4 ms·

Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment

51 points by cookscar 9y ago

censoredforlife 9y ago
No it is not, and as far as crypto is concerned - mainstream media is almost always wrong. This really reads like PR for vitalik. Eth is great as a developer platform, and it can/does have a future. However, btc will remain the true king because of its decentralized nature.
- computerwizard 9y ago
  Ethereum has over 4.5x as many full nodes as Bitcoin, how is it more decentralized?
  - simplehuman 9y ago
    What are the absolute numbers?
  - AlwaysBCoding 9y ago
    Bitcoin also only has one client with one development team whereas Ethereum has multiple clients with multiple development teams. Tell me more about that legendary Bitcoin decentralization.
    - censoredforlife 9y ago
      Having one or more clients doesn't mean much. Eth is organizationally centralized because of the eth foundation. It literally has a dear leader (vitalik), and no different from crypto issued by, say, the fed. The entire point of crypto is that it tries to solve the problem with existing currency (fiat), which is too tightly controlled by a few individuals.
      - slashrsm 9y ago
        This! Everyone seems to be forgetting about this aspect, which is very important IMO.
      - vzcx 9y ago
        Is this actually solved by bitcoin? Is this actually solvable? I feel we're butting up against the Iron Law of Oligarchy, here. What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central roof to solve the proof-of-work. There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.
    - uncletammy 9y ago
      > Bitcoin also only has one client with one development team Nope. See below. https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/tree/segwit2x https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/tree/segwit2x
  - kbody 9y ago
    This is a common argument, but the state is quite different. Ethereum has supposedly 34k nodes, which includes light-nodes which merely hold the last state of the blockchain, that is not a full-node and heavily reduces the trustlessness and security of a cryptocurrency. Light-nodes are closer to an SPV than a Node. I haven't seen any source reporting only full-nodes which would be the proper comparison. On the other side the number ~7.5k nodes popup for Bitcoin, but that's wrong as well. Those are the full-nodes that are listening for new connections publicly. Not all the nodes of the Bitcoin network. Following [1] you can see the data from a seed DNS node of Bitcoin, which shows a number closer to reality which is 86k of actual full-nodes. [1]: http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html?2 http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...
- aarpmcgee 9y ago
  Careful about predicting the future!
- cgb223 9y ago
  Why? That's a big statement. Expand on it.
  - censoredforlife 9y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud
- bowmessage 9y ago
  nice bitcoin maximalism
willitpamp573 9y ago
Ethereum is an obvious ponzi pump and dump scam. I like how they frame the DAO hack as an opportunity for growth rather than a gross display of incompetence followed by a breaking of the original promise of immutability of the platform, which is what it was.
- kinghajj 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_what_exactly_is_the_fraud_in_ethereum/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_w...
  - 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
    care to post a TLDR?
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      It has this as a summary: "Ethereum is an unsecure, trust-requiring, centralized, mutable platform that runs stoppable apps and censors people Ethereum Foundation (EF) dislikes - the opposite of what it advertises itself as. Ethereum Foundation misrepresents what Ethereum is to prospective investors for increasing the value of the traded asset ETH while profiting financially. This means, by definition, Ethereum Foundation is participating in fraud by continuously misleading investors. Furthermore, the act of suddenly changing the properties of the unregistered security after the sale of the security in the initial coin offering (ICO) and/or on exchanges while profiting personally constitutes securities fraud. Additionally, Ethereum Foundation is connected to damaging the value of sold assets, damaging the value of competing assets, theft from competition, and market manipulation of competing assets for profit."
- narrator 9y ago
  Immutability is really the key to the whole cryptocurrency system. Unlike every previous currency system that has existed, duress can not be used to have a transaction reversed.
segmondy 9y ago
Unlike stocks which are regulated and you are not suppose to promote if you already own some. There is no such thing for crypto currency. I always view every article promoting digital currency like a pump and dump scheme.
- pthreads 9y ago
  That's right. In fact that has been happening with just about every cryptocurrency that trades on crypto-exchanges (and even those that don't).
- curiousgal 9y ago
  As a third world citizen, Bitocin is godsent to me, never have I been able to purchase stuff online and pay for books and services like a normal 21st century human being. the feeling of being connected in that way to the rest of the world is priceless and I owe it all to Bitcoin.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    What bookstores do you buy from that accept bitcoin?
    - diego 9y ago
      You can buy gift cards for lots of major retailers with bitcoin. You can even buy from amazon via purse.io.
      - gnodar 9y ago
        A lot of people use cash to buy giftcards, in order to pay for bitcoin anonymously. So now it's cash -> giftcard -> bitcoin -> giftcard -> physical thing. The future is odd.
      - Analemma_ 9y ago
        purse.io is a money laundering operation for stolen credit card numbers. If it hasn't been shut down yet and its operators arrested, it will be soon.
flunhat 9y ago
What is the advantage in creating an Ethereum smart contract over a regular contract in our legal system (using a lawyer and some pen and paper)? If code has bugs (and sufficiently complex code will always, always, always have bugs) you simply have to suffer the consequences (sorry for your loss) or the entire community can choose to execute a hard fork and rewrite history (see DAO). If a vanilla legal contract has some typos or even some semantic differences that lead to ridiculous outcomes, lawyers and judges will hash it out. People, not computers, make the final decisions in our legal system, so human errors are mostly tolerated. If I sneak a clause into a contract saying that the other party must pay me their entire salary every year, it would be voided in an instant. Not so if placed in a "smart" contract. Perhaps you could say that Ethereum is better than our legal system because it's decentralized. But I don't think it's enough to say something is better simply because it's decentralized. Why should I be afraid of a centralized legal system? We elect politicians, who choose judges (who have to be confirmed by legislative bodies whose members we also elect). Sure, it's not perfect, but it's hardly the tyrannical system that would make me turn to the bug-ridden wild west of Ethereum smart contracts. I think the only reasonable argument in favor of Ethereum contracts is that they are easier to create (less friction, don't need to hire a lawyer, etc), but that's hardly a good thing. Real life contracts are expensive for a reason, not because Rothschild & Co. have some other nefarious plans. You need lawyers to write good contracts and think through their consequences, as well as reasonable, human judges to decide issues when they arise. Ethereum, to me, seems a purely ideological creation, not one rooted in actual needs that people have. Sure, it's decentralized and immutable (unless a contract hurts the wrong people, lol) but did anyone really want that (except for those with ideological reasons, i.e. libertarians)? Not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to hear a strong opposing viewpoint on this.
- jurandom 9y ago
  I think the term "smart contract" is a misnomer. Sure, you could write a code similar to one I use: Store money and confirm that I am alive every year (by means of me sending a transaction to the contract). If I don't send this transaction, all money is released to my daughters account. This looks like a standard contract. Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and paper" umbrella.
RichardHeart 9y ago
1. Ethereum will always have more consensus failures than bitcoin. It has a larger attack surface, and competing implementations. 2. Ethereum will always be more risky because they abuse the "default option" power over apathetic nodes. Thus any regulator can just have them make aml/kyc/sec reg a requirement and bye bye efficiency. 3. Ethereum was always have more down time than bitcoin, check out 2017 for instance. (see point 1.) 4. Ethereum has 3x less reddit users, a couple x less twitter mentions, a few x less wallets, a few x less press, a few x less years of testing, less hardware wallets, less adoption in nearly every way. 5. Ethereum tricks devs into loser far more money with "smart" contracts that have bugs, than bitcoin does with accidentally sending change to the miner instead of to a new address. 6. Smart contracts will always be dumb as long as you have to trust a signal from the real, non digital world (oracle problem.) If you have to trust anyway, then just let the oracle do it all. 7. There's nearly no demand for the gas you're supposed to buy with ETH to make ETH valuable at all, unless you like it's speculative platform utility. Gambling on gambling. 8. Their blockchain is bloated grows faster than many users can download it. It's transactions per a second is maybe 3x bitcoins. It's very likely sharding and other solutions will not "work" if you care about immutability/trustlessness. 9. Ethereum is more centralized, more risky, down more often, and always will be.

51 points by cookscar 9y ago

No it is not, and as far as crypto is concerned - mainstream media is almost always wrong. This really reads like PR for vitalik. Eth is great as a developer platform, and it can/does have a future. However, btc will remain the true king because of its decentralized nature.

computerwizard 9y ago
Ethereum has over 4.5x as many full nodes as Bitcoin, how is it more decentralized?
- simplehuman 9y ago
  What are the absolute numbers?
- AlwaysBCoding 9y ago
  Bitcoin also only has one client with one development team whereas Ethereum has multiple clients with multiple development teams. Tell me more about that legendary Bitcoin decentralization.
  - censoredforlife 9y ago
    Having one or more clients doesn't mean much. Eth is organizationally centralized because of the eth foundation. It literally has a dear leader (vitalik), and no different from crypto issued by, say, the fed. The entire point of crypto is that it tries to solve the problem with existing currency (fiat), which is too tightly controlled by a few individuals.
    - slashrsm 9y ago
      This! Everyone seems to be forgetting about this aspect, which is very important IMO.
    - vzcx 9y ago
      Is this actually solved by bitcoin? Is this actually solvable? I feel we're butting up against the Iron Law of Oligarchy, here. What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central roof to solve the proof-of-work. There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.
  - uncletammy 9y ago
    > Bitcoin also only has one client with one development team Nope. See below. https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/tree/segwit2x https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/tree/segwit2x
- kbody 9y ago
  This is a common argument, but the state is quite different. Ethereum has supposedly 34k nodes, which includes light-nodes which merely hold the last state of the blockchain, that is not a full-node and heavily reduces the trustlessness and security of a cryptocurrency. Light-nodes are closer to an SPV than a Node. I haven't seen any source reporting only full-nodes which would be the proper comparison. On the other side the number ~7.5k nodes popup for Bitcoin, but that's wrong as well. Those are the full-nodes that are listening for new connections publicly. Not all the nodes of the Bitcoin network. Following [1] you can see the data from a seed DNS node of Bitcoin, which shows a number closer to reality which is 86k of actual full-nodes. [1]: http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html?2 http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...
aarpmcgee 9y ago
Careful about predicting the future!
cgb223 9y ago
Why? That's a big statement. Expand on it.
- censoredforlife 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud
bowmessage 9y ago
nice bitcoin maximalism

willitpamp573 9y ago

Ethereum is an obvious ponzi pump and dump scam. I like how they frame the DAO hack as an opportunity for growth rather than a gross display of incompetence followed by a breaking of the original promise of immutability of the platform, which is what it was.

kinghajj 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_what_exactly_is_the_fraud_in_ethereum/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_w...
- 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
  care to post a TLDR?
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    It has this as a summary: "Ethereum is an unsecure, trust-requiring, centralized, mutable platform that runs stoppable apps and censors people Ethereum Foundation (EF) dislikes - the opposite of what it advertises itself as. Ethereum Foundation misrepresents what Ethereum is to prospective investors for increasing the value of the traded asset ETH while profiting financially. This means, by definition, Ethereum Foundation is participating in fraud by continuously misleading investors. Furthermore, the act of suddenly changing the properties of the unregistered security after the sale of the security in the initial coin offering (ICO) and/or on exchanges while profiting personally constitutes securities fraud. Additionally, Ethereum Foundation is connected to damaging the value of sold assets, damaging the value of competing assets, theft from competition, and market manipulation of competing assets for profit."
narrator 9y ago
Immutability is really the key to the whole cryptocurrency system. Unlike every previous currency system that has existed, duress can not be used to have a transaction reversed.

segmondy 9y ago

Unlike stocks which are regulated and you are not suppose to promote if you already own some. There is no such thing for crypto currency. I always view every article promoting digital currency like a pump and dump scheme.

pthreads 9y ago
That's right. In fact that has been happening with just about every cryptocurrency that trades on crypto-exchanges (and even those that don't).
curiousgal 9y ago
As a third world citizen, Bitocin is godsent to me, never have I been able to purchase stuff online and pay for books and services like a normal 21st century human being. the feeling of being connected in that way to the rest of the world is priceless and I owe it all to Bitcoin.
- skybrian 9y ago
  What bookstores do you buy from that accept bitcoin?
  - diego 9y ago
    You can buy gift cards for lots of major retailers with bitcoin. You can even buy from amazon via purse.io.
    - gnodar 9y ago
      A lot of people use cash to buy giftcards, in order to pay for bitcoin anonymously. So now it's cash -> giftcard -> bitcoin -> giftcard -> physical thing. The future is odd.
    - Analemma_ 9y ago
      purse.io is a money laundering operation for stolen credit card numbers. If it hasn't been shut down yet and its operators arrested, it will be soon.

flunhat 9y ago

What is the advantage in creating an Ethereum smart contract over a regular contract in our legal system (using a lawyer and some pen and paper)? If code has bugs (and sufficiently complex code will always, always, always have bugs) you simply have to suffer the consequences (sorry for your loss) or the entire community can choose to execute a hard fork and rewrite history (see DAO). If a vanilla legal contract has some typos or even some semantic differences that lead to ridiculous outcomes, lawyers and judges will hash it out. People, not computers, make the final decisions in our legal system, so human errors are mostly tolerated. If I sneak a clause into a contract saying that the other party must pay me their entire salary every year, it would be voided in an instant. Not so if placed in a "smart" contract. Perhaps you could say that Ethereum is better than our legal system because it's decentralized. But I don't think it's enough to say something is better simply because it's decentralized. Why should I be afraid of a centralized legal system? We elect politicians, who choose judges (who have to be confirmed by legislative bodies whose members we also elect). Sure, it's not perfect, but it's hardly the tyrannical system that would make me turn to the bug-ridden wild west of Ethereum smart contracts. I think the only reasonable argument in favor of Ethereum contracts is that they are easier to create (less friction, don't need to hire a lawyer, etc), but that's hardly a good thing. Real life contracts are expensive for a reason, not because Rothschild & Co. have some other nefarious plans. You need lawyers to write good contracts and think through their consequences, as well as reasonable, human judges to decide issues when they arise. Ethereum, to me, seems a purely ideological creation, not one rooted in actual needs that people have. Sure, it's decentralized and immutable (unless a contract hurts the wrong people, lol) but did anyone really want that (except for those with ideological reasons, i.e. libertarians)? Not trying to start a flamewar, I just want to hear a strong opposing viewpoint on this.

jurandom 9y ago
I think the term "smart contract" is a misnomer. Sure, you could write a code similar to one I use: Store money and confirm that I am alive every year (by means of me sending a transaction to the contract). If I don't send this transaction, all money is released to my daughters account. This looks like a standard contract. Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and paper" umbrella.

RichardHeart 9y ago

1. Ethereum will always have more consensus failures than bitcoin. It has a larger attack surface, and competing implementations. 2. Ethereum will always be more risky because they abuse the "default option" power over apathetic nodes. Thus any regulator can just have them make aml/kyc/sec reg a requirement and bye bye efficiency. 3. Ethereum was always have more down time than bitcoin, check out 2017 for instance. (see point 1.) 4. Ethereum has 3x less reddit users, a couple x less twitter mentions, a few x less wallets, a few x less press, a few x less years of testing, less hardware wallets, less adoption in nearly every way. 5. Ethereum tricks devs into loser far more money with "smart" contracts that have bugs, than bitcoin does with accidentally sending change to the miner instead of to a new address. 6. Smart contracts will always be dumb as long as you have to trust a signal from the real, non digital world (oracle problem.) If you have to trust anyway, then just let the oracle do it all. 7. There's nearly no demand for the gas you're supposed to buy with ETH to make ETH valuable at all, unless you like it's speculative platform utility. Gambling on gambling. 8. Their blockchain is bloated grows faster than many users can download it. It's transactions per a second is maybe 3x bitcoins. It's very likely sharding and other solutions will not "work" if you care about immutability/trustlessness. 9. Ethereum is more centralized, more risky, down more often, and always will be.