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correct me if I'm wrong but the oil analogy breaks down when you look at the fact that there is nothing special about ethereum. it was conjured from thin air an
by asdf333 12y ago
correct me if I'm wrong but the oil analogy breaks down when you look at the fact that there is nothing special about ethereum. it was conjured from thin air and can be conjured even more easily the second time. oil runs out and its not easy to make more.
ethereum running out? no worries! just create a new currency ethereum2, issue 100billion and use the blockchain to power more apps.
In fact you could just have several ethereum clones going at once.
- servowire 12y agoThis does seem valid, in a way. But is the same not true about Bitcoin then? I'm confused.
- conroe64 12y agoMany clones were made of bitcoin, but it has a large first mover advantage which keeps it on top. coinmarketcap.com has some interesting stats on the "altcoins"
- granaldo 12y agoThere are indeed many clones of Bitcoin. Look here at https://www.coingecko.com/ https://www.coingecko.com/ Those stats determine where most of the resources have been focused on. Each coins have their own agenda, goal, and different group of community backing it.
- asdf333 12y agoi think its a bit different b/c ethereum is supposedly useful as the 'fuel that allows apps to utilize the concept of a blockchain' in apps. i suppose the idea is that it 'burns' ethereum to run an app on top of it, so I can see a scenario where ethereum becomes too expensive and businesses that use decide to move to a different fork that is less expensive. I guess the oil analogy works then -- it gets too expensive and alternatives are found. However, its just a matter of forking the codebase and starting another one...kind of like stellar did with ripple.
- facepalm 12y agoIt was not conjured from thin air. A lot of people work on implementing it. It's true that something similar could be implemented any time (at a cost). However, the same can be said for Twitter or Facebook. The analogy to oil is not very useful, it seems.
- b1db77d2 12y agoIt takes no effort to change the name and clone it completely.
- facepalm 12y agoTrue, but still the question remains which copy the public would adopt. But I also see it as a a problem that Ethereum presumably doesn't have a huge user base yet.
- b1db77d2 12y agoDoes it matter? Bitcoin has thousands of clones but they still manage to gain userbases. http://mapofcoins.com/ http://mapofcoins.com/
- facepalm 12y agoDo they? I think a lot of them fail, apparently there are also practical issues with attracting enough mining power to make them secure. Atm Bitcoin still seems the only safe bet for the long run.
- runeks 12y agoIt's not about number of users, it's about liquidity for the money/currency in question (whether it be bitcoins, litecoins or "ethers"). Ie. how much will selling/buying a certain amount of the currency affect the market price. This is what defines money: high liquidity (market depth). Something cannot be money without this property. It might have the potential to become money, though. But without liquidity it is as much money as baseball cards and wine.
- nadaviv 12y agoBy creating a separate network, you would lose interoperability with the original network, the security properties of having a large network with more mining hashpower and the network effects of the people already invested into and using the previous system.