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When you dress something up like a stock (ownership of a piece of a company) but there is nothing behind it, it really starts to look like a scam. That is where

When you dress something up like a stock (ownership of a piece of a company) but there is nothing behind it, it really starts to look like a scam. That is where the hate comes from. There are no fundamentals to analyze. For Ethereum, what do you propose? It is a way to buy incredibly inefficient computation. What are the killer smart contracts? How does the price reflect the price of computation? Has someone made a more efficient EVM? A less efficient one? The US dollar is the currency that you need to use in order to participate in the largest world economy. No one claims it has a market cap. No one claims it is going to the moon. No one tries to analyze it's fundamentals. No one is pretending it's a stock.

aey 8y ago
World spends about $2t on moving money around. The fee that you pay to transfer wealth on ethereum isnt compeating with AWS, it’s compeating with the banks computer that moves a few digits around when you make a transfer.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 8y ago
  The world doesn't spend $2t on moving money around, it spends it on moving money around, and a slate of other financial services (Mostly to do with issuing loans.)
  - aey 8y ago
    https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/A%20mixed%202015%20for%20the%20global%20payments%20industry/Global-Payments-2016.ashx https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financi... From what I can tell in the report 16% is account liquidity. The rest is actually transfers and maintenance
gweinberg 8y ago
If new dollars were created at a fixed rate rather than an accelerating one, the purchasing power of dollars would tend to go up over time.
erulabs 8y ago
No one tries to analyze the fundamentals of the US Dollar? I would argue the single most powerful agency of the Federal Government of the United States spends the majority of its time doing _exactly_ that...
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Of all the things that TACIXAT said, that was the only sentence you found that you could argue with. That leaves the rest of his statements unchallenged.
  - erulabs 8y ago
    That’s not his assertions work, nor refutations. Other posters replied to his other sentences... I’m not entering into an argument with someone who has very obviously made up their mind - rather trying to point out a basic logical flaw in their argument that, I would hope, causes readers to think critically about the other assertions. The worlds most relied upon currency is fiat - ethereum is not. Thus, the fundamentals argument ought to be closely examined.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  As you say, people analyse the fundamentals of the US Dollar all the time. Currency markets are inherently speculative, but there are reasons that you must by US Dollars. For example, if you want to buy stocks on a US exchange, it eventually has to go into US dollars. If you want to buy real estate, or commodities for US companies, buy US government bonds, etc, etc, etc. Although the day to day price of the currency is speculative, there is are underlying fundamentals that will dictate a floor and ceiling to that price. I don't know very much about Etherium, but I don't know of any fundamental reason why anyone must buy Etherium. At best it's an option among others. At worst it's simply a market based on speculation. This says nothing about the potential of Etherium or any other cyptocurrency. It's just saying that the current markets are completely speculative and it's not really an "investment" to buy it -- it's more of a bet.
derefr 8y ago
> What are the killer smart contracts? Security tokens (i.e. actual equities that happen to exist according to a blockchain rather than according to several stock exchanges, but which are still managed by government regulatory agencies, just through the regulator's presence as another smart contract on the same blockchain) seem fundamentally sound. Even governments are getting behind them. Also, non-fungible asset tokens. Better known as "deeds." (Right now they're mostly used for virtual collectibles, but fundamentally they're the same "possession of X is ownership of the thing X represents" objects that fit the government's model for e.g. real-estate law. They're just digital instead of paper.) > How does the price reflect the price of computation? Nobody's claiming it does, I don't think. The price is definitely mostly speculative value. What I would assert is that it's not 100% speculative value. Even with every single speculator out of the system, the value of ETH would not crash to zero; it would crash to some very small nonzero amount. And that would be just fine, as long as the value stabilized there, since you can still use an ETH that's worth pennies in USD—but is stable there—as a medium of exchange for buying and selling these other digital financial instruments. (And, in fact, an ETH that's worth only pennies is much better from the perspective of actually being able to deploy and run novel smart contracts.) > Has someone made a more efficient EVM? A less efficient one? There are quite a few such projects. Pretty much everyone building "a new blockchain" these days is doing so by forking the Ethereum codebase and adding their own features (e.g. Hyperledger Burrow), or by building something that's "heavily inspired" by Ethereum (e.g. Neo.) There are also Ethereum side-chains aiming to optimize Ethereum computation by moving most of the non-trust-requiring parts of a computation to infrastructure that's not quite so decentralized—Golem (https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/), for example, which is something you interact with on the Ethereum blockchain itself, but where the resulting computations from this interaction happen partially off of Ethereum, and therefore are cheaper than an entirely on-chain transaction. Of course, most people don't really need that inversion; they just build their product so most of it happens centralized anyway, and only the part that needs to be mass-auditable and not under single-party control gets put on Ethereum. This is, for example, how CryptoKitties is built: it's a regular web-app, where the only thing about it that's on a blockchain is the record of what user owns what kitty-UUID. Every fact about that UUID is just on CryptoKitties' servers, but those facts aren't really under contention—only the ownership is. That's the idiomatic way to build an app that stores data on a blockchain at this point.
lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
If you think Ethereum is a way to buy (inefficient) computation, you have completely misunderstood what it is. As for fundamentals, it is obviously a technological product, with people working on improving it and building services based on it. It's also trying to solve a rather hard problem, as it turns out. It's possible that it simply isn't good enough at solving that problem yet (too many bugs or whatever).
- nradov 8y ago
  Ethereum isn't a "product" yet since it doesn't have any real uses. It's more of a tech demo right now which could possibly evolve into a product later.
  - lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
    Arguably ICOs were a use case that was popular at least for a while. Saying it doesn't have any real uses sounds like the IBM guy who estimated the demand for computers to be about two or three globally.
    - nradov 8y ago
      ICOs were never a real use case, just a way for scammers to cheat greedy and ignorant people out of their money.
      - lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
        Yeah whatever - you have it all figured out, right? You seem to trust the government. Are you a Trump fan? Not saying it would be a bad thing. Just pointing out that governments aren't perfect.
        nradov 8y ago
        I don't trust the government much. I trust cryptocurrency suckers and scammers even less. And you're correct: I do have it all figured out! Thanks for noticing.

aey 8y ago

World spends about $2t on moving money around. The fee that you pay to transfer wealth on ethereum isnt compeating with AWS, it’s compeating with the banks computer that moves a few digits around when you make a transfer.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vkou 8y ago
The world doesn't spend $2t on moving money around, it spends it on moving money around, and a slate of other financial services (Mostly to do with issuing loans.)
- aey 8y ago
  https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/A%20mixed%202015%20for%20the%20global%20payments%20industry/Global-Payments-2016.ashx https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financi... From what I can tell in the report 16% is account liquidity. The rest is actually transfers and maintenance

gweinberg 8y ago

If new dollars were created at a fixed rate rather than an accelerating one, the purchasing power of dollars would tend to go up over time.

erulabs 8y ago

No one tries to analyze the fundamentals of the US Dollar? I would argue the single most powerful agency of the Federal Government of the United States spends the majority of its time doing _exactly_ that...

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Of all the things that TACIXAT said, that was the only sentence you found that you could argue with. That leaves the rest of his statements unchallenged.
- erulabs 8y ago
  That’s not his assertions work, nor refutations. Other posters replied to his other sentences... I’m not entering into an argument with someone who has very obviously made up their mind - rather trying to point out a basic logical flaw in their argument that, I would hope, causes readers to think critically about the other assertions. The worlds most relied upon currency is fiat - ethereum is not. Thus, the fundamentals argument ought to be closely examined.
mikekchar 8y ago
As you say, people analyse the fundamentals of the US Dollar all the time. Currency markets are inherently speculative, but there are reasons that you must by US Dollars. For example, if you want to buy stocks on a US exchange, it eventually has to go into US dollars. If you want to buy real estate, or commodities for US companies, buy US government bonds, etc, etc, etc. Although the day to day price of the currency is speculative, there is are underlying fundamentals that will dictate a floor and ceiling to that price. I don't know very much about Etherium, but I don't know of any fundamental reason why anyone must buy Etherium. At best it's an option among others. At worst it's simply a market based on speculation. This says nothing about the potential of Etherium or any other cyptocurrency. It's just saying that the current markets are completely speculative and it's not really an "investment" to buy it -- it's more of a bet.

derefr 8y ago

> What are the killer smart contracts? Security tokens (i.e. actual equities that happen to exist according to a blockchain rather than according to several stock exchanges, but which are still managed by government regulatory agencies, just through the regulator's presence as another smart contract on the same blockchain) seem fundamentally sound. Even governments are getting behind them. Also, non-fungible asset tokens. Better known as "deeds." (Right now they're mostly used for virtual collectibles, but fundamentally they're the same "possession of X is ownership of the thing X represents" objects that fit the government's model for e.g. real-estate law. They're just digital instead of paper.) > How does the price reflect the price of computation? Nobody's claiming it does, I don't think. The price is definitely mostly speculative value. What I would assert is that it's not 100% speculative value. Even with every single speculator out of the system, the value of ETH would not crash to zero; it would crash to some very small nonzero amount. And that would be just fine, as long as the value stabilized there, since you can still use an ETH that's worth pennies in USD—but is stable there—as a medium of exchange for buying and selling these other digital financial instruments. (And, in fact, an ETH that's worth only pennies is much better from the perspective of actually being able to deploy and run novel smart contracts.) > Has someone made a more efficient EVM? A less efficient one? There are quite a few such projects. Pretty much everyone building "a new blockchain" these days is doing so by forking the Ethereum codebase and adding their own features (e.g. Hyperledger Burrow), or by building something that's "heavily inspired" by Ethereum (e.g. Neo.) There are also Ethereum side-chains aiming to optimize Ethereum computation by moving most of the non-trust-requiring parts of a computation to infrastructure that's not quite so decentralized—Golem (https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/), for example, which is something you interact with on the Ethereum blockchain itself, but where the resulting computations from this interaction happen partially off of Ethereum, and therefore are cheaper than an entirely on-chain transaction. Of course, most people don't really need that inversion; they just build their product so most of it happens centralized anyway, and only the part that needs to be mass-auditable and not under single-party control gets put on Ethereum. This is, for example, how CryptoKitties is built: it's a regular web-app, where the only thing about it that's on a blockchain is the record of what user owns what kitty-UUID. Every fact about that UUID is just on CryptoKitties' servers, but those facts aren't really under contention—only the ownership is. That's the idiomatic way to build an app that stores data on a blockchain at this point.

lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago

If you think Ethereum is a way to buy (inefficient) computation, you have completely misunderstood what it is. As for fundamentals, it is obviously a technological product, with people working on improving it and building services based on it. It's also trying to solve a rather hard problem, as it turns out. It's possible that it simply isn't good enough at solving that problem yet (too many bugs or whatever).

nradov 8y ago
Ethereum isn't a "product" yet since it doesn't have any real uses. It's more of a tech demo right now which could possibly evolve into a product later.
- lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
  Arguably ICOs were a use case that was popular at least for a while. Saying it doesn't have any real uses sounds like the IBM guy who estimated the demand for computers to be about two or three globally.
  - nradov 8y ago
    ICOs were never a real use case, just a way for scammers to cheat greedy and ignorant people out of their money.
    - lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
      Yeah whatever - you have it all figured out, right? You seem to trust the government. Are you a Trump fan? Not saying it would be a bad thing. Just pointing out that governments aren't perfect.
      - nradov 8y ago
        I don't trust the government much. I trust cryptocurrency suckers and scammers even less. And you're correct: I do have it all figured out! Thanks for noticing.