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Ethereum price goes up nearly 50 percent in under a week

130 points by campbelltown 10y ago

sarayevo 10y ago
The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin (for those who don't know, ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution) and the development ecosystem is much more vibrant and promising. We haven't seen the last of this.
- merlincorey 10y ago
  > The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin Opinion > ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution Fact -- but double edged sword (my opinion, of course). I have personally been skeptical of ETH for years as their team have been promising the moon for a variety of use cases. For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law". This is in contrast to the line they were pushing for years that the code IS law. Then someone found a bug in the first major DAO and the code was quickly changed. So much for that. If you think that is gonna be the last issue along these lines, I've got a bridge to sell you, too.
  - splintercell 10y ago
    > For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law". Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care. Clearly the biggest blow to ETH is NOT the DAO fork. If ETH is not above bitcoin, then among all the reasons I can list, its decision to hard fork is not one of it (because if that is the case then ETC would have been the market leader).
    - merlincorey 10y ago
      > Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care. I'm not sure how my view is distorted - it might be naive, I concede. My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
      - splintercell 10y ago
        I am calling your view of 'code is law' as a distorted view because it isn't that the other side doesn't think that code is law, it's just what do we consider 'the law' to be. In my world view, if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties. Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication. Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain. Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough. It wasn't a bounty contract. If that was known beforehand, then there is no way it would have accrued $150 million worth of ethers. > My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics. Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that Ethereum is never going to succeed because they didn't honor the hacker's bounty?
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code. There's no reason that smart contracts require Turing completeness (no real world program requires it, for that matter), and software theorem proving will be required for me to take smart contracts seriously. We need to be able to prove things about the contract execution for it to be safe to trust "code as contract". Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so.
    - merlincorey 10y ago
      I think this is a great response, especially because I agree with the first part, and the second part gave me more to think about. > I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code. Absolutely! My premise is that with turing completeness comes more chances for shooting in the foot. > Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so. This is great insight. I think for me, personally, the problem I have is that it seems like there isn't much politics involved at all... a completely centralized and small group made a decision and the great majority of users followed right along (as we would expect them to). This is not quite how it is (or was anyway) sold to people as a concept.
      - computerwizard 10y ago
        Checkout Byteball. I think it has a strong future and the technology is novel. https://Byteball.org https://Byteball.org
        10y ago
  - ferologics 10y ago
    what's your definition of law?
- Xophmeister 10y ago
  Both BTC and ETH have been (generally) climbing lately; ETH especially. However, I feel (and I should be clear that this is all my own, anecdotal opinion) like -- even if it is superior -- BTC was "first to market" in a popularist sense and thus probably a better long-term bet. ETH is Betamax to BTC's VHS.
  - adeptus 10y ago
    >ETH is Betamax to BTC's VHS. More like the Netflix to BTC's VHS I personally equate it to DOS vs Android. The potential for ETH is massive... granted security concerns, scalability, POS are equally massive hurdles to overcome.
AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
I'll get the dumb stuff out of the way. No, the hard fork for TheDAO did not sacrifice our principles. No it wasn't a centralized bailout. Yes, there were SOME shady things that went down, but all very minor. It was a very confusing time for all. Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one. Congratulations. Let me direct you to Ethereum Classic. You can't complain about a hard fork when you have a community that upholds the original version. Go complain there. The rest of us are moving forward and helping develop a technology that will ultimately be fully decentralized and uncensorable. In the meantime, our community respects our centralized development team that is super awesome and competent and are committed to changing the world. Best analogy I can come up with is Elon Musk trying to develop automated driving cars, and a few people tragically get killed along the way due to it. That doesnt mean automated driving cars are bad, or that development of the technology should cease. Here's a great list of upcoming projects https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_slowly_starting_to_come_together/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_sl...
- merlincorey 10y ago
  > No, the hard fork for TheDAO did not sacrifice our principles. As an observer, yes, it definitely did. It's the thing that has most turned me off of ETH.
  - AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
    Great, dont use it. Clearly, others don't share your perspective. That's the beauty of decentralized systems. No one is forcing you to use Ethereum or Bitcoin or anything. But your opinion on its usefulness as an outsider is much less meaningful.
    - merlincorey 10y ago
      Your attitude here isn't exactly endearing me, and I would imagine some third party observers as well. Your team has always been a bit combative with regards to criticism, from my experience. That said... I am actually more interested in using ethereum classic than I am ethereum, uh, central.
iMuzz 10y ago
The recent price movement could be attributed to the formation of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance[0]. Here's a description from the website for what the EEA aims to do. > "The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. Together, we will learn from and build upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real-world production – Ethereum – to define enterprise-grade software capable of handling the most complex, highly demanding applications at the speed of business." Some big names that are a part of the Alliance include Microsoft, Intel, J.P. Morgan, and Accenture. The rest are on the site! [0]> http://entethalliance.org/ http://entethalliance.org/
- kbody 10y ago
  Unless the formation of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance supports about 10 or so other cryptocurrencies[1], then the formation is not really the reason. Imo the Bitcoin ETF rejection produced a knee-jerk reaction and caused a lot of potential (in-case-of-approved-ETF) Bitcoin investors to diversify for now with other cryptos as well, then or at the same time cryptotraders started pumping more. A lot of altcoins are in a crazy pump-and-dump cycles at the moment, so be cautious. As for Ethereum, no one in their right mind would base something so crucial on such risky and proven-damaging language/platform. Print all the press releases you want to present yourself innovative etc., but it's a rotten foundation if you care about security and reliability. At least I hope we will see some evolution on that side instead of dirty-patching security issues. [1] http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/
  - DennisP 10y ago
    It might be part of the reason, the ETH price went up dramatically between the EEA and the Bitcoin ETF decision.
  - ecesena 10y ago
    Or both.
  - reddytowns 10y ago
    > As for Ethereum, no one in their right mind would base something so crucial on such risky and proven-damaging language/platform. Print all the press releases you want to present yourself innovative etc., but it's a rotten foundation if you care about security and reliability. At least I hope we will see some evolution on that side instead of dirty-patching security issues. This is a bold statement to proclaim while providing no evidence. It's the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, for Christsakes!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
latenightcoding 10y ago
Ethereum brought a lot of geeky fun to my life, it's a great hobby for those interested in cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, compilers and so on. But, it was just that, a hobby. 90% of the people I met in Ethereum meetups and hackathons didn't really understand what Ethereum is, most big companies that invest in Ethereum just do it because they don't want to miss "the next big thing", not because Ethereum solves any of their problems. After the hard fork I stopped going to these meetups and hackathons.
- ferologics 10y ago
  I especially dislike the "let's make spotify, but on blockchain" approach the community has. They simply don't get that people won't switch over to their solution just because it's running ethereum blockchain.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    Are you kidding? Who doesn't want an Uber for the Blockchain, where they can enter into a smart contract with their driver before getting into the vehicle?!
    - flippyhead 10y ago
      I don't specifically want that. I don't not want it either.
      - OJFord 10y ago
        Perhaps it wasn't clear, bit I was kidding :)
        warkdarrior 10y ago
        Son, on the Internet you need to close your <sarcasm> tag.
      - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
anothercomment 10y ago
If there was a hard fork, shouldn't they report numbers for both versions? Or which version went up by 50%?
- james_niro 10y ago
  The new version the old version is at $1.60 +-
- jacoblambda 10y ago
  both went up by similar percents.
antocv 10y ago
Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and too expensive. Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand. Declarative smart contracts, over at https://byteball.org/ https://byteball.org/
- schmichael 10y ago
  Using bytes as the unit of currency is awful. That's like releasing a car whose dashboard displays speed in liters.
  - Y_Y 10y ago
    Incidentally, the SI unit of fuel efficiency is 1/m^2, the "per-square-metre", not this miles per gallon crap.
    - K0SM0S 10y ago
      Miles is a unit of measure, ultimately meters in the SI. A gallon is a volume, liters in the SI, or more fundamentally a fraction of cube-meters (m^3). m / m^3 = 1/m^2 Which is the unit for fuel efficiency. It's expressed in imperial units but it's physically sound, not 'crap'. ;) In other parts of the world you'll see this expressed as "liters per 100km" usually.
      - Y_Y 10y ago
        Maybe my tongue-in-cheekness wasn't clear, sorry. MPG is more pervasive than you might think. Even in metric, European Ireland it's the typical unit, despite speeds being in km/h and fuel being sold by the litre. Since you seem to be interested, let me also add that litres are only accepted by, not part of, the SI. Also the SI spellings are "metre" and "litre".
        K0SM0S 10y ago
oldstrangers 10y ago
Neat story.
- RoboTeddy 10y ago
  Actually, it is -- it's interesting that many excited "users" of the software might not actually understand what it is.
  - latenightcoding 10y ago
    I always mention that because in my opinion many people don't try bitcoin because they don't fully understand it, well Ethereum is many times harder to explain.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't do this here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13862350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13862350 and marked it off-topic.
crypt1d 10y ago
The altcoin trading market went berserk after the ETF decision, so there is likely some correlation. I guess a lot of money was made off the volatility around that time, so it had to go somewhere. P.S. as I write this, poloniex went down.
wakkaflokka 10y ago
I put a fair bit of money into ETH immediately when I saw the NYT article on the announcement of the EEA. If I were to sell now, I will have made a very good bit of money from it. I'm at a crossroads where, given the EEA and their recent white paper about linking private blockchains the banks will potentially be using, with the public blockchain, makes me think I should stay in it. On the other hand, the skepticism in this forum (albeit from people who are far more knowledgeable about crypto currencies and markets than me) makes me feel like I should 1) sell it all, or 2) sell only enough to recoup my initial investment. Either way, the money I put into it was just fun money and wouldn't hurt if I lost it. It's a bit of a thrill to watch an asset appreciate in value that much within such a small period of time. The ultimate question is when to realize the gain or the loss. Humans have a distinct disposition wherein we tend to sell gaining assets earlier than we sell losing ones (the disposition effect), even in circumstances where it's detrimental to us. Is this playing out in my mind right now?
- DennisP 10y ago
  Commenters here were deeply skeptical of Ethereum during its crowdsale too. People who bought in and held anyway made a 100x gain, so far. Personally I develop smart contracts on Ethereum for a living, and business is good. The ecosystem is developing fast.
  - jcfrei 10y ago
    I didn't know you could already do this for a living. Care to share what kinds of smart contracts?
    - DennisP 10y ago
      I do partly new development, partly security audits for clients' code. Projects so far include an Ethereum-backed debit card, a gambling system, a currency backed by hours of labor, and ICOs ("initial coin offerings"). All my work so far is on startup projects for the public chain, but there's also corporate work for the EEA's private chain efforts. They said there's a severe shortage of skilled people. I've gotten two other full-time job offers and one for ongoing freelance, without really promoting myself at all. I'm just active in the community and blog a little.
NurAzhar 10y ago
ethereum = yahoo tezos = google choose
ecesena 10y ago
It also did 3x since Feb 1st. I used this spike to cash out half of my ETH bought in July, which basically gave me back in $ my initial investment. Interestingly, since July, roughly speaking both ETH and BTC doubled their prices. I was expecting ETH to go up, but I wasn't expecting BTC to be equally strong.
pmorici 10y ago
A lot of things have happened in the crypto currency world over the past three months. A lot of people attribute ETH's breakout to the EEA announcement or the ETF rejection. Those things while I'm sure they had some effect are unlikely the underlying driver of the recent price move. The current ETH price trend started in February. The other thing that happened in Feb. is that ETH's transaction volume started to rise after being essentially flat for the year prior. [0] The rise in ETH transactions roughly coincided with Bitcoin's blocks being consistently full and large backlogs in the Bitcoin transaction mem pool. [1] You can also look at Bitcoin's transaction volume graph and see that it's transaction volume has been growing throughout the year long bull market it is currently in. [2] ETH's price on the other hand was flat until February when it started to benefit from congestion in Bitcoin. Make of that what you will. [0] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year [2] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all [3] https://etherscan.io/chart/etherprice https://etherscan.io/chart/etherprice
codingmyway 10y ago
I see two reasons for this: 1) Bitcoin transaction fees increasing and ETH being the main alternative available on Coinbase, even though ETH is not meant to be a currency, more like AWS credits, and its supply isn't fixed so isn't a good store of value. 2) Everyone was holding onto their BTC in case the ETF decision lead to a surge of new money into bitcon. Now that is off the table they are seeking bigger returns in alts. Also new money is being pulling in by Dash hyping their version to those who missed out on the bitcoin bull and since Dash is nothing special now people have the idea that any other alt could be next.
zengr 10y ago
Its because of Barry Silbert's Ether trust. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/bitcoin-trust-s-silbert-to-launch-classic-ether-fund-this-month https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/bitcoin-t...

130 points by campbelltown 10y ago

The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin (for those who don't know, ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution) and the development ecosystem is much more vibrant and promising. We haven't seen the last of this.

merlincorey 10y ago
> The underlying technology here is far superior to that of bitcoin Opinion > ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution Fact -- but double edged sword (my opinion, of course). I have personally been skeptical of ETH for years as their team have been promising the moon for a variety of use cases. For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law". This is in contrast to the line they were pushing for years that the code IS law. Then someone found a bug in the first major DAO and the code was quickly changed. So much for that. If you think that is gonna be the last issue along these lines, I've got a bridge to sell you, too.
- splintercell 10y ago
  > For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law". Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care. Clearly the biggest blow to ETH is NOT the DAO fork. If ETH is not above bitcoin, then among all the reasons I can list, its decision to hard fork is not one of it (because if that is the case then ETC would have been the market leader).
  - merlincorey 10y ago
    > Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care. I'm not sure how my view is distorted - it might be naive, I concede. My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
    - splintercell 10y ago
      I am calling your view of 'code is law' as a distorted view because it isn't that the other side doesn't think that code is law, it's just what do we consider 'the law' to be. In my world view, if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties. Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication. Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain. Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough. It wasn't a bounty contract. If that was known beforehand, then there is no way it would have accrued $150 million worth of ethers. > My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics. Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that Ethereum is never going to succeed because they didn't honor the hacker's bounty?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code. There's no reason that smart contracts require Turing completeness (no real world program requires it, for that matter), and software theorem proving will be required for me to take smart contracts seriously. We need to be able to prove things about the contract execution for it to be safe to trust "code as contract". Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so.
  - merlincorey 10y ago
    I think this is a great response, especially because I agree with the first part, and the second part gave me more to think about. > I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code. Absolutely! My premise is that with turing completeness comes more chances for shooting in the foot. > Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so. This is great insight. I think for me, personally, the problem I have is that it seems like there isn't much politics involved at all... a completely centralized and small group made a decision and the great majority of users followed right along (as we would expect them to). This is not quite how it is (or was anyway) sold to people as a concept.
    - computerwizard 10y ago
      Checkout Byteball. I think it has a strong future and the technology is novel. https://Byteball.org https://Byteball.org
      - 10y ago
- ferologics 10y ago
  what's your definition of law?
Xophmeister 10y ago
Both BTC and ETH have been (generally) climbing lately; ETH especially. However, I feel (and I should be clear that this is all my own, anecdotal opinion) like -- even if it is superior -- BTC was "first to market" in a popularist sense and thus probably a better long-term bet. ETH is Betamax to BTC's VHS.
- adeptus 10y ago
  >ETH is Betamax to BTC's VHS. More like the Netflix to BTC's VHS I personally equate it to DOS vs Android. The potential for ETH is massive... granted security concerns, scalability, POS are equally massive hurdles to overcome.

AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago

I'll get the dumb stuff out of the way. No, the hard fork for TheDAO did not sacrifice our principles. No it wasn't a centralized bailout. Yes, there were SOME shady things that went down, but all very minor. It was a very confusing time for all. Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one. Congratulations. Let me direct you to Ethereum Classic. You can't complain about a hard fork when you have a community that upholds the original version. Go complain there. The rest of us are moving forward and helping develop a technology that will ultimately be fully decentralized and uncensorable. In the meantime, our community respects our centralized development team that is super awesome and competent and are committed to changing the world. Best analogy I can come up with is Elon Musk trying to develop automated driving cars, and a few people tragically get killed along the way due to it. That doesnt mean automated driving cars are bad, or that development of the technology should cease. Here's a great list of upcoming projects https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_slowly_starting_to_come_together/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_sl...

merlincorey 10y ago
> No, the hard fork for TheDAO did not sacrifice our principles. As an observer, yes, it definitely did. It's the thing that has most turned me off of ETH.
- AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
  Great, dont use it. Clearly, others don't share your perspective. That's the beauty of decentralized systems. No one is forcing you to use Ethereum or Bitcoin or anything. But your opinion on its usefulness as an outsider is much less meaningful.
  - merlincorey 10y ago
    Your attitude here isn't exactly endearing me, and I would imagine some third party observers as well. Your team has always been a bit combative with regards to criticism, from my experience. That said... I am actually more interested in using ethereum classic than I am ethereum, uh, central.

iMuzz 10y ago

The recent price movement could be attributed to the formation of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance[0]. Here's a description from the website for what the EEA aims to do. > "The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. Together, we will learn from and build upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real-world production – Ethereum – to define enterprise-grade software capable of handling the most complex, highly demanding applications at the speed of business." Some big names that are a part of the Alliance include Microsoft, Intel, J.P. Morgan, and Accenture. The rest are on the site! [0]> http://entethalliance.org/ http://entethalliance.org/

kbody 10y ago
Unless the formation of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance supports about 10 or so other cryptocurrencies[1], then the formation is not really the reason. Imo the Bitcoin ETF rejection produced a knee-jerk reaction and caused a lot of potential (in-case-of-approved-ETF) Bitcoin investors to diversify for now with other cryptos as well, then or at the same time cryptotraders started pumping more. A lot of altcoins are in a crazy pump-and-dump cycles at the moment, so be cautious. As for Ethereum, no one in their right mind would base something so crucial on such risky and proven-damaging language/platform. Print all the press releases you want to present yourself innovative etc., but it's a rotten foundation if you care about security and reliability. At least I hope we will see some evolution on that side instead of dirty-patching security issues. [1] http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/
- DennisP 10y ago
  It might be part of the reason, the ETH price went up dramatically between the EEA and the Bitcoin ETF decision.
- ecesena 10y ago
  Or both.
- reddytowns 10y ago
  > As for Ethereum, no one in their right mind would base something so crucial on such risky and proven-damaging language/platform. Print all the press releases you want to present yourself innovative etc., but it's a rotten foundation if you care about security and reliability. At least I hope we will see some evolution on that side instead of dirty-patching security issues. This is a bold statement to proclaim while providing no evidence. It's the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, for Christsakes!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

latenightcoding 10y ago

Ethereum brought a lot of geeky fun to my life, it's a great hobby for those interested in cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, compilers and so on. But, it was just that, a hobby. 90% of the people I met in Ethereum meetups and hackathons didn't really understand what Ethereum is, most big companies that invest in Ethereum just do it because they don't want to miss "the next big thing", not because Ethereum solves any of their problems. After the hard fork I stopped going to these meetups and hackathons.

ferologics 10y ago
I especially dislike the "let's make spotify, but on blockchain" approach the community has. They simply don't get that people won't switch over to their solution just because it's running ethereum blockchain.
- OJFord 10y ago
  Are you kidding? Who doesn't want an Uber for the Blockchain, where they can enter into a smart contract with their driver before getting into the vehicle?!
  - flippyhead 10y ago
    I don't specifically want that. I don't not want it either.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      Perhaps it wasn't clear, bit I was kidding :)
      - warkdarrior 10y ago
        Son, on the Internet you need to close your <sarcasm> tag.
    - yazaddaruvala 10y ago

anothercomment 10y ago

If there was a hard fork, shouldn't they report numbers for both versions? Or which version went up by 50%?

james_niro 10y ago
The new version the old version is at $1.60 +-
jacoblambda 10y ago
both went up by similar percents.

antocv 10y ago

Turing complete smart contracts are a problem, we will make mistakes, The DAO showed. Programmers can not make perfect software, formal logic is too hard and too expensive. Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand. Declarative smart contracts, over at https://byteball.org/ https://byteball.org/

schmichael 10y ago
Using bytes as the unit of currency is awful. That's like releasing a car whose dashboard displays speed in liters.
- Y_Y 10y ago
  Incidentally, the SI unit of fuel efficiency is 1/m^2, the "per-square-metre", not this miles per gallon crap.
  - K0SM0S 10y ago
    Miles is a unit of measure, ultimately meters in the SI. A gallon is a volume, liters in the SI, or more fundamentally a fraction of cube-meters (m^3). m / m^3 = 1/m^2 Which is the unit for fuel efficiency. It's expressed in imperial units but it's physically sound, not 'crap'. ;) In other parts of the world you'll see this expressed as "liters per 100km" usually.
    - Y_Y 10y ago
      Maybe my tongue-in-cheekness wasn't clear, sorry. MPG is more pervasive than you might think. Even in metric, European Ireland it's the typical unit, despite speeds being in km/h and fuel being sold by the litre. Since you seem to be interested, let me also add that litres are only accepted by, not part of, the SI. Also the SI spellings are "metre" and "litre".
      - K0SM0S 10y ago

oldstrangers 10y ago

Neat story.

RoboTeddy 10y ago
Actually, it is -- it's interesting that many excited "users" of the software might not actually understand what it is.
- latenightcoding 10y ago
  I always mention that because in my opinion many people don't try bitcoin because they don't fully understand it, well Ethereum is many times harder to explain.
dang 10y ago
Please don't do this here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13862350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13862350 and marked it off-topic.

crypt1d 10y ago

The altcoin trading market went berserk after the ETF decision, so there is likely some correlation. I guess a lot of money was made off the volatility around that time, so it had to go somewhere. P.S. as I write this, poloniex went down.

wakkaflokka 10y ago

I put a fair bit of money into ETH immediately when I saw the NYT article on the announcement of the EEA. If I were to sell now, I will have made a very good bit of money from it. I'm at a crossroads where, given the EEA and their recent white paper about linking private blockchains the banks will potentially be using, with the public blockchain, makes me think I should stay in it. On the other hand, the skepticism in this forum (albeit from people who are far more knowledgeable about crypto currencies and markets than me) makes me feel like I should 1) sell it all, or 2) sell only enough to recoup my initial investment. Either way, the money I put into it was just fun money and wouldn't hurt if I lost it. It's a bit of a thrill to watch an asset appreciate in value that much within such a small period of time. The ultimate question is when to realize the gain or the loss. Humans have a distinct disposition wherein we tend to sell gaining assets earlier than we sell losing ones (the disposition effect), even in circumstances where it's detrimental to us. Is this playing out in my mind right now?

DennisP 10y ago
Commenters here were deeply skeptical of Ethereum during its crowdsale too. People who bought in and held anyway made a 100x gain, so far. Personally I develop smart contracts on Ethereum for a living, and business is good. The ecosystem is developing fast.
- jcfrei 10y ago
  I didn't know you could already do this for a living. Care to share what kinds of smart contracts?
  - DennisP 10y ago
    I do partly new development, partly security audits for clients' code. Projects so far include an Ethereum-backed debit card, a gambling system, a currency backed by hours of labor, and ICOs ("initial coin offerings"). All my work so far is on startup projects for the public chain, but there's also corporate work for the EEA's private chain efforts. They said there's a severe shortage of skilled people. I've gotten two other full-time job offers and one for ongoing freelance, without really promoting myself at all. I'm just active in the community and blog a little.

NurAzhar 10y ago

ethereum = yahoo tezos = google choose

ecesena 10y ago

It also did 3x since Feb 1st. I used this spike to cash out half of my ETH bought in July, which basically gave me back in $ my initial investment. Interestingly, since July, roughly speaking both ETH and BTC doubled their prices. I was expecting ETH to go up, but I wasn't expecting BTC to be equally strong.

pmorici 10y ago

A lot of things have happened in the crypto currency world over the past three months. A lot of people attribute ETH's breakout to the EEA announcement or the ETF rejection. Those things while I'm sure they had some effect are unlikely the underlying driver of the recent price move. The current ETH price trend started in February. The other thing that happened in Feb. is that ETH's transaction volume started to rise after being essentially flat for the year prior. [0] The rise in ETH transactions roughly coincided with Bitcoin's blocks being consistently full and large backlogs in the Bitcoin transaction mem pool. [1] You can also look at Bitcoin's transaction volume graph and see that it's transaction volume has been growing throughout the year long bull market it is currently in. [2] ETH's price on the other hand was flat until February when it started to benefit from congestion in Bitcoin. Make of that what you will. [0] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year [2] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all [3] https://etherscan.io/chart/etherprice https://etherscan.io/chart/etherprice

codingmyway 10y ago

I see two reasons for this: 1) Bitcoin transaction fees increasing and ETH being the main alternative available on Coinbase, even though ETH is not meant to be a currency, more like AWS credits, and its supply isn't fixed so isn't a good store of value. 2) Everyone was holding onto their BTC in case the ETF decision lead to a surge of new money into bitcon. Now that is off the table they are seeking bigger returns in alts. Also new money is being pulling in by Dash hyping their version to those who missed out on the bitcoin bull and since Dash is nothing special now people have the idea that any other alt could be next.

zengr 10y ago

Its because of Barry Silbert's Ether trust. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/bitcoin-trust-s-silbert-to-launch-classic-ether-fund-this-month https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-09/bitcoin-t...