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What mostly excites me about Ethereum ist the very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders around it. You can think of NFTs and DeFi whatever you want, the

What mostly excites me about Ethereum ist the very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders around it. You can think of NFTs and DeFi whatever you want, the sheer amount of new applications and innovative ideas on the ethereum blockchain has been mind-boggling. My personal favorite is Sorare, which combines NFT collectibles with fantasy soccer. And sure, right now everything suffers from high gas prices but it looks like that might be solved over the next 12 months

ObserverNeutral 5y ago
All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else. It has to be as easy as sending money via paypal. No doubt ETH can be the base of that technically, but the model which has ETH holders make money off the appreciation of the ETH token in the process is flawed. Fortune500 and even startups who'd use the open source ETH blockchain technology to bring many services to the common folk won't ever accept to pay a huge cut to parasitic behavior such as to those hodling or staking. Also nobody ever mentions how the ETH blockchain is opensource. If a startup of a fortune500 wants to do something about it they have a big chuck of the development cost eliminated just by forking off the ETH blockchain. This is great! But just like Android doesn't owe Linus anything, so those companies will owe nothing to the stakers and the ETH holders. So to summarize, if you want to build something go to Zug, find Vitalik and give him a big kiss because he saved you a lot of money, at the same time show the middle finger to hodlers and stakers on your way out. On the other hand...if you want to have a shot at getting rich without doing any work...buy deflationary crypto such as king BTC and watch it appreciate vs the dollar....and it will because people are scared as hell about inflation (regardless of the merit of such scare), and everybody is scared about it...from the common person at the supermarket to Stanley Druckenmiller
- whitepaint 5y ago
  > All those things will never break among the common folk. You should google "NFT".
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Not exactly broken among the common folk, although there is a sudden wave of artists chasing whale money.
  - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
    What stops Spotify or Sotheby or any other proper company from forking off the ETH blockchain and sell NFT as a service? Nothing..they won't even have to pay because the project is opensource. They can solely focus on ease of use and marketing which is what proper companies do best and just take the technical part without any compensation. This is also the reason why Larry Page is among the richest men in the world and Linux' Linus is a nobody who is only known and relevant among nerds
    - whitepaint 5y ago
      > What stops Spotify or Sotheby or any other proper company from forking off the ETH blockchain and sell NFT as a service? It's as saying if Facebook released all of its code then suddenly it would get competition. It wouldn't. There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes. By the way, to say that Linus Torvalds is a nobody is a ridiculous thing. His net worth is humongous to begin with.
      - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
        > There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes. Are those things really needed to ...you know commercially sell the product to the public, give them ease of use and make money in the process? Because if we must ride the blockchain thing for Venture Capital funding or to look hip among the public on twitter...well we can stick an ethereum logo on it and invite Vitalik to the company podcast. It's much easier and accomplishes the goal in much more straightforward manner.
- meowkit 5y ago
  A regular centralized company wouldn't want to necessarily use the ETH blockchain. They would use a private blockchain for internal auditing or supply chain partnerships, and would probably build it on something like HyperLedger https://www.hyperledger.org/use/fabric https://www.hyperledger.org/use/fabric (What?! The Linux Foundation??). Binance did fork ETH and has built out the Binance Smart Chain. Problem is that is still centralized. The unresolved debate is whether its the code or the network effects that matter. Oh by the way: Bitcoin is open sourced too. Here's the link! https://github.com/bitcoin https://github.com/bitcoin
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Why would any company build a private blockchain? Private companies have top to bottom control of their systems, which means they don't need proof of work or proof of stake or any other system to establish trust: they can just issue PKI keys to employees from a database. Private blockchain has never made any sense: you just give all your employees private keys and move on with your life. EDIT: Which is to say, I'm sure a lot of people are saying they're doing it, and it is yet to be for anything more then to say "we're doing blockchain" to investors and the public. EDIT 2: Reading through the Hyperledger case studies seems to bare this out as well - the implementations are comparatively small, and keep desperately asking the question "was blockchain vital to any of this, or was the actual innovation you just finally automated something into a database?"
    - meowkit 5y ago
      Clearly we have different interpretations of the case studies. Walmart seems interested. But I guess its all just buzzwords and speculation! All these people wasting their time on something so obviously useless. You should let them know!!
      - XorNot 5y ago
        Walmart have literally thousands if not tens of thousands of product lines, but after an initial study are not using their hyperledger implementation for more then 25 according to the website. But that's not the real problem: the real problem is, how can blockchain contribute anything to this problem for them? The process of validating the origin of goods depends on remotely uploading certificates of authenticity - an artifact produced off-chain. From that point on, nothing else matters - since it all depends on whether that certificate is legitimate, trust is external to the chain. The rest does not require "blockchain" at all and is actively made more difficult by it - since every other step is just regular logistics tracking, something Walmart is very good at. Again: what possible benefit is blockchain bringing here? The original artifact is off chain, the goods in question are offchain and the cited benefit is not "improved security" -- it's "quicker look ups". But...that would've been achieved by just scanning barcode numbers into a database at every location (which again: is trust, it's not a fact which is established on-chain). So yes, I do believe people are wasting their time on something obviously useless - IBM was involved and their biggest contribution to my country was to call 25 million people logging on to do a census on one night a denial of service attack. Walmart executives aren't technical - they need to know "what the blockchain could do" and IBM sells them some snakeoil.
- mettamage 5y ago
  > All those things will never break among the common folk. To be fair, when I was a 10 year old kid in the nineties, I'd never ever suspect that everyone and their grandma* would be so internet savvy as they are. * Obviously not all grandparents ;-) But I've seen quite a few grandparents of whom I'd never suspect to use internet services like WhatsApp.
- tim333 5y ago
  >All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else In my experience the common folk want number go up above anything else.
- Tangokat 5y ago
  "All those things will never break among the common folk." Just like normal folk will never use TCP/IP, know HTML etc? Nobody needs to know that something runs on a blockchain or how NFTs work. Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are. Same as she's using an ipad now without knowing objective C or any underlying protocols and tech.
  - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
    > Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are Sure but she will use the Spotify app or the Sotheby app to buy NFTs Spotify and Sotheby on the other hand they will not even use a blockchain. Just like Coinbase doesn't use a blockchain This whole decentralization mania solely work when people are are terribly scared of something: Government diluting their purchasing power via printing money and inflation. That's a really deeply rooted thing in our brain as governments did that since the stone age. That's the only killer app of decentralization. As shown by the marketcap of king BTC and the success of exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. NFTs, DeFi...all the other stuff...the user doesn't hate Spotify or Sotheby or the Google Store , but let's say for a moment that it does..well even if the ease of use and fees of DeFi were on par with legacy companies (they are not)...the consumer will always keep using the legacy company product and ask the government to tax them more. So they'd have the best of both worlds: a functioning product and a way to express their hatred
    - Tangokat 5y ago
      I disagree. Decentralization makes it possible to cut out the middle man, Sotheby is no longer needed to do art deals, you can buy directly via smart contract. Will some people buy via Sotheby's still because they provide value in curating items? Sure but they will have much more competition than they do now. It also makes new things possible, for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans. Another example is Defi which also cuts out the middleman. I want to send you 100 usd. I have euro, right now I need to go to my bank app and they will convert for a pretty big fee , they will also take 5 days to send it to you if it's international and god help me if there are holidays involved. With defi I send instantly and I will be able to choose what kind of value I send and you will be able to choose what kind of value you want to receive. I don't even need to know. I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing. If I'm a farmer and I have corn futures I could probably pay in that and you would still just get usd. Again cuts out the middleman. Does it help that it's also censorship resistant and trustless? Yes. The ease of use is not on par with legacy for my mum.. yet. But that was also the case in 1995 with the internet.
asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
Ethereum is quite exciting in that regard, but my feeling is that most eth enthusiasts don't actually care about that. They only care about the value and thus it has become another crypto pyramid scheme for now. The only crypto community who has shown any genuine effort in creating a "currency" is Dogecoin. And that is mainly because they are more aware that their coin has no value without real adoption. But sadly, even that has been infested with the pyramid scheme HODLers after the recent surge in value. Another problem with Eth is that regular folk are thrown off when they hear things like "smart contracts", "NFT" etc.. So, in terms of a realistic crypto "currency" having widespread adoption, it seems hard to justify any of them at the moment. I love using crypto for payments as it can be incredibly simple when done right. I really hope to see a crypto that works toward distributing wealth and opportunity though rather than the toxic crypto culture of HODlers we see today!
- nathias 5y ago
  How do you define a pyramid scheme? Thing go up in value?
  - asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
    I'd basically see it as an investment opportunity that greatly favours early adopters.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      70% of ethereum was sold at rock bottom prices to "early adopters" in a presale. You are right. It is a ponzi.
      - ZitchDog 5y ago
        It must also be unsustainable without new entrants.
      - asenna 5y ago
        Most of the early investors (very early, startup phase) of Amazon and Apple got shares in the company at rock bottom prices. Does that make them a ponzi scheme?
dash2 5y ago
A question I've asked before: are there any applications which don't involve speculation?
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  timestamping? Don't even need to pay any fees: https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/
- tim333 5y ago
  Well - money laundering, drug dealing, ICO scams... On the positive side I think there's something like creating wealth through the power of imagination. I mean 20 years ago there were no crypto currencies. Now on paper they are worth $2trn ($260 a head for the world's population). And lots of people can feel wealthy because they have $100k in bitcoin of whatever. And it can retain actual value in the sense that you can swap it for US$ as long as everyone doesn't sell at the same time. And where has the value come from - basically human imagination thinking the 0s and 1s are worth something. Which may be more sustainable than it sounds. Where does the value of fiat currency come from or the value of a painting in excess of the cost of making a copy of it? I foresee a future where everyone is a crypto millionaire through the power of imagination. (Which would imply a 10000x form here?!)
  - jdmoreira 5y ago
    > Where does the value of fiat currency come from From the taxman knocking at your door. They have prisons you know and some really well armed goons. They also control the education system and pretty much everything else and are capable of stealing your children from you and send them to die in some far away shore. They create all kinds of myths and bullshit and we take them for granted... like national identities and currencies. Pretty powerful system.
    - jdmoreira 5y ago
      I would even argue the only reason crypto has any value is because people think they are sticking it to the man or hiding away from them. But that’s just a fantasy of course.
intricatedetail 5y ago
Is there any material that explains NFT what it is for? I have a general idea, but to me it makes no sense e.g. what is the advantage over an invoice for something you bought.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  You are asking the wrong question. "What is NFT for" question has a million convoluted and opaque answers with zero practical information. Better question would be - "what is NFT". And the answer is JSON file with a hyperlink inside. That is all, literally nothing else is in NFT and no existing legal artifacts are any way related to selling/buying of NFTs.
londons_explore 5y ago
What scares me from Ethereum is the very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders around it. Look back at Ethereum's history and the vast vast majority of historical projects are dead. People who invested time or money into them have lost out. What makes it different now?
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  ICOs? or smart contracts broken by never-ending hardforks?
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Both
- kolinko 5y ago
  You could say the same about startups on general
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    Are there any decentralized companies on ethereum making a steady income for people who invested in them?
    - Sargos 5y ago
      Maker, YFI, Aave just to name a few. https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ lists the real cash flows of protocols.
- mratsim 5y ago
  Time I'm investing in developing Ethereum led me to work on state of the art cryptography, acquire advanced peer-to-peer fault tolerant computing concept, exposed me to formal verification techniques, writing code expecting an hostile environment, thinking about economic incentives and game theory. Social networks, banking and cloud companies would love to hire for those skills. Also central banks now want to do CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies), so skills acquired as dev/builders are and will stay in very high demand for the foreseeable future.
m9731526 5y ago
> very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders Whenever I see someone say something like this for some blockchain, I wonder what exactly is exciting for them? Most dapps is about money and more money, I played with Ethereum before (like stress testing nodes), and would really like to know really innovating dapp these days -- I mean tech that solve existing real-world problems, not create new subjects to collect.
- Kathula 5y ago
  Yeah 99% of Ethereums use-cases is creating erc-20 tokens. Most of which is just iterations with slight variables of something that already exists.
  - asenna 5y ago
    This statement feels straight out of 2017. Have you looked into the Ethereum ecosystem of 2021 by any chance? Some examples: - You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/ https://alchemix.fi/ - Borrow stablecoins at 0% interest on your collateral => https://liquity.org/ https://liquity.org/ - Musicians managing royalties of their work through NFTs => https://eulerbeats.com/ https://eulerbeats.com/ And there's a lot more.
    - graeme 5y ago
      Why would a loan pay itself or why would someone give you an interest free loan when those same stablecoins pay out 20%+ interest if deposited?
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  You won't find any. I searched as well. Once you try to make your dapp interact with the real world you run into so many problems that it is very unclear whether it could ever be competitive compared to traditional legal/financial structures.
throwaway_isms 5y ago
>right now everything suffers from high gas prices but it looks like that might be solved over the next 12 months High gas prices are solved, its just no one really seems to understand or care about the technology. Just as example, it might cost somewhere between $50-$80 in gas to use OpenSea's "free" NFT minting smart contract. But instead you can already use an L2 solution like Polygon(Matic). I minted 1,000,000 NFTs on Polygon(Matic) just to experiment and the total gas for all 1,000,000 NFTs was less the $0.01 (I think it was $0.00018xxx) and this has the double benefit of buyers normally having to pay the same $50-80 gas fees for an NFT on Ethereum Mainnet to only pay fractions of a cent. OpenSea even has a Polygon(Matic) Beta Marketplace, but funny story maybe after 1hour after my 1,000,000 NFTs were minted I listed them for sale and OpenSea took down the Beta for maintenance for a few hours and when it went back up they removed my NFT and listing entirely from the Marketplace lol. Enjin is another interesting platform, which I'll begin to experiment with as well because it has built in staking and burning features, but until they adopt a side chain I think it will suffer from the same high gas fees. Point is the actual tech is there, but it really seems all about the money not the tech, and that's why people are paying high gas fees.
brightball 5y ago
This is where Ethereum gets my interest as well. The value in anything comes from a combination of scarcity AND liquidity (being able to sell it to people willing to buy it). It seems to me that with ETH set to be the backbone behind the entire crypto-ecosystem (especially with news like Visa), it will have guaranteed liquidity built into it due to that system. With any other cryptocurrency, the value seems to only exist from constantly trying to convince people to buy more of it, like a global pump and dump scheme. Bitcoin has such a high price because of brand recognition in that regard. But branding is the only thing really powering it long term.

ObserverNeutral 5y ago

All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else. It has to be as easy as sending money via paypal. No doubt ETH can be the base of that technically, but the model which has ETH holders make money off the appreciation of the ETH token in the process is flawed. Fortune500 and even startups who'd use the open source ETH blockchain technology to bring many services to the common folk won't ever accept to pay a huge cut to parasitic behavior such as to those hodling or staking. Also nobody ever mentions how the ETH blockchain is opensource. If a startup of a fortune500 wants to do something about it they have a big chuck of the development cost eliminated just by forking off the ETH blockchain. This is great! But just like Android doesn't owe Linus anything, so those companies will owe nothing to the stakers and the ETH holders. So to summarize, if you want to build something go to Zug, find Vitalik and give him a big kiss because he saved you a lot of money, at the same time show the middle finger to hodlers and stakers on your way out. On the other hand...if you want to have a shot at getting rich without doing any work...buy deflationary crypto such as king BTC and watch it appreciate vs the dollar....and it will because people are scared as hell about inflation (regardless of the merit of such scare), and everybody is scared about it...from the common person at the supermarket to Stanley Druckenmiller

whitepaint 5y ago
> All those things will never break among the common folk. You should google "NFT".
- pjc50 5y ago
  Not exactly broken among the common folk, although there is a sudden wave of artists chasing whale money.
- ObserverNeutral 5y ago
  What stops Spotify or Sotheby or any other proper company from forking off the ETH blockchain and sell NFT as a service? Nothing..they won't even have to pay because the project is opensource. They can solely focus on ease of use and marketing which is what proper companies do best and just take the technical part without any compensation. This is also the reason why Larry Page is among the richest men in the world and Linux' Linus is a nobody who is only known and relevant among nerds
  - whitepaint 5y ago
    > What stops Spotify or Sotheby or any other proper company from forking off the ETH blockchain and sell NFT as a service? It's as saying if Facebook released all of its code then suddenly it would get competition. It wouldn't. There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes. By the way, to say that Linus Torvalds is a nobody is a ridiculous thing. His net worth is humongous to begin with.
    - ObserverNeutral 5y ago
      > There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes. Are those things really needed to ...you know commercially sell the product to the public, give them ease of use and make money in the process? Because if we must ride the blockchain thing for Venture Capital funding or to look hip among the public on twitter...well we can stick an ethereum logo on it and invite Vitalik to the company podcast. It's much easier and accomplishes the goal in much more straightforward manner.
meowkit 5y ago
A regular centralized company wouldn't want to necessarily use the ETH blockchain. They would use a private blockchain for internal auditing or supply chain partnerships, and would probably build it on something like HyperLedger https://www.hyperledger.org/use/fabric https://www.hyperledger.org/use/fabric (What?! The Linux Foundation??). Binance did fork ETH and has built out the Binance Smart Chain. Problem is that is still centralized. The unresolved debate is whether its the code or the network effects that matter. Oh by the way: Bitcoin is open sourced too. Here's the link! https://github.com/bitcoin https://github.com/bitcoin
- XorNot 5y ago
  Why would any company build a private blockchain? Private companies have top to bottom control of their systems, which means they don't need proof of work or proof of stake or any other system to establish trust: they can just issue PKI keys to employees from a database. Private blockchain has never made any sense: you just give all your employees private keys and move on with your life. EDIT: Which is to say, I'm sure a lot of people are saying they're doing it, and it is yet to be for anything more then to say "we're doing blockchain" to investors and the public. EDIT 2: Reading through the Hyperledger case studies seems to bare this out as well - the implementations are comparatively small, and keep desperately asking the question "was blockchain vital to any of this, or was the actual innovation you just finally automated something into a database?"
  - meowkit 5y ago
    Clearly we have different interpretations of the case studies. Walmart seems interested. But I guess its all just buzzwords and speculation! All these people wasting their time on something so obviously useless. You should let them know!!
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Walmart have literally thousands if not tens of thousands of product lines, but after an initial study are not using their hyperledger implementation for more then 25 according to the website. But that's not the real problem: the real problem is, how can blockchain contribute anything to this problem for them? The process of validating the origin of goods depends on remotely uploading certificates of authenticity - an artifact produced off-chain. From that point on, nothing else matters - since it all depends on whether that certificate is legitimate, trust is external to the chain. The rest does not require "blockchain" at all and is actively made more difficult by it - since every other step is just regular logistics tracking, something Walmart is very good at. Again: what possible benefit is blockchain bringing here? The original artifact is off chain, the goods in question are offchain and the cited benefit is not "improved security" -- it's "quicker look ups". But...that would've been achieved by just scanning barcode numbers into a database at every location (which again: is trust, it's not a fact which is established on-chain). So yes, I do believe people are wasting their time on something obviously useless - IBM was involved and their biggest contribution to my country was to call 25 million people logging on to do a census on one night a denial of service attack. Walmart executives aren't technical - they need to know "what the blockchain could do" and IBM sells them some snakeoil.
mettamage 5y ago
> All those things will never break among the common folk. To be fair, when I was a 10 year old kid in the nineties, I'd never ever suspect that everyone and their grandma* would be so internet savvy as they are. * Obviously not all grandparents ;-) But I've seen quite a few grandparents of whom I'd never suspect to use internet services like WhatsApp.
tim333 5y ago
>All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else In my experience the common folk want number go up above anything else.
Tangokat 5y ago
"All those things will never break among the common folk." Just like normal folk will never use TCP/IP, know HTML etc? Nobody needs to know that something runs on a blockchain or how NFTs work. Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are. Same as she's using an ipad now without knowing objective C or any underlying protocols and tech.
- ObserverNeutral 5y ago
  > Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are Sure but she will use the Spotify app or the Sotheby app to buy NFTs Spotify and Sotheby on the other hand they will not even use a blockchain. Just like Coinbase doesn't use a blockchain This whole decentralization mania solely work when people are are terribly scared of something: Government diluting their purchasing power via printing money and inflation. That's a really deeply rooted thing in our brain as governments did that since the stone age. That's the only killer app of decentralization. As shown by the marketcap of king BTC and the success of exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. NFTs, DeFi...all the other stuff...the user doesn't hate Spotify or Sotheby or the Google Store , but let's say for a moment that it does..well even if the ease of use and fees of DeFi were on par with legacy companies (they are not)...the consumer will always keep using the legacy company product and ask the government to tax them more. So they'd have the best of both worlds: a functioning product and a way to express their hatred
  - Tangokat 5y ago
    I disagree. Decentralization makes it possible to cut out the middle man, Sotheby is no longer needed to do art deals, you can buy directly via smart contract. Will some people buy via Sotheby's still because they provide value in curating items? Sure but they will have much more competition than they do now. It also makes new things possible, for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans. Another example is Defi which also cuts out the middleman. I want to send you 100 usd. I have euro, right now I need to go to my bank app and they will convert for a pretty big fee , they will also take 5 days to send it to you if it's international and god help me if there are holidays involved. With defi I send instantly and I will be able to choose what kind of value I send and you will be able to choose what kind of value you want to receive. I don't even need to know. I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing. If I'm a farmer and I have corn futures I could probably pay in that and you would still just get usd. Again cuts out the middleman. Does it help that it's also censorship resistant and trustless? Yes. The ease of use is not on par with legacy for my mum.. yet. But that was also the case in 1995 with the internet.

asjdflakjsdf 5y ago

Ethereum is quite exciting in that regard, but my feeling is that most eth enthusiasts don't actually care about that. They only care about the value and thus it has become another crypto pyramid scheme for now. The only crypto community who has shown any genuine effort in creating a "currency" is Dogecoin. And that is mainly because they are more aware that their coin has no value without real adoption. But sadly, even that has been infested with the pyramid scheme HODLers after the recent surge in value. Another problem with Eth is that regular folk are thrown off when they hear things like "smart contracts", "NFT" etc.. So, in terms of a realistic crypto "currency" having widespread adoption, it seems hard to justify any of them at the moment. I love using crypto for payments as it can be incredibly simple when done right. I really hope to see a crypto that works toward distributing wealth and opportunity though rather than the toxic crypto culture of HODlers we see today!

nathias 5y ago
How do you define a pyramid scheme? Thing go up in value?
- asjdflakjsdf 5y ago
  I'd basically see it as an investment opportunity that greatly favours early adopters.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    70% of ethereum was sold at rock bottom prices to "early adopters" in a presale. You are right. It is a ponzi.
    - ZitchDog 5y ago
      It must also be unsustainable without new entrants.
    - asenna 5y ago
      Most of the early investors (very early, startup phase) of Amazon and Apple got shares in the company at rock bottom prices. Does that make them a ponzi scheme?

dash2 5y ago

A question I've asked before: are there any applications which don't involve speculation?

inter_netuser 5y ago
timestamping? Don't even need to pay any fees: https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/
tim333 5y ago
Well - money laundering, drug dealing, ICO scams... On the positive side I think there's something like creating wealth through the power of imagination. I mean 20 years ago there were no crypto currencies. Now on paper they are worth $2trn ($260 a head for the world's population). And lots of people can feel wealthy because they have $100k in bitcoin of whatever. And it can retain actual value in the sense that you can swap it for US$ as long as everyone doesn't sell at the same time. And where has the value come from - basically human imagination thinking the 0s and 1s are worth something. Which may be more sustainable than it sounds. Where does the value of fiat currency come from or the value of a painting in excess of the cost of making a copy of it? I foresee a future where everyone is a crypto millionaire through the power of imagination. (Which would imply a 10000x form here?!)
- jdmoreira 5y ago
  > Where does the value of fiat currency come from From the taxman knocking at your door. They have prisons you know and some really well armed goons. They also control the education system and pretty much everything else and are capable of stealing your children from you and send them to die in some far away shore. They create all kinds of myths and bullshit and we take them for granted... like national identities and currencies. Pretty powerful system.
  - jdmoreira 5y ago
    I would even argue the only reason crypto has any value is because people think they are sticking it to the man or hiding away from them. But that’s just a fantasy of course.

intricatedetail 5y ago

Is there any material that explains NFT what it is for? I have a general idea, but to me it makes no sense e.g. what is the advantage over an invoice for something you bought.

Yizahi 5y ago
You are asking the wrong question. "What is NFT for" question has a million convoluted and opaque answers with zero practical information. Better question would be - "what is NFT". And the answer is JSON file with a hyperlink inside. That is all, literally nothing else is in NFT and no existing legal artifacts are any way related to selling/buying of NFTs.

londons_explore 5y ago

What scares me from Ethereum is the very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders around it. Look back at Ethereum's history and the vast vast majority of historical projects are dead. People who invested time or money into them have lost out. What makes it different now?

inter_netuser 5y ago
ICOs? or smart contracts broken by never-ending hardforks?
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Both
kolinko 5y ago
You could say the same about startups on general
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  Are there any decentralized companies on ethereum making a steady income for people who invested in them?
  - Sargos 5y ago
    Maker, YFI, Aave just to name a few. https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ lists the real cash flows of protocols.
mratsim 5y ago
Time I'm investing in developing Ethereum led me to work on state of the art cryptography, acquire advanced peer-to-peer fault tolerant computing concept, exposed me to formal verification techniques, writing code expecting an hostile environment, thinking about economic incentives and game theory. Social networks, banking and cloud companies would love to hire for those skills. Also central banks now want to do CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies), so skills acquired as dev/builders are and will stay in very high demand for the foreseeable future.

m9731526 5y ago

> very vibrant ecosystem of developers and builders Whenever I see someone say something like this for some blockchain, I wonder what exactly is exciting for them? Most dapps is about money and more money, I played with Ethereum before (like stress testing nodes), and would really like to know really innovating dapp these days -- I mean tech that solve existing real-world problems, not create new subjects to collect.

Kathula 5y ago
Yeah 99% of Ethereums use-cases is creating erc-20 tokens. Most of which is just iterations with slight variables of something that already exists.
- asenna 5y ago
  This statement feels straight out of 2017. Have you looked into the Ethereum ecosystem of 2021 by any chance? Some examples: - You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/ https://alchemix.fi/ - Borrow stablecoins at 0% interest on your collateral => https://liquity.org/ https://liquity.org/ - Musicians managing royalties of their work through NFTs => https://eulerbeats.com/ https://eulerbeats.com/ And there's a lot more.
  - graeme 5y ago
    Why would a loan pay itself or why would someone give you an interest free loan when those same stablecoins pay out 20%+ interest if deposited?
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
You won't find any. I searched as well. Once you try to make your dapp interact with the real world you run into so many problems that it is very unclear whether it could ever be competitive compared to traditional legal/financial structures.

throwaway_isms 5y ago

>right now everything suffers from high gas prices but it looks like that might be solved over the next 12 months High gas prices are solved, its just no one really seems to understand or care about the technology. Just as example, it might cost somewhere between $50-$80 in gas to use OpenSea's "free" NFT minting smart contract. But instead you can already use an L2 solution like Polygon(Matic). I minted 1,000,000 NFTs on Polygon(Matic) just to experiment and the total gas for all 1,000,000 NFTs was less the $0.01 (I think it was $0.00018xxx) and this has the double benefit of buyers normally having to pay the same $50-80 gas fees for an NFT on Ethereum Mainnet to only pay fractions of a cent. OpenSea even has a Polygon(Matic) Beta Marketplace, but funny story maybe after 1hour after my 1,000,000 NFTs were minted I listed them for sale and OpenSea took down the Beta for maintenance for a few hours and when it went back up they removed my NFT and listing entirely from the Marketplace lol. Enjin is another interesting platform, which I'll begin to experiment with as well because it has built in staking and burning features, but until they adopt a side chain I think it will suffer from the same high gas fees. Point is the actual tech is there, but it really seems all about the money not the tech, and that's why people are paying high gas fees.

brightball 5y ago

This is where Ethereum gets my interest as well. The value in anything comes from a combination of scarcity AND liquidity (being able to sell it to people willing to buy it). It seems to me that with ETH set to be the backbone behind the entire crypto-ecosystem (especially with news like Visa), it will have guaranteed liquidity built into it due to that system. With any other cryptocurrency, the value seems to only exist from constantly trying to convince people to buy more of it, like a global pump and dump scheme. Bitcoin has such a high price because of brand recognition in that regard. But branding is the only thing really powering it long term.