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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/B

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.

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.