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Ethereum Price Climbs to $360; Crypto Market Cap Pierces $160B

Retric 9y ago
I wonder how much of that is is lost wallets ect as it's very easy to have unrecoverable issues.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  I'm sure a lot of bitcoin wallets are permanently dormant/inaccessible due to lost keys, lost hardware, etc. Hacked coins also tend to stay unused. Although there are 16 million coins in circulation, a good chunk of those will probably never be sold ever.
  - omarchowdhury 9y ago
    Plus 1,000,000 bitcoins are locked up in Satoshi's stash. It may never be touched.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  another bullish case.
- karaokeyoga 9y ago
  Here's an example … https://etherscan.io/address/0x4f35f119145b8d599d2b70b37c73086f71cd416b https://etherscan.io/address/0x4f35f119145b8d599d2b70b37c730... I mined these ~1500 ether in the first few days of their going live. Then I killed all my AWS instances, inadvertently making this account inaccessible as a result. It's "fun" to watch it go up in value. It was under $1K at one point. I don't feel too bad, though, as I would have sold at 2x rather than 500x anyway …
  - paulpauper 9y ago
    someone would have to work 30+ years to make as much after-tax income as someone made just mining some coins ..just mindblowing
  - omarchowdhury 9y ago
    How much computing power / AWS cost / time did it take for you to generate 1500 ETH back then?
TACIXAT 9y ago
It seems really disingenuous to talk about market caps in cryptocurrencies. The US dollar doesn't have a market cap. No currency does. Market cap is the markets valuation of a company. The term is used to contrast it against their actual valuation. The use in crypto is just a mechanism to dress them up like stocks. If you call these currencies, then you need to recognize that they are extremely deflationary and will never be used as fiat currencies are. If you call them speculative investments, you need to realize they're not backed by any actual value. I haven't done a deep dive on Ethereum yet, so this is mostly addressing Bitcoin and all its derivatives.
- pja 9y ago
  Ethereum is BTC with an even greater wealth transfer to early adopters built-in in the form of the switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. What's the acceptable stake? Ether. How do you get Ether? You're going to have to buy it off the early adopters who mined it. IOW, the Ether guys thought that Satoshi was a chump who left too much value on the table.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - uncoder0 9y ago
    In the bitcointalk forums they have a special name for these sort of coins... 'pre-mined shitcoins' The whole PoS swap makes that even more apparent in Ether's case. I mean hell they hardforked because some rich friends on the dev team got 'hacked' by a poorly written smart contract.
  - mrfusion 9y ago
    Explain like I'm from 2010? ( and what/when is a proof of stake swap?)
    - raisedbyninjas 9y ago
      Proof of stake mints new coins based on who already has coins (they have a stake in the platform's success). This is opposed to solving arbitrary math problems to mint new coins, which is called "proof of work". At some point in the future the Ethereum client will have the proof of work algo swapped out with the proof of stake algo.
Taylor_OD 9y ago
I invested a small (hundreds) into Ethereum and a few other coins earlier this year. They've since doubled in value. I can imagine if you were a very high risk investor and believed in crypto's right now you could be making a lot of money.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  It's a lot less risky than the US dollar.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    You're joking right? The US dollar is the least risky place on the planet to put your money
    - brndnmtthws 9y ago
      Inflation, manipulation by the federal reserve, civil asset forfeiture, bank account seizures. The purchasing power of the US dollar has consistently declined over time. Only a fool would place complete trust in the US government. Relevant Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6wo4od/have_you_heard_of_this_altcoin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6wo4od/have...
      - bpicolo 9y ago
        > /r/CryptoCurrency/ Potentially the worst source one can provide. Cryptocurrency buzzwords aren't an argument against the USD
- zazpowered 9y ago
  Yep. A lot of ppl making a killing right now
- cryptothrowaway 9y ago
  I am up 6,200% ytd. Some like NEO and Waves did that for me. It took me cycling through 25+ altcoins to reach that level.
cm2187 9y ago
One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental impact. I am a bit surprised to see the environment-friendly silicon valley getting excited by such an energy-wasting protocol. If we have to burn CPUs reversing hashes every time someone makes a payment, we should start building new coal and nuclear power plants now.
- pdq 9y ago
  The whole point in Cryptos is they are fundamentally "backed" by the power of the network. If it were trivial to compute the next block, there's not much value in the network and the coins. I don't see how Crypto using electricity is any more wasteful than Google searches using electricity.
  - wmf 9y ago
    If Google used 100x more energy per search than Bing, would you consider it wasteful? Now compare PoW against SCP.
    - beaner 9y ago
      What is SCP?
      - lightbyte 9y ago
        Stellar Consensus Protocol: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd... https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...
  - nosuchthing 9y ago
    The utility of the service is disproportionately minuscule in relation to the insane amount of resources in energy and hardware currently used for BTC or ETH. For a database, with 3-4 transactions per second [1], and each transaction consuming the equivalent amount of energy to power 1.6 houses for a day [2] it begs the question of if and when a viable alternative arises that is more efficient at offering an improved service with less waste. [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions [2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is-unsustainable https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...
ashark 9y ago
Is there some meta-miner project you can use to mine a few of every not-obviously-garbage new coin, then stop, just in case they turn out to be worth something?
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  This is developing along those lines: https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted
srge 9y ago
I don't mean to say that all coins are valuable. But it does ressemble another gold rush. Do some remember the domain name craze 20 years ago? Any kid smart enough to have bought generic domain names back then made lots of money.

I wonder how much of that is is lost wallets ect as it's very easy to have unrecoverable issues.

paulpauper 9y ago
I'm sure a lot of bitcoin wallets are permanently dormant/inaccessible due to lost keys, lost hardware, etc. Hacked coins also tend to stay unused. Although there are 16 million coins in circulation, a good chunk of those will probably never be sold ever.
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  Plus 1,000,000 bitcoins are locked up in Satoshi's stash. It may never be touched.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
another bullish case.
karaokeyoga 9y ago
Here's an example … https://etherscan.io/address/0x4f35f119145b8d599d2b70b37c73086f71cd416b https://etherscan.io/address/0x4f35f119145b8d599d2b70b37c730... I mined these ~1500 ether in the first few days of their going live. Then I killed all my AWS instances, inadvertently making this account inaccessible as a result. It's "fun" to watch it go up in value. It was under $1K at one point. I don't feel too bad, though, as I would have sold at 2x rather than 500x anyway …
- paulpauper 9y ago
  someone would have to work 30+ years to make as much after-tax income as someone made just mining some coins ..just mindblowing
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  How much computing power / AWS cost / time did it take for you to generate 1500 ETH back then?

It seems really disingenuous to talk about market caps in cryptocurrencies. The US dollar doesn't have a market cap. No currency does. Market cap is the markets valuation of a company. The term is used to contrast it against their actual valuation. The use in crypto is just a mechanism to dress them up like stocks. If you call these currencies, then you need to recognize that they are extremely deflationary and will never be used as fiat currencies are. If you call them speculative investments, you need to realize they're not backed by any actual value. I haven't done a deep dive on Ethereum yet, so this is mostly addressing Bitcoin and all its derivatives.

pja 9y ago
Ethereum is BTC with an even greater wealth transfer to early adopters built-in in the form of the switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. What's the acceptable stake? Ether. How do you get Ether? You're going to have to buy it off the early adopters who mined it. IOW, the Ether guys thought that Satoshi was a chump who left too much value on the table.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- uncoder0 9y ago
  In the bitcointalk forums they have a special name for these sort of coins... 'pre-mined shitcoins' The whole PoS swap makes that even more apparent in Ether's case. I mean hell they hardforked because some rich friends on the dev team got 'hacked' by a poorly written smart contract.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  Explain like I'm from 2010? ( and what/when is a proof of stake swap?)
  - raisedbyninjas 9y ago
    Proof of stake mints new coins based on who already has coins (they have a stake in the platform's success). This is opposed to solving arbitrary math problems to mint new coins, which is called "proof of work". At some point in the future the Ethereum client will have the proof of work algo swapped out with the proof of stake algo.

Taylor_OD 9y ago

I invested a small (hundreds) into Ethereum and a few other coins earlier this year. They've since doubled in value. I can imagine if you were a very high risk investor and believed in crypto's right now you could be making a lot of money.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
It's a lot less risky than the US dollar.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  You're joking right? The US dollar is the least risky place on the planet to put your money
  - brndnmtthws 9y ago
    Inflation, manipulation by the federal reserve, civil asset forfeiture, bank account seizures. The purchasing power of the US dollar has consistently declined over time. Only a fool would place complete trust in the US government. Relevant Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6wo4od/have_you_heard_of_this_altcoin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6wo4od/have...
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      > /r/CryptoCurrency/ Potentially the worst source one can provide. Cryptocurrency buzzwords aren't an argument against the USD
zazpowered 9y ago
Yep. A lot of ppl making a killing right now
cryptothrowaway 9y ago
I am up 6,200% ytd. Some like NEO and Waves did that for me. It took me cycling through 25+ altcoins to reach that level.

cm2187 9y ago

One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental impact. I am a bit surprised to see the environment-friendly silicon valley getting excited by such an energy-wasting protocol. If we have to burn CPUs reversing hashes every time someone makes a payment, we should start building new coal and nuclear power plants now.

pdq 9y ago
The whole point in Cryptos is they are fundamentally "backed" by the power of the network. If it were trivial to compute the next block, there's not much value in the network and the coins. I don't see how Crypto using electricity is any more wasteful than Google searches using electricity.
- wmf 9y ago
  If Google used 100x more energy per search than Bing, would you consider it wasteful? Now compare PoW against SCP.
  - beaner 9y ago
    What is SCP?
    - lightbyte 9y ago
      Stellar Consensus Protocol: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd... https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proof-code/ https://www.stellar.org/blog/stellar-consensus-protocol-proo...
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  The utility of the service is disproportionately minuscule in relation to the insane amount of resources in energy and hardware currently used for BTC or ETH. For a database, with 3-4 transactions per second [1], and each transaction consuming the equivalent amount of energy to power 1.6 houses for a day [2] it begs the question of if and when a viable alternative arises that is more efficient at offering an improved service with less waste. [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions [2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is-unsustainable https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...

ashark 9y ago

Is there some meta-miner project you can use to mine a few of every not-obviously-garbage new coin, then stop, just in case they turn out to be worth something?

omarchowdhury 9y ago
This is developing along those lines: https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted

srge 9y ago

I don't mean to say that all coins are valuable. But it does ressemble another gold rush. Do some remember the domain name craze 20 years ago? Any kid smart enough to have bought generic domain names back then made lots of money.