I have been debating buying some Ethereum in this initial sale. Has anyone else?
As far as I understand the annual creation of ETH will be approximately 26% of the initial issue (or current total), which begins as mostly the number of ETH purchased. The growth should go something like this:
If anyone has any opinions regarding Ethereum, I'd love to hear them. From my perspective, it looks like the potential is enormous, but I expect that the caveats of executable contracts would be huge.
- Contracts are the main building blocks of Ethereum. A contract is a computer program that lives inside the distributed Ethereum network and has its own ether balance, memory and code. Every time you send a transaction to a contract, it executes its code, which can store data, send transactions and interact with other contracts.
I am not sure how the system won't be bogged down by malicious contracts. Given that the Ethereum blockchain will be huge, and the number of full nodes low, I suspect that the incentive for double-executions might be higher than double-spends, and the risk greater.
My coworker and I are gunna grab some. I'm not sure how much because I don't know how many bitcoins I have. Remind me tomorrow to type up his thoughts on it. He did his research this weekend I guess and seems pretty excited. The one thing that makes me optimistic about it is the amount of excitement others have in it. I believe that bitcoin and dogecoin were both successful because enough people truly wanted them to be successful. I suppose that is the definition of speculative. :) I'll update you more tomorrow.
Possibly, but I doubt it. If anything, the pooling of BTC into ethereum-owned addresses would decrease the supply. However, even then, all the 46M ETH bought so far only accounts for 6 days of BTC creation (or 0.17% of all mined BTC), so I don't think the effect would be large. More likely it is due to the news cycle. Demand has to suck up 3600 BTC per day just to keep the price stable. Also, although transactions per day is stable or slowly rising, the daily volume of bitcoin transacted has been consistently falling. I think this is starting to weigh on speculation some. I don't think demand from speculation is keeping pace with the supply of BTC dropped on the exchanges due to more and more merchants converting it to fiat. IMO people need to be payed in BTC before it can ever take off as a currency.
Recently bought some - which seems like a major risk. I've always thought that the blockchain idea had more to do with just currency, and it seems to me a good time to take what you've got of crytpto to put into something like this. I can't wait to start dinking around with their code and seeing what possibilities there are. Simulation theory is going to skyrocket.
Random assortment of thoughts: Currently there have been 44m ether sold. To put it into perspective there are only like 15m BTC in existence. And Ether, unlike other crypto currencies, in a sense, is already backed up by BTC in the same sense the USD is backed by gold. The fact that 44m ether have now sold means that people like the concept, people are willing to invest money in it, and people are excited about the potential - either in the sense that they like the possibilities of what could be created, managed, etc or they like the fact that it might be a worthwhile investment. The fact that 44m are there means it's highly unlikely to disappear before release - which is good. But the value of each ether somewhat depends on the amount of ether in "circulation" so the more ether sold, the less each individual one is worth. At this point, it's fairly reasonable to assume that each ether will be at least $1 as soon as it's released, pending any drama or big news / mass media shitstorm. There is obviously a bunch of different factors that determine the price of ether. It's speculative and really depends on the number of applications running on it and what people do with it. It's a really different than a typical currency even though it's fairly easy to look at it like a currency in it's current infant stage. It's fuel to run the applications - so if someone builds a successful social network - or banking application - or whatever - on it and that application takes off, the price of ether will also take off. So while BTC is really a currency and it's value depends on circulation, blah blah blah - Ether value depends on trading and number of application that require ether to operate. Really interesting shit. The main thing I'm personally speculating about is why people have bought ether. What is the breakdown between people who are solely buying as a financial investment: "I'll buy now, sell later at a high price" vs. "I want to support this awesome decentralized plan" vs "I'm going to build an awesome app and should get some ether up front." Based on reddit threads, the most vocal people are in it because they want to support Ether development and Ether apps. That's the main reason I invested, although there are also obviously other possible (financial) motivations and benefits. I don't believe that this is an accurate representation of why most people are buying though - just why the most vocal people are buying. A lot are probably in the "buy now, sell later" mentality. At least these people aren't 100% looking for a quick buck because they've invested in something that doesn't actually exist yet. Hoping there won't be a huge sell off of the early investors the second Ether reaches a certain price. That could rock the boat a bit.
I have an upcoming essay for hubski that I've been writing that I'd love to share with you. Remind me if it doesn't come soon - I have about 4 pages of notes so far. Really, I think that's how Ether-people will try to commoditize it. But the secret is that any sub-ether, or sub currency can be made -- meaning, really, if you wanted to make an LLC of yourself: discuss it here: https://hubski.com/pub?id=171035 And Ether, unlike other crypto currencies, in a sense, is already backed up by BTC in the same sense the USD is backed by gold
It's fuel to run the applications - so if someone builds a successful social network - or banking application - or whatever - on it and that application takes off, the price of ether will also take off. So while BTC is really a currency and it's value depends on circulation, blah blah blah - Ether value depends on trading and number of application that require ether to operate. Really interesting shit
I would really love to read your essay. Even in note form. I love to learn as much as I can about this stuff and get other peoples' perspectives.
As far as I understand, Ethereum is a blockchain-based decentralized network similar to bitcoin, however, instead of just having transactions change amounts on a ledger, transactions can execute functional code. In an example provided in the white paper, you can have a smart contract that has different functionality in regard to others: Thus, you can put some logic that you might build in an application using an asset, but in a manner in which the logic is built into the Ethereum protocol rather than in an app that interacts with the asset. I am not sure when this would be particularly advantageous, however. It seems to me that in most cases, you will have a non-ethereum app that must interact with the protocol, but putting some of the logic within the blockchain must allow for some types of applications that coding against bitcoin doesn't. My concern is that some will create contracts built only to corrupt and weigh down the network. Could a contract create more contracts in a viral manner? I expect that Ethereum is ahead of its time. Still, I may well be wrong, and will buy a small amount.Every time you send a transaction to a contract, it executes its code, which can store data, send transactions and interact with other contracts.
For example, one might have a treasury contract of the form "A can withdraw up to X currency units per day, B can withdraw up to Y per day, A and B together can withdraw anything, and A can shut off B's ability to withdraw".
"The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station."