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From what i know about cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has so many more use cases and functionalities built in than Bitcoin. It seems like this is what blockchain te

From what i know about cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has so many more use cases and functionalities built in than Bitcoin. It seems like this is what blockchain tech is all about, not just transacting money. Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RIMR 7y ago
Ethereum has been around for nearly 4 years now, and despite some wacky smart-contract experiments, the most compelling use of it as a platform has been CryptoKitties. Other than that, it is mostly just a cryptocurrency. Ethereum is novel, but it doesn't solve the right problems.
- cdiddy2 7y ago
  I think the defi movement with MakerDao/Dai, uniswap, and compound finance have eclipsed cryptokitties as the most compelling use.
  - lawlessone 7y ago
    Ok i just looked up DAI I'm watching a video on it and all this financial babble about collateralized debt. This just sounds a lot like someone selling equity in their home.. only instead of getting cash they get some weird crypto. Ok so the Dai is kept stable by users who are some how incentivized to keep its value at one dollar... but it that fails another token called Maker comes in.. I;m sorry but this sounds over complicated and insane, almost like it was put together to baffle people into buying it because they feel stupid.
    - magnamerc 7y ago
      That's what you got out of it? Keep researching, because Maker has been building since 2015. The more you read into it, the more you understand these design decisions and the way the system works. There's nothing overly complicated about it. You need to understand that you've likely just started thinking about crypto and blockchain design, but these guys have been living, breathing and thinking of smart contracts/blockchain since at least 2012. You need MKR tokens for governance, like to control the interest rates as well as the price oracle whitelist. Maker is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
      - october_sky 7y ago
        You just proved the previous commenter's point about how overly complicated it is.
    - madhancr 7y ago
      this only shows your bias. If FB or Google release a project duplicating this, it will be legit tech. Just like the whole blockchain was a ponzi scheme till FB copies most of the features and release Libra.
- SirensOfTitan 7y ago
  Prediction markets are interesting but I don't think they've taken off at all. One of the larger issues with Ethereum is that Solidity, and the EVM as an extension, make it really, really difficult to write correct, cheap contracts. Off the top of my head, choices like: * uint256 as a standard word size * the possibility of reentrancy attacks * overflowing integers wrap around * contract upgrades are non-trivial (particularly upgrading solidity versions using an upgradable contract paradigm). * Operator semantics are confusing * State mutability is not as explicit as it ought to be I know bad language features like hoisting were fixed a while back (and maybe some of the stuff I listed as well), but many of us are stuck on pinned older versions of solidity because upgrades. Questions like: "what transactions are present for a particular address" have non-trivial answers. Key management is difficult even for experienced users, as are addresses and identity management. There is some momentum toward using WASM instead of EVM in future Ethereum versions, but I honestly think the proper move is to develop and use a standard language for the purposes of building secure financial contracts. Running a full-node and keeping it healthy (let's say with state pruning, i.e. not a full archive node) is actually pretty difficult. Most people probably use infura because of this. I still don't have a great answer on how to properly determine that a node (geth, unsure about parity) is effectively 1. up to date and 2. healthy (i.e. can be load balanced), making it difficult to automate stuff like load balancer promotion / demotion. Last week the gas price on the network went up like 20-40x for 4-5 days because of an individual contract spamming transactions with a high gas price. It seems like few people noticed and few people cared.
  - langitbiru 7y ago
    What do you think of Vyper?
- langitbiru 7y ago
  Ethereum is a more flexible programmable money compared to Bitcoin. For example, I can create a smart contract where I can send money (say 10 ETH or USD2600) to my cousin every month. But I want my cousin to use this money to better him/herself. I want her/him to spend it on education (buying books, subscribing to programming course) not on something else (buying alcoholic drinks, etc). With PayPal, I can only send him/her money. But with smart contract, I can create a whitelist of merchants easily. And I can be very creative. I can create a condition on which on Sunday only, my cousin can spend some money to buy ice cream.
  - therein 7y ago
    Not as easily as you make it sound to be. Whitelisting merchants surely will require, a whitelist. Given merchants generate brand new addresses to receive transactions, that'll be tough.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > the most compelling use of it as a platform has been CryptoKitties. 2017 called and wants it meme back. That was a consumer facing game and all people did was get smarter about what they store on chain. The "Gas guzzlers" list changes very frequently. https://ethgasstation.info/gasguzzlers.php https://ethgasstation.info/gasguzzlers.php People and organizations use Ethereum more like a collection of lambda nodes doing discreet processes and saving state in an immutable-enough way. Not really that complicated. If your use case doesn't require that level of immutability and it isn't economically feasible to pay the nodes for processing then don't use it.
drcode 7y ago
(disclosure: I also am long on cryptocurrency and ethereum) All the cryptocurrencies are greatly overvalued due to speculation. The main reasons the ethereum market cap is still lower is (1) everyone's still struggling to find good "actual use cases" for this tech, so ethereum is simply the largest dwarf in that regard (2) bitcoin has some use for "parking money" that is slightly better than ethereum because of lower historic volatility. By it's nature, using currency as a "store of value" in this way leads to more scarcity and hence higher prices.
- october_sky 7y ago
  > "lower historic volatility" Do you have a source for this?
nostrademons 7y ago
There's currently a big drag on Ethereum prices from the legacy of the ICO boom. During the boom, it acted like a double-pyramid-scheme: the only way to invest in ICOs was to buy Ethereum first, which made the price of ETH skyrocket, which meant for eye-popping dollar values raised by ICOs (denominated in ETH, not dollars, so the top-line had to be multiplied by the ETH price), which attracted new investors into the market, which raised the price even more, which meant that early ETH investors were sitting on large paper gains, which made them even more willing to open their money and fund ICOs, and so on. When the bubble burst, this pyramid scheme works in reverse. Many ICO companies were holding the bulk of their assets in ETH. To convert that to dollars to fund operations, they all need to sell, and they're all fighting over the same shrunken pool of incoming ETH/USD dollars. So as more of them sell, the price dropped, which forced even more to sell, and so on. IMHO the worst was actually the capitulation last December, which saw ETH go down to $85 from a high of $1200. (Possibly not coincidentally, this capitulation started right around when the $40M raised by a typical ICO declined in value to the roughly $5-7M that's a typical Series A.) But until ICO companies go bankrupt or start shipping useful products, they'll be a continual drag as they liquidate ETH to pay salaries.
- madhancr 7y ago
  ICO selling is mostly over - https://diar.co/ethereum-ico-treasury-balances/ https://diar.co/ethereum-ico-treasury-balances/ It does not affect the price anymore compared to daily trading volumes
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    The zero-point on that graph is 2.5M ETH. It's certainly down significantly from last year, particularly when measured in dollar terms, but in terms of ETH wallets it's just about half. Withdrawals on the site you cited are at about 2/3 of their 2018 averages.
- derefr 7y ago
  > During the boom, it acted like a double-pyramid-scheme: the only way to invest in ICOs was to buy Ethereum first One could compare this to a situation where there is a global economy but a given type of asset or financial instrument only exists in one exchange in one country. Presumably the exchange rate of that country's currency will rise as people buy into its currency to use in investing in that new instrument/asset class.
root_axis 7y ago
Ethereum doesn't really add much more value than bitcoin because smart contracts aren't very useful in practice.
- cujic9 7y ago
  Also, simplicity is a feature when it comes to storing things of value. Ethereum has too many features.
- weedking 7y ago
  Really? https://blog.chain.link/the-power-of-smart-contracts-what-they-are-and-how-they-can-revolutionize-the-future/ https://blog.chain.link/the-power-of-smart-contracts-what-th...
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Really! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCHab0dNnj4&feature=youtu.be&t=1727 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCHab0dNnj4&feature=youtu.be... Don't listen to marketing copy from the people trying to peddle you this stuff.
  - root_axis 7y ago
    Smart contracts are useless. If you want to pick a particular point out of that article to discuss I'm happy to do so but so far it looks like the same flawed reasoning that has been debunked 1000 times over on this site.
    - cdiddy2 7y ago
      Not going off the article, but if you think that 100% of smart contracts are useless, I would like to know why the uniswap is useless in your mind. Its a decentralized exchange contract for trading tokens on ethereum https://uniswap.io/ https://uniswap.io/
      - root_axis 7y ago
        Decentralized exchanges are a dime a dozen and are basically ghost towns compared to the centralized exchanges.
sp332 7y ago
There was a really embarrassing early fork, resulting in Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event This means you can't 100% trust that your smart contracts will be honored because Ethereum miners have (now repeatedly) shown a willingness to revert them.
- Diti 7y ago
  Almost as much embarrassing as the Bitcoin revert IMHO – https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
  - rlt 7y ago
    Eh, they were very different. From a technical perspective I'm not sure which bug is worse (FWIW the Bitcoin one happened 1 year after it launched and 5 years before Ethereum launched), but the justification for forking Ethereum was weaker and more controversial. Ethereum was forked to revert the loss of funds (about 3% the current supply of ETH I think) of users of a specific (but popular) buggy contract. Ethereum itself would have survived without the fork. The Bitcoin bug enabled an attacker to create ~184 billion Bitcoin, resulting in something like 50,000% inflation. Not reverting that would absolutely have killed Bitcoin.
    - shazow 7y ago
      > FWIW the Bitcoin one happened 1 year after it launched and 5 years before Ethereum launched FWIW the Ethereum one also happened 1 year after it launched.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dsco 7y ago
  They've also shown an unwillingness to fork other hacks, such as the Parity one: https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisig-hack-405a8c12e8f7 https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisi... I do understand that reverting is somewhat against fundamental blockchain ideals, but on the other hand – you could always just continue using Ethereum classic – if you're a more principled blockchain enthusiast. Also the use of the word "embarassing" makes me wonder if you truly understand what massive efforts it takes to create something as ambitious as Ethereum without running into some critical bugs.
ilaksh 7y ago
Yes, it is things like hype and first mover advantage etc. What most people don't understand is that merit and popularity are two completely different things. And they will always find these technical rationalizations for why one things takes off and another doesn't. But it's all side issues and the technical merits often barely matter to popularity. For example, the new "cryptocurrency" Libra being promoted by Facebook and supported by Visa, MasterCard and PayPal (sworn enemies of cryptocurrency since it completely invalidates their business model) has got to 5,437 stars on GitHub practically overnight. Yet there is some technical debate as to whether this is even truly a blockchain technology in the end due to the closed validators and reliance on fiat. But if Libra launches, it could easily become the largest market cap, just by virtue of being inside of WeChat/Facebook. Assuming Libra goes forward, for Ethereum to have a chance to take off, Ethereum 2.0 needs to complete its scaling upgrades and launch before Libra. And what they need to be popular is just to be attached to something trite but addictive (like Facebook). So to accomplish that, having a simple library that developers can use to embed a lightweight wallet in a mobile app, perhaps something derived from nimbus, so that a mobile app with a normal install process can contain Ethereum. Once the scaling is available, all it would take is one popular game to use it for micro-transactions, or a popular chat app to embed it. Or it could be anything as long as it's popular. For example, a NSFW apk that had to be sideloaded and has a library of Ariana Grande and other celebrity upskirt clips clips, that uses Ether subscriptions to unlock exclusive softcore smut. Just any garbage that lots of people will get off to. Like Facebook.
- kybernetikos 7y ago
  Ability to pay fees in a stable coin is also essential I would say.
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  > Just any garbage that lots of people will get off to. Like Facebook. or drugs, like what drove Bitcoin
lawn 7y ago
If you think it's hard to scale Bitcoin, imagine how hard it would be to scale Ethereum where all computers doesn't just verify transactions (really simple scripts actually) and instead run fully Turing complete scripts. To try to do this anyway Ethereum has been adding on extreme amounts of complexity. They have many, so for unsolved, hard issues in front. For example their move to proof-of-stake (which has several major weaknesses, see the nothing-at-stake problem for example) and how they need to shard the blockchain (to avoid all nodes validating everything). In short Ethereum is struggling to not collapse from it's own weight. > Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first? Well... It is indeed just hype that Bitcoin is first.
- somebodythere 7y ago
  > nothing-at-stake problem This is addressed in Ethereum's Casper POS protocol. Validators can have their stakes slashed if they stake on the wrong chain. See: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#what-is-the-nothing-at-stake-problem-and-how-can-it-be-fixed https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#wha...
rolltiide 7y ago
> Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first? Sure, plenty. First "coolness" and technological advantage are not correlated with price. You can make it correlated by selling to idiots, it works. Secondly, Ethereum is the computational network and database. Ether is the toll to use that database. Market cap takes the last price someone paid to top up their Ether inventory, and multiplies it by all Ethers in existence. Okay [maybe] you know this, next: Third, you simply don't need that much Ether to write to the database. Ether is not a scarce resource. You can run extremely complex operations for extremely cheap. IDEX - one of the most sophisticated and popular decentralized stock-like exchange - was launched by the most sophisticated Ethereum developers and it only cost 0.026916422 Ether to deploy that and force all Ethereum nodes to process for all eternity. [1] (for pedants, yes other people transacting to that contract use additional Ether as gas). They could launch 5 whole startups with 1 Ether. Basically, if the most sophisticated power users who also feel like being entrepreneurs don't even need to own 1 single Ether to use the world computer, you don't ether. So when you can explain who the other 106 million Ethers are for, you can understand how much someone will pay for this easy to acquire and cheap resource of which more will always be issued. Only speculators and third party finance apps hoard Ether and even they don't need to, as there are better assets issued on the Ethereum network for speculation and finance apps. The final point is that Ether is only expensive and scarce when the transactions which use miniscule amounts of Ether skyrocket. But they can't skyrocket that much because the network can't handle that many transactions! D'oh! So it is almost all speculation fuel supporting the price. [1] - IDEX 1 deployment transaction - https://etherscan.io/tx/0x24b99bebf8a908be3d09bb8101446350cc7d1bea467b5242352c9c53e85c5283 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x24b99bebf8a908be3d09bb8101446350cc...
- heptathorp 7y ago
  You make it sound like ether can only be used to pay for gas. It can also be transferred to another account in a transaction, it's the native currency for making payments. It will also be required for staking.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
madhancr 7y ago
Ethereum marketcap is lower because institutional investors are being sold Bitcoin by the few who are providing the onramp to these large players. They conveniently changed the narrative around bitcoin from payment system to "digital gold". Smaller investors are chasing the shitcoins (penny stocks). You dont have much vested interests really 'marketing' ethereum. most people involved are headsdown building great products and protocols.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RIMR 7y ago

Ethereum has been around for nearly 4 years now, and despite some wacky smart-contract experiments, the most compelling use of it as a platform has been CryptoKitties. Other than that, it is mostly just a cryptocurrency. Ethereum is novel, but it doesn't solve the right problems.

cdiddy2 7y ago
I think the defi movement with MakerDao/Dai, uniswap, and compound finance have eclipsed cryptokitties as the most compelling use.
- lawlessone 7y ago
  Ok i just looked up DAI I'm watching a video on it and all this financial babble about collateralized debt. This just sounds a lot like someone selling equity in their home.. only instead of getting cash they get some weird crypto. Ok so the Dai is kept stable by users who are some how incentivized to keep its value at one dollar... but it that fails another token called Maker comes in.. I;m sorry but this sounds over complicated and insane, almost like it was put together to baffle people into buying it because they feel stupid.
  - magnamerc 7y ago
    That's what you got out of it? Keep researching, because Maker has been building since 2015. The more you read into it, the more you understand these design decisions and the way the system works. There's nothing overly complicated about it. You need to understand that you've likely just started thinking about crypto and blockchain design, but these guys have been living, breathing and thinking of smart contracts/blockchain since at least 2012. You need MKR tokens for governance, like to control the interest rates as well as the price oracle whitelist. Maker is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
    - october_sky 7y ago
      You just proved the previous commenter's point about how overly complicated it is.
  - madhancr 7y ago
    this only shows your bias. If FB or Google release a project duplicating this, it will be legit tech. Just like the whole blockchain was a ponzi scheme till FB copies most of the features and release Libra.
SirensOfTitan 7y ago
Prediction markets are interesting but I don't think they've taken off at all. One of the larger issues with Ethereum is that Solidity, and the EVM as an extension, make it really, really difficult to write correct, cheap contracts. Off the top of my head, choices like: * uint256 as a standard word size * the possibility of reentrancy attacks * overflowing integers wrap around * contract upgrades are non-trivial (particularly upgrading solidity versions using an upgradable contract paradigm). * Operator semantics are confusing * State mutability is not as explicit as it ought to be I know bad language features like hoisting were fixed a while back (and maybe some of the stuff I listed as well), but many of us are stuck on pinned older versions of solidity because upgrades. Questions like: "what transactions are present for a particular address" have non-trivial answers. Key management is difficult even for experienced users, as are addresses and identity management. There is some momentum toward using WASM instead of EVM in future Ethereum versions, but I honestly think the proper move is to develop and use a standard language for the purposes of building secure financial contracts. Running a full-node and keeping it healthy (let's say with state pruning, i.e. not a full archive node) is actually pretty difficult. Most people probably use infura because of this. I still don't have a great answer on how to properly determine that a node (geth, unsure about parity) is effectively 1. up to date and 2. healthy (i.e. can be load balanced), making it difficult to automate stuff like load balancer promotion / demotion. Last week the gas price on the network went up like 20-40x for 4-5 days because of an individual contract spamming transactions with a high gas price. It seems like few people noticed and few people cared.
- langitbiru 7y ago
  What do you think of Vyper?
langitbiru 7y ago
Ethereum is a more flexible programmable money compared to Bitcoin. For example, I can create a smart contract where I can send money (say 10 ETH or USD2600) to my cousin every month. But I want my cousin to use this money to better him/herself. I want her/him to spend it on education (buying books, subscribing to programming course) not on something else (buying alcoholic drinks, etc). With PayPal, I can only send him/her money. But with smart contract, I can create a whitelist of merchants easily. And I can be very creative. I can create a condition on which on Sunday only, my cousin can spend some money to buy ice cream.
- therein 7y ago
  Not as easily as you make it sound to be. Whitelisting merchants surely will require, a whitelist. Given merchants generate brand new addresses to receive transactions, that'll be tough.
rolltiide 7y ago
> the most compelling use of it as a platform has been CryptoKitties. 2017 called and wants it meme back. That was a consumer facing game and all people did was get smarter about what they store on chain. The "Gas guzzlers" list changes very frequently. https://ethgasstation.info/gasguzzlers.php https://ethgasstation.info/gasguzzlers.php People and organizations use Ethereum more like a collection of lambda nodes doing discreet processes and saving state in an immutable-enough way. Not really that complicated. If your use case doesn't require that level of immutability and it isn't economically feasible to pay the nodes for processing then don't use it.

drcode 7y ago

(disclosure: I also am long on cryptocurrency and ethereum) All the cryptocurrencies are greatly overvalued due to speculation. The main reasons the ethereum market cap is still lower is (1) everyone's still struggling to find good "actual use cases" for this tech, so ethereum is simply the largest dwarf in that regard (2) bitcoin has some use for "parking money" that is slightly better than ethereum because of lower historic volatility. By it's nature, using currency as a "store of value" in this way leads to more scarcity and hence higher prices.

october_sky 7y ago
> "lower historic volatility" Do you have a source for this?

nostrademons 7y ago

There's currently a big drag on Ethereum prices from the legacy of the ICO boom. During the boom, it acted like a double-pyramid-scheme: the only way to invest in ICOs was to buy Ethereum first, which made the price of ETH skyrocket, which meant for eye-popping dollar values raised by ICOs (denominated in ETH, not dollars, so the top-line had to be multiplied by the ETH price), which attracted new investors into the market, which raised the price even more, which meant that early ETH investors were sitting on large paper gains, which made them even more willing to open their money and fund ICOs, and so on. When the bubble burst, this pyramid scheme works in reverse. Many ICO companies were holding the bulk of their assets in ETH. To convert that to dollars to fund operations, they all need to sell, and they're all fighting over the same shrunken pool of incoming ETH/USD dollars. So as more of them sell, the price dropped, which forced even more to sell, and so on. IMHO the worst was actually the capitulation last December, which saw ETH go down to $85 from a high of $1200. (Possibly not coincidentally, this capitulation started right around when the $40M raised by a typical ICO declined in value to the roughly $5-7M that's a typical Series A.) But until ICO companies go bankrupt or start shipping useful products, they'll be a continual drag as they liquidate ETH to pay salaries.

madhancr 7y ago
ICO selling is mostly over - https://diar.co/ethereum-ico-treasury-balances/ https://diar.co/ethereum-ico-treasury-balances/ It does not affect the price anymore compared to daily trading volumes
- nostrademons 7y ago
  The zero-point on that graph is 2.5M ETH. It's certainly down significantly from last year, particularly when measured in dollar terms, but in terms of ETH wallets it's just about half. Withdrawals on the site you cited are at about 2/3 of their 2018 averages.
derefr 7y ago
> During the boom, it acted like a double-pyramid-scheme: the only way to invest in ICOs was to buy Ethereum first One could compare this to a situation where there is a global economy but a given type of asset or financial instrument only exists in one exchange in one country. Presumably the exchange rate of that country's currency will rise as people buy into its currency to use in investing in that new instrument/asset class.

root_axis 7y ago

Ethereum doesn't really add much more value than bitcoin because smart contracts aren't very useful in practice.

cujic9 7y ago
Also, simplicity is a feature when it comes to storing things of value. Ethereum has too many features.
weedking 7y ago
Really? https://blog.chain.link/the-power-of-smart-contracts-what-they-are-and-how-they-can-revolutionize-the-future/ https://blog.chain.link/the-power-of-smart-contracts-what-th...
- floatboth 7y ago
  Really! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCHab0dNnj4&feature=youtu.be&t=1727 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCHab0dNnj4&feature=youtu.be... Don't listen to marketing copy from the people trying to peddle you this stuff.
- root_axis 7y ago
  Smart contracts are useless. If you want to pick a particular point out of that article to discuss I'm happy to do so but so far it looks like the same flawed reasoning that has been debunked 1000 times over on this site.
  - cdiddy2 7y ago
    Not going off the article, but if you think that 100% of smart contracts are useless, I would like to know why the uniswap is useless in your mind. Its a decentralized exchange contract for trading tokens on ethereum https://uniswap.io/ https://uniswap.io/
    - root_axis 7y ago
      Decentralized exchanges are a dime a dozen and are basically ghost towns compared to the centralized exchanges.

sp332 7y ago

There was a really embarrassing early fork, resulting in Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event This means you can't 100% trust that your smart contracts will be honored because Ethereum miners have (now repeatedly) shown a willingness to revert them.

Diti 7y ago
Almost as much embarrassing as the Bitcoin revert IMHO – https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
- rlt 7y ago
  Eh, they were very different. From a technical perspective I'm not sure which bug is worse (FWIW the Bitcoin one happened 1 year after it launched and 5 years before Ethereum launched), but the justification for forking Ethereum was weaker and more controversial. Ethereum was forked to revert the loss of funds (about 3% the current supply of ETH I think) of users of a specific (but popular) buggy contract. Ethereum itself would have survived without the fork. The Bitcoin bug enabled an attacker to create ~184 billion Bitcoin, resulting in something like 50,000% inflation. Not reverting that would absolutely have killed Bitcoin.
  - shazow 7y ago
    > FWIW the Bitcoin one happened 1 year after it launched and 5 years before Ethereum launched FWIW the Ethereum one also happened 1 year after it launched.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dsco 7y ago
They've also shown an unwillingness to fork other hacks, such as the Parity one: https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisig-hack-405a8c12e8f7 https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisi... I do understand that reverting is somewhat against fundamental blockchain ideals, but on the other hand – you could always just continue using Ethereum classic – if you're a more principled blockchain enthusiast. Also the use of the word "embarassing" makes me wonder if you truly understand what massive efforts it takes to create something as ambitious as Ethereum without running into some critical bugs.

ilaksh 7y ago

Yes, it is things like hype and first mover advantage etc. What most people don't understand is that merit and popularity are two completely different things. And they will always find these technical rationalizations for why one things takes off and another doesn't. But it's all side issues and the technical merits often barely matter to popularity. For example, the new "cryptocurrency" Libra being promoted by Facebook and supported by Visa, MasterCard and PayPal (sworn enemies of cryptocurrency since it completely invalidates their business model) has got to 5,437 stars on GitHub practically overnight. Yet there is some technical debate as to whether this is even truly a blockchain technology in the end due to the closed validators and reliance on fiat. But if Libra launches, it could easily become the largest market cap, just by virtue of being inside of WeChat/Facebook. Assuming Libra goes forward, for Ethereum to have a chance to take off, Ethereum 2.0 needs to complete its scaling upgrades and launch before Libra. And what they need to be popular is just to be attached to something trite but addictive (like Facebook). So to accomplish that, having a simple library that developers can use to embed a lightweight wallet in a mobile app, perhaps something derived from nimbus, so that a mobile app with a normal install process can contain Ethereum. Once the scaling is available, all it would take is one popular game to use it for micro-transactions, or a popular chat app to embed it. Or it could be anything as long as it's popular. For example, a NSFW apk that had to be sideloaded and has a library of Ariana Grande and other celebrity upskirt clips clips, that uses Ether subscriptions to unlock exclusive softcore smut. Just any garbage that lots of people will get off to. Like Facebook.

kybernetikos 7y ago
Ability to pay fees in a stable coin is also essential I would say.
JudgeWapner 7y ago
> Just any garbage that lots of people will get off to. Like Facebook. or drugs, like what drove Bitcoin

lawn 7y ago

If you think it's hard to scale Bitcoin, imagine how hard it would be to scale Ethereum where all computers doesn't just verify transactions (really simple scripts actually) and instead run fully Turing complete scripts. To try to do this anyway Ethereum has been adding on extreme amounts of complexity. They have many, so for unsolved, hard issues in front. For example their move to proof-of-stake (which has several major weaknesses, see the nothing-at-stake problem for example) and how they need to shard the blockchain (to avoid all nodes validating everything). In short Ethereum is struggling to not collapse from it's own weight. > Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first? Well... It is indeed just hype that Bitcoin is first.

somebodythere 7y ago
> nothing-at-stake problem This is addressed in Ethereum's Casper POS protocol. Validators can have their stakes slashed if they stake on the wrong chain. See: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#what-is-the-nothing-at-stake-problem-and-how-can-it-be-fixed https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#wha...

rolltiide 7y ago

> Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first? Sure, plenty. First "coolness" and technological advantage are not correlated with price. You can make it correlated by selling to idiots, it works. Secondly, Ethereum is the computational network and database. Ether is the toll to use that database. Market cap takes the last price someone paid to top up their Ether inventory, and multiplies it by all Ethers in existence. Okay [maybe] you know this, next: Third, you simply don't need that much Ether to write to the database. Ether is not a scarce resource. You can run extremely complex operations for extremely cheap. IDEX - one of the most sophisticated and popular decentralized stock-like exchange - was launched by the most sophisticated Ethereum developers and it only cost 0.026916422 Ether to deploy that and force all Ethereum nodes to process for all eternity. [1] (for pedants, yes other people transacting to that contract use additional Ether as gas). They could launch 5 whole startups with 1 Ether. Basically, if the most sophisticated power users who also feel like being entrepreneurs don't even need to own 1 single Ether to use the world computer, you don't ether. So when you can explain who the other 106 million Ethers are for, you can understand how much someone will pay for this easy to acquire and cheap resource of which more will always be issued. Only speculators and third party finance apps hoard Ether and even they don't need to, as there are better assets issued on the Ethereum network for speculation and finance apps. The final point is that Ether is only expensive and scarce when the transactions which use miniscule amounts of Ether skyrocket. But they can't skyrocket that much because the network can't handle that many transactions! D'oh! So it is almost all speculation fuel supporting the price. [1] - IDEX 1 deployment transaction - https://etherscan.io/tx/0x24b99bebf8a908be3d09bb8101446350cc7d1bea467b5242352c9c53e85c5283 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x24b99bebf8a908be3d09bb8101446350cc...

heptathorp 7y ago
You make it sound like ether can only be used to pay for gas. It can also be transferred to another account in a transaction, it's the native currency for making payments. It will also be required for staking.
- rolltiide 7y ago

madhancr 7y ago

Ethereum marketcap is lower because institutional investors are being sold Bitcoin by the few who are providing the onramp to these large players. They conveniently changed the narrative around bitcoin from payment system to "digital gold". Smaller investors are chasing the shitcoins (penny stocks). You dont have much vested interests really 'marketing' ethereum. most people involved are headsdown building great products and protocols.