6 ms·

Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment

57 points by mathgenius 9y ago

lawless123 9y ago
Ethereum is interesting. Ether as currency is a disaster waiting to happen. https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d36 https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-... People are speculating on it because they have confused companies using the technology as using the currency itself.
- lmilcin 9y ago
  This is called market inefficiency. Don't fret, there will be a lesson or two and companies will catch up in understanding what this is about, exactly.
- Diti 9y ago
  Your article doesn't mention the other uses of smart contracts, of Swarm, and of Whisper. The article is embarrassingly one-sided in terms of arguments. (Disclosure: I bought ETH one month ago for development using these 3 tools).
  - lawless123 9y ago
    I seen it's use of smart contracts with the DAO.. now that was embarrassing.
- DennisP 9y ago
  I watched the Enterprise Ethereum conference. They're using private chains for scalability and privacy, but hope to migrate a lot of their work to the public chain in a couple years. They think zksnarks, proof of stake, and at least the basic sharding plan will all work. In the meantime they're being careful to stay compatible, and contributing development resources to the public project. JP Morgan is working on an open source client that bridges private chains with public. Even using the public chain doesn't mean they're using ETH, but lots of startups on the public chain aren't using it either; nevertheless ETH seems to be maintaining its position as the dominant Ethereum currency, and it will play a unique role in proof of stake.
- hrkristian 9y ago
  Isn't this exactly what people were saying about BitCoin as well? BitCoin has a genuine inherent worth now and while it's still not nearly large enough to fend off crashes, it's there and it's growing. I don't see the argument for why Ethereum is different in this respect. Perhaps I'm just not getting the real point of the linked article?
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    > BitCoin has a genuine inherent worth now Does it? Why? I mean, people currently want to buy it, but then in the early to mid noughties people wanted to buy securitised junk mortgages; simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth. If anything, it has less of a worth than before, in that its "success" has made it largely useless for actual transactions. Look at the current costs to actually get anything through; it's stormed past SEPA and threatening to hit Western Union levels of expense (it's already exceeded Western Union and friends for small transactions). What is it _for_?
    - Eerie 9y ago
      >simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth. Just to serve as devil's advocate here: Nothing has an inherent worth, unless you postulate the existence of "worth" as an immaterial label, like "soul". BitCoin clearly has worth to some people right now. They keep buying it.
      - rsynnott 9y ago
        Sure, but with most things, there is demand for them either because owning them yields dividends (stocks) or because they are required for doing something else (commodities); the demand is based on utility. Bitcoin obviously doesn't pay dividends, and is increasingly useless due to the ludicrous transaction fees, so it increasingly looks like the value is being driven mostly by speculation/expectation of capital gain. This is, historically, unsafe.
        9y ago
qertoip 9y ago
Fundamentals are firmly behind Bitcoin. Ethereum is proven to be essentially more centralized and essentially less immutable ledger. That being said the experiments carried out by the Ethereum community are extremely valuable and I am keeping my fingers crossed for them.
- sanswork 9y ago
  I think one problem a lot of people in the cryptocurrency world have is overvaluing immutability/expecting most people to demand it. Most people don't want immutable payments. If you're the consumer it is never a good deal and most people are consumers.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    You can build a mutable payment system on top of an immutable blockchain but you can't build an immutable payment system on top of a mutable blockchain. Without immutability, the blockchain will eventually lose all of its differentiating features, and have no value proposition. But I think the parent comment is wrong about Ethereum being 'less immutable'. Either a blockchain is immutable, or it isn't. A year ago, for one moment, Ethereum was mutable. But that was a unique situation that Ethereum will never find itself in again: It will never be that small of a community, and have that little happening on the blockchain. It will never be that young. Ethereum's leaders will never fail to that degree to properly warn people about smart contract security. The Ethereum community will never be that inexperienced with smart contracts, both in terms of their security properties and their economic properties (the DAO was the very first smart contract of its kind, and had a goal of attracting $500,000 worth of ETH, and instead $150 million worth was deposited). Now that the community has gotten a lesson in how smart contracts work, there will be much less sympathy for anyone who loses ETH they deposit into one. It's buyer beware at this point. So the likelihood of another hard fork happening to reverse a hack of a third party Dapp is extremely low in my opinion. Ethereum is for all intents and purposes immutable right now.
    - sanswork 9y ago
      >You can build a mutable payment system on top of an immutable blockchain Can you do this without centralization? >Without immutability, the blockchain will eventually lose all of its differentiating features, and have no value proposition. Right my point is though that for most people immutability ISN'T actually a value proposition. It's a risk.
erikb 9y ago
I love how Ether's PR department really pushes the limits of public opinion. But if you look at it cleanly it seems if at all, people are moving to Bitcoin for the time being. (Honestly I'm surprised that there is anybody willing to try crypto currency who hasn't tried it in the last 5 years already).
DiabloD3 9y ago
I don't know why anyone really talks about Ethereum. The community basically just goes around saying "Bitcoin is dead" and tries to get you to buy Ethereum as if it's some sort of pyramid scheme. No thanks.
- sanswork 9y ago
  That sounds exactly the same as the bitcoin community which basically just goes around saying USD, WU, PP, etc are dead and tries to get you to buy Bitcoin as if it's some sort of pyramid scheme.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Those kinds of remarks are discouraged in all of the main Ethereum forums, with the partial exception of /r/ethtrader, which is like all cryptocurrency trading subreddits.
- erikb 9y ago
  Is Ethereum a community? I thought it's a company. As a company their strategy makes sense, and they'll probably win at some point.
- aiyodev 9y ago
  Well, there's this, for example: http://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid-to-10000-syrian-refugees-using-ethereum-blockchain/ http://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid-to-10000-sy... Not a pyramid scheme.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    That's not Ethereum the thing that's being traded. That's "ethereum" the tech. Using that terminology, we should call most altcoins "Bitcoin".
- joosters 9y ago
  The logo is literally two pyramids joined together and it is named after a classical material that doesn't exist. I'd like to think it was designed as a joke.
sanswork 9y ago
As someone that has been openly critical of bitcoin in the past it's funny to see the bitcoin communities response to other cryptocurrencies while claiming anyone that doesn't buy into their coin is clearly just unintelligent or unable to comprehend technology and the future. I'm reminded of the joke about the atheist and the christian where the atheist says to the christian "We believe in basically the same thing. I just believe in one less god than you". I'm still yet to see any cases where any of these coins or tokens perform better than a centralized system(and can continue to perform better at similar utilization) or where the value of the distributed system is worth more than the cost of distributing it. But I've been surprised by the communities before so maybe I will be again.
- Cakez0r 9y ago
  > I'm still yet to see any cases where any of these coins or tokens perform better than a centralized system(and can continue to perform better at similar utilization) or where the value of the distributed system is worth more than the cost of distributing it. Silk road?
  - sanswork 9y ago
    Yeah sorry I meant legal. If you're running an online drug market or a cryptolocker extortion scheme it is probably the best solution.
    - discombobulate 9y ago
      Supporting Wikileaks when the US government wanted to defund them.
      - sanswork 9y ago
        I'd say it didn't do that great of a job of that since if my memory serves right(I ran the numbers a few years ago on their early donations) they didn't really receive that much from bitcoin donations. Likely because it was a pain to get bitcoin at the time so it severely limited the number of potential donors. They would have made a lot if they held them all to today but back when the donations peaked 100btc donation was $600.
opcon 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14591097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14591097 (from 12 hours ago)
hedgew 9y ago
I'm so, so skeptical of the current cryptocurrency valuations. $200 mil for a browser with no users. $1.5 billion for a coin that was twice renamed to hide that it was premined. $500 million for a Reddit with less than 1/10000 of Reddit's users. $30 million for PotCoin. $350 million for DogeCoin. The list goes on and on. If BAT was a normal company, would someone buy them for $200 million? Would someone pay $500 million for Steemit? These valuations sound insane, but that is what people are paying.
- auganov 9y ago
  Not disagreeing. But as far as Brave/BAT goes, given that the founder is Brendan Eich, I imagine somebody might.
- LMYahooTFY 9y ago
  I'm slightly confused. Can you compare a currency market cap in USD to a company valuation?? Who is "buying" a cryptocurrency....?
  - andruby 9y ago
    You could compare it with _funding_ valuations, which is different from _buying_ a company at a certain valuation. Eg: If a company has 200M shares, and someone pays $1/share during an investment round, the company (and the press) will mention that the funding was done at a $200M valuation. The same logic is done to calculate crypto currency market cap. If there are 200M coins, and someone somewhere pays $1/coin, the market cap is reported at $200M. This is, however, the total value of all coins of that currency. Often, the person(s) or company that created a coin won't own most coins (unlike with company shares).
    - LMYahooTFY 9y ago
      I see the similarities there. However, isn't there a fundamental difference in stock valuation and a currency? The currency can't "go out of business", as it's entire existence is a speculation. Anyone using a given currency speculates that it will be accepted tomorrow.
someSven 9y ago
Simple question every investor should ask himself: How many Bitcoin tokens exist and how many of Etherum?
legulere 9y ago
Does Ethereum solve Bitcoin's core problems? increasing usage leads to transaction fees becoming prohibitively expensive, bitcoins get stolen regularly without any way to get them back, bitcoins are often used for illegal transactions and tax evasion.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  Those aspects might be problems for you, but for me they are huge advantages, for example. If there's no way to get stolen bitcoins back, it means that there's no way to stole properly secured bitcoins. If they can be used for illegal transactions, I can help dissidents, for example. And tax evasion is a good thing as well.
  - joosters 9y ago
    Isn't that just a circular definition? Bitcoins get stolen in increasingly different ways, then people say that they weren't properly secured. 'Be your own bank' is not actually a good feature.
- jpatokal 9y ago
  The last of those is a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is actually pretty bad at hiding tracks, but many next-gen cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero are explicitly designed for anonymity.
- drcode 9y ago
  Ethereum addresses scaling with a flexible block size system, which is only a temporary solution. Long term, the ethereum community is heavily involved in "scalable blockchain" research, the only true solution to this problem. As for coins getting stolen: Ethereum users regularly make use of "bank vault" smart contracts that can time lock funds as a protection against thefts. As for people doing "naughty things" with Ethereum: No, there is no central entity that maintains "anti money laundering" information on transactions.
vbezhenar 9y ago
After hard fork to cover their failure, Etherium lost my support. Bitcoin is much more solid in that aspect.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 9y ago
This has been posted 5 times in the last 24 hours, I think I got it the first time.
pg_bot 9y ago
Whenever I read about digital currencies I get a sinking feeling. Everything about them raises red flags in my brain that this is an asset bubble that will pop. All of these currencies have drastically appreciated in the past few months without anything fundamentally changing. A series of companies have ridden the wave based on black box tech that few people understand. I've had a few friends who are looking to make a quick buck ask me for my opinion on cryptocurrencies. The only benefit (IMO) of using a cryptocurrency is the ability to participate in the black market. The current financial system for all its warts does a good job at facilitating trade. My advice would be to treat any speculation into digital currency as gambling. Don't spend any money you can't afford to lose, take some money off the table if you happen to be winning.
- flowless 9y ago
  The thing is - there is no black box tech. Bitcoin paper is so clear you can explain the tech behind Bitcoin to a person in few minutes/hours depending on their math background. Same holds for virtually any cryptocurrency although the tech gets a bit more complicated (for example zero-knowledge proofs used by Zcash are not that easy to comprehend and explain). There are many benefits of cryptocurrencies, one of them is IMHO pretty important - it is much harder to manipulate the prize of currency, or to create new amounts of currency at will - everything is backed by math and computational power.
- skilesare 9y ago
  Could you read about my stuff at Catallax.info and tell me it makes you feel the same way? I mostly agree with you but think there is an underlying property of the immutable ledger that will lead to some really interesting things. The news section has some of the latest info.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
simias 9y ago
It's sucks that it's so difficult to have a level headed discussion about the technology behind cryptocurrencies online. There's too much money involved, and money kills rationality it seems. I've been looking into cryptocurrencies a bit lately and from a technological standpoint it's exhilarating. Witnessing the internet centralize itself more and more around big platforms this past decade, it really is a breath of fresh air to see those highly complex and advanced distributed systems. And technology-wise ethereum is really an amazing concept on its own. There's also so much left to do! How will those systems scale up if they're supposed to replace "fiat" currency and your Visa card? Currently that's a big debate in the Bitcoin community, with the push for Segregated Witness support while other petition for increased block sizes etc... But because there's so much money at stake the technical discussions are surprisingly rare. For something that's mostly "just code and maths" it's insane to read all these discussions where so many people throw around unsubstantiated arguments when it's not complete FUD. As far as I can tell Bitcoin forums these days look more like a conspiracy theory subreddit (or alternatively a political subreddit, is there a difference nowadays?) than hacker news. Is there a cryptocurrency out there that's more about experimenting with the technology rather than a Get Rich Quick scheme? If I had more time I think I'd just start writing my own coin miner from scratch just to see how it works in details.
bdz 9y ago
As someone who build gaming PCs: the Ethereum craze is destroying the GPU market. The AMD RX 470/570 and 480/580 are so good for mining that when on sale they sell out instantly everywhere and goes above $100-150 the MSRP on eBay. And now people who sold their AMD cards buying up the Nvidia GTX 1070s which is the best obvious upgrade... It's just crazy

57 points by mathgenius 9y ago

Ethereum is interesting. Ether as currency is a disaster waiting to happen. https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d36 https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-... People are speculating on it because they have confused companies using the technology as using the currency itself.

lmilcin 9y ago
This is called market inefficiency. Don't fret, there will be a lesson or two and companies will catch up in understanding what this is about, exactly.
Diti 9y ago
Your article doesn't mention the other uses of smart contracts, of Swarm, and of Whisper. The article is embarrassingly one-sided in terms of arguments. (Disclosure: I bought ETH one month ago for development using these 3 tools).
- lawless123 9y ago
  I seen it's use of smart contracts with the DAO.. now that was embarrassing.
DennisP 9y ago
I watched the Enterprise Ethereum conference. They're using private chains for scalability and privacy, but hope to migrate a lot of their work to the public chain in a couple years. They think zksnarks, proof of stake, and at least the basic sharding plan will all work. In the meantime they're being careful to stay compatible, and contributing development resources to the public project. JP Morgan is working on an open source client that bridges private chains with public. Even using the public chain doesn't mean they're using ETH, but lots of startups on the public chain aren't using it either; nevertheless ETH seems to be maintaining its position as the dominant Ethereum currency, and it will play a unique role in proof of stake.
hrkristian 9y ago
Isn't this exactly what people were saying about BitCoin as well? BitCoin has a genuine inherent worth now and while it's still not nearly large enough to fend off crashes, it's there and it's growing. I don't see the argument for why Ethereum is different in this respect. Perhaps I'm just not getting the real point of the linked article?
- rsynnott 9y ago
  > BitCoin has a genuine inherent worth now Does it? Why? I mean, people currently want to buy it, but then in the early to mid noughties people wanted to buy securitised junk mortgages; simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth. If anything, it has less of a worth than before, in that its "success" has made it largely useless for actual transactions. Look at the current costs to actually get anything through; it's stormed past SEPA and threatening to hit Western Union levels of expense (it's already exceeded Western Union and friends for small transactions). What is it _for_?
  - Eerie 9y ago
    >simply having a potentially temporary demand does not mean it has an _inherent_ worth. Just to serve as devil's advocate here: Nothing has an inherent worth, unless you postulate the existence of "worth" as an immaterial label, like "soul". BitCoin clearly has worth to some people right now. They keep buying it.
    - rsynnott 9y ago
      Sure, but with most things, there is demand for them either because owning them yields dividends (stocks) or because they are required for doing something else (commodities); the demand is based on utility. Bitcoin obviously doesn't pay dividends, and is increasingly useless due to the ludicrous transaction fees, so it increasingly looks like the value is being driven mostly by speculation/expectation of capital gain. This is, historically, unsafe.
      - 9y ago

qertoip 9y ago

Fundamentals are firmly behind Bitcoin. Ethereum is proven to be essentially more centralized and essentially less immutable ledger. That being said the experiments carried out by the Ethereum community are extremely valuable and I am keeping my fingers crossed for them.

sanswork 9y ago
I think one problem a lot of people in the cryptocurrency world have is overvaluing immutability/expecting most people to demand it. Most people don't want immutable payments. If you're the consumer it is never a good deal and most people are consumers.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  You can build a mutable payment system on top of an immutable blockchain but you can't build an immutable payment system on top of a mutable blockchain. Without immutability, the blockchain will eventually lose all of its differentiating features, and have no value proposition. But I think the parent comment is wrong about Ethereum being 'less immutable'. Either a blockchain is immutable, or it isn't. A year ago, for one moment, Ethereum was mutable. But that was a unique situation that Ethereum will never find itself in again: It will never be that small of a community, and have that little happening on the blockchain. It will never be that young. Ethereum's leaders will never fail to that degree to properly warn people about smart contract security. The Ethereum community will never be that inexperienced with smart contracts, both in terms of their security properties and their economic properties (the DAO was the very first smart contract of its kind, and had a goal of attracting $500,000 worth of ETH, and instead $150 million worth was deposited). Now that the community has gotten a lesson in how smart contracts work, there will be much less sympathy for anyone who loses ETH they deposit into one. It's buyer beware at this point. So the likelihood of another hard fork happening to reverse a hack of a third party Dapp is extremely low in my opinion. Ethereum is for all intents and purposes immutable right now.
  - sanswork 9y ago
    >You can build a mutable payment system on top of an immutable blockchain Can you do this without centralization? >Without immutability, the blockchain will eventually lose all of its differentiating features, and have no value proposition. Right my point is though that for most people immutability ISN'T actually a value proposition. It's a risk.

erikb 9y ago

I love how Ether's PR department really pushes the limits of public opinion. But if you look at it cleanly it seems if at all, people are moving to Bitcoin for the time being. (Honestly I'm surprised that there is anybody willing to try crypto currency who hasn't tried it in the last 5 years already).

DiabloD3 9y ago

I don't know why anyone really talks about Ethereum. The community basically just goes around saying "Bitcoin is dead" and tries to get you to buy Ethereum as if it's some sort of pyramid scheme. No thanks.

sanswork 9y ago
That sounds exactly the same as the bitcoin community which basically just goes around saying USD, WU, PP, etc are dead and tries to get you to buy Bitcoin as if it's some sort of pyramid scheme.
Jabanga 9y ago
Those kinds of remarks are discouraged in all of the main Ethereum forums, with the partial exception of /r/ethtrader, which is like all cryptocurrency trading subreddits.
erikb 9y ago
Is Ethereum a community? I thought it's a company. As a company their strategy makes sense, and they'll probably win at some point.
aiyodev 9y ago
Well, there's this, for example: http://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid-to-10000-syrian-refugees-using-ethereum-blockchain/ http://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid-to-10000-sy... Not a pyramid scheme.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  That's not Ethereum the thing that's being traded. That's "ethereum" the tech. Using that terminology, we should call most altcoins "Bitcoin".
joosters 9y ago
The logo is literally two pyramids joined together and it is named after a classical material that doesn't exist. I'd like to think it was designed as a joke.

sanswork 9y ago

As someone that has been openly critical of bitcoin in the past it's funny to see the bitcoin communities response to other cryptocurrencies while claiming anyone that doesn't buy into their coin is clearly just unintelligent or unable to comprehend technology and the future. I'm reminded of the joke about the atheist and the christian where the atheist says to the christian "We believe in basically the same thing. I just believe in one less god than you". I'm still yet to see any cases where any of these coins or tokens perform better than a centralized system(and can continue to perform better at similar utilization) or where the value of the distributed system is worth more than the cost of distributing it. But I've been surprised by the communities before so maybe I will be again.

Cakez0r 9y ago
> I'm still yet to see any cases where any of these coins or tokens perform better than a centralized system(and can continue to perform better at similar utilization) or where the value of the distributed system is worth more than the cost of distributing it. Silk road?
- sanswork 9y ago
  Yeah sorry I meant legal. If you're running an online drug market or a cryptolocker extortion scheme it is probably the best solution.
  - discombobulate 9y ago
    Supporting Wikileaks when the US government wanted to defund them.
    - sanswork 9y ago
      I'd say it didn't do that great of a job of that since if my memory serves right(I ran the numbers a few years ago on their early donations) they didn't really receive that much from bitcoin donations. Likely because it was a pain to get bitcoin at the time so it severely limited the number of potential donors. They would have made a lot if they held them all to today but back when the donations peaked 100btc donation was $600.

opcon 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14591097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14591097 (from 12 hours ago)

hedgew 9y ago

I'm so, so skeptical of the current cryptocurrency valuations. $200 mil for a browser with no users. $1.5 billion for a coin that was twice renamed to hide that it was premined. $500 million for a Reddit with less than 1/10000 of Reddit's users. $30 million for PotCoin. $350 million for DogeCoin. The list goes on and on. If BAT was a normal company, would someone buy them for $200 million? Would someone pay $500 million for Steemit? These valuations sound insane, but that is what people are paying.

auganov 9y ago
Not disagreeing. But as far as Brave/BAT goes, given that the founder is Brendan Eich, I imagine somebody might.
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
I'm slightly confused. Can you compare a currency market cap in USD to a company valuation?? Who is "buying" a cryptocurrency....?
- andruby 9y ago
  You could compare it with _funding_ valuations, which is different from _buying_ a company at a certain valuation. Eg: If a company has 200M shares, and someone pays $1/share during an investment round, the company (and the press) will mention that the funding was done at a $200M valuation. The same logic is done to calculate crypto currency market cap. If there are 200M coins, and someone somewhere pays $1/coin, the market cap is reported at $200M. This is, however, the total value of all coins of that currency. Often, the person(s) or company that created a coin won't own most coins (unlike with company shares).
  - LMYahooTFY 9y ago
    I see the similarities there. However, isn't there a fundamental difference in stock valuation and a currency? The currency can't "go out of business", as it's entire existence is a speculation. Anyone using a given currency speculates that it will be accepted tomorrow.

someSven 9y ago

Simple question every investor should ask himself: How many Bitcoin tokens exist and how many of Etherum?

legulere 9y ago

Does Ethereum solve Bitcoin's core problems? increasing usage leads to transaction fees becoming prohibitively expensive, bitcoins get stolen regularly without any way to get them back, bitcoins are often used for illegal transactions and tax evasion.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vbezhenar 9y ago
Those aspects might be problems for you, but for me they are huge advantages, for example. If there's no way to get stolen bitcoins back, it means that there's no way to stole properly secured bitcoins. If they can be used for illegal transactions, I can help dissidents, for example. And tax evasion is a good thing as well.
- joosters 9y ago
  Isn't that just a circular definition? Bitcoins get stolen in increasingly different ways, then people say that they weren't properly secured. 'Be your own bank' is not actually a good feature.
jpatokal 9y ago
The last of those is a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is actually pretty bad at hiding tracks, but many next-gen cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero are explicitly designed for anonymity.
drcode 9y ago
Ethereum addresses scaling with a flexible block size system, which is only a temporary solution. Long term, the ethereum community is heavily involved in "scalable blockchain" research, the only true solution to this problem. As for coins getting stolen: Ethereum users regularly make use of "bank vault" smart contracts that can time lock funds as a protection against thefts. As for people doing "naughty things" with Ethereum: No, there is no central entity that maintains "anti money laundering" information on transactions.

vbezhenar 9y ago

After hard fork to cover their failure, Etherium lost my support. Bitcoin is much more solid in that aspect.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 9y ago

This has been posted 5 times in the last 24 hours, I think I got it the first time.

pg_bot 9y ago

Whenever I read about digital currencies I get a sinking feeling. Everything about them raises red flags in my brain that this is an asset bubble that will pop. All of these currencies have drastically appreciated in the past few months without anything fundamentally changing. A series of companies have ridden the wave based on black box tech that few people understand. I've had a few friends who are looking to make a quick buck ask me for my opinion on cryptocurrencies. The only benefit (IMO) of using a cryptocurrency is the ability to participate in the black market. The current financial system for all its warts does a good job at facilitating trade. My advice would be to treat any speculation into digital currency as gambling. Don't spend any money you can't afford to lose, take some money off the table if you happen to be winning.

flowless 9y ago
The thing is - there is no black box tech. Bitcoin paper is so clear you can explain the tech behind Bitcoin to a person in few minutes/hours depending on their math background. Same holds for virtually any cryptocurrency although the tech gets a bit more complicated (for example zero-knowledge proofs used by Zcash are not that easy to comprehend and explain). There are many benefits of cryptocurrencies, one of them is IMHO pretty important - it is much harder to manipulate the prize of currency, or to create new amounts of currency at will - everything is backed by math and computational power.
skilesare 9y ago
Could you read about my stuff at Catallax.info and tell me it makes you feel the same way? I mostly agree with you but think there is an underlying property of the immutable ledger that will lead to some really interesting things. The news section has some of the latest info.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

simias 9y ago

It's sucks that it's so difficult to have a level headed discussion about the technology behind cryptocurrencies online. There's too much money involved, and money kills rationality it seems. I've been looking into cryptocurrencies a bit lately and from a technological standpoint it's exhilarating. Witnessing the internet centralize itself more and more around big platforms this past decade, it really is a breath of fresh air to see those highly complex and advanced distributed systems. And technology-wise ethereum is really an amazing concept on its own. There's also so much left to do! How will those systems scale up if they're supposed to replace "fiat" currency and your Visa card? Currently that's a big debate in the Bitcoin community, with the push for Segregated Witness support while other petition for increased block sizes etc... But because there's so much money at stake the technical discussions are surprisingly rare. For something that's mostly "just code and maths" it's insane to read all these discussions where so many people throw around unsubstantiated arguments when it's not complete FUD. As far as I can tell Bitcoin forums these days look more like a conspiracy theory subreddit (or alternatively a political subreddit, is there a difference nowadays?) than hacker news. Is there a cryptocurrency out there that's more about experimenting with the technology rather than a Get Rich Quick scheme? If I had more time I think I'd just start writing my own coin miner from scratch just to see how it works in details.

bdz 9y ago

As someone who build gaming PCs: the Ethereum craze is destroying the GPU market. The AMD RX 470/570 and 480/580 are so good for mining that when on sale they sell out instantly everywhere and goes above $100-150 the MSRP on eBay. And now people who sold their AMD cards buying up the Nvidia GTX 1070s which is the best obvious upgrade... It's just crazy