn't it? You can certainly phrase it like that but is that really whats going on. An actual scam?
  - brighton36 11y ago
    Many dotcoms were very scammy.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      A few were but most were just naive. Point is that calling Etherum a scam seem based on claiming to know the intentions of the creator, rather than an actual description of what Etherum is.
- DennisP 11y ago
  So I take it you're against crowdfunding in general?
- patcon 11y ago

leashless 11y ago

facepalm Bitcoin fundamentalism doesn't really change what we've shipped, and as you see products coming out based on our technology over the next few weeks, these questions will be settled, cold, hard and clear. Enough.

leashless 11y ago
(I should note that I'm the release coordinator for Ethereum)
davidgerard 11y ago
I look forward to you explaining this one: http://cointelegraph.com/news/115034/ethereum-launches-but-leaked-chat-says-project-needs-years-more http://cointelegraph.com/news/115034/ethereum-launches-but-l... If you look at how the money actually flowed, it went from the suckers to the premining pumpers who dumped it, and the devs will be paid another seven months before leaving the bagholders high and dry. Note the irrelevance of the promised smart contract/distributed botnet functionality - which, as that post notes, at present rates won't be working properly for years - to the actual, observed flow of cash. This is a repeat of Paycoin and Stellar. Totally standard premined altcoin pump and dump.

chrispeel 11y ago

Vitalik Buterin and others have been very clear that Ethereum may fail completely and that it's an experiment. Others (https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/495300992049479680 https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/495300992049479680) widely acknowledge that Ethereum is the most technically ambitious cryptocurrency since Bitcoin; it's not in the same category of coins which changed a parameter and created a new coin. I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I've offered a chance to Greg Maxwell, and Austin Hill the chance to talk to us and give a coherent critique of Ethereum; they did not take me up on the offer (We had Matthieu Riou give a brief critique of Ethereum at our meetup; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y). I'd be very happy for a coherent and respectful critique of Ethereum from one of you at one of our meetups; you're welcome to contact me; see http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/ http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/

davidgerard 11y ago

Looks like word got out about the premine: it's straight-up imploded upon hitting the exchanges, losing 75% in a day and still dropping. http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ Paycoin 2.0! (And as soon as it stabilised against Bitcoin, Bitcoin went down $20.)

negamax 11y ago
It was sold for 2000 per BTC. Still 10 times higher!
DennisP 11y ago
The first prices were posted while Kraken only allowed a few users to sell (Level-4 verified with collateral). It's not surprising that the price went down when the supply went up.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Graph still flat. So, when do you predict it will start going up uP UP? Please make a checkable prediction as to this.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    Not before there's a convenient gui with a nice collection of apps.