ETH will fall to 1 cent. Poor investors...Poor ETH.
Project is close to bankrupt now. Ethereum is brilliant and probably every bit as revolutionary as Dash, albeit with a different niche. It's really sad to see that it's almost back down to the presale price ($0.42 right now; presale price was about $0.30). The have just suffered so severely from mismanagement and delays that it's going to take awhile for confidence to recover--if they don't run out of money first.
Vitalik is a true genius in every sense of the word, but he's far too naive and inexperienced to run a business or manage others, IMO. Under his leadership, Ethereum lost $9 million (half of its original funding) by not selling its bitcoin holding at higher prices. Vitalik has said that he was afraid if he sold too quickly and damaged the bitcoin price, that bitcoiners would hate him. He literally lost $9 million because he was afraid some people wouldn't like him!!! (With a daily volume in excess of $10 million per day, there's no reason the Ethereum Foundation couldn't have unloaded $18 million worth in 2-3 months with minimal impact on the price. They would have lost some, as the price was trending downwards the whole time, but they wouldn't have lost nearly as much.)
Not only was the endowment severely mismanaged, but the project was overly-ambitious and fraught with delays from the beginning. According to what I've read on their reddit, developers would barely talk to each other for the longest time, and there was no sort of project management structure in place. Instead of focusing on getting one implementation coded and out the door, they divided their resources amongst three different implementations. While this reaped rewards in terms of security and helped them stop a number of bugs from being released into the wild, it also drained their resources three times as fast and led to innumerable delays.
Originally Ethereum was expected to be developed in less than a year; in reality they missed several self-imposed deadlines (including the infamous "March 20") and finally launched at the very end of June (2015), almost eighteen months after beginning their project. The ether awards Vitalik promised to early contributors were based on his expectation that the project would take less than a year to launch, so in the end, those who left early ended up getting "paid" a disproportionately high amount.
Ethereum lost it's CEO (Charles Hoskinson) and it's CCO (Stephen Tual) left after the overpaying early contributers debacle. Vitalik only recently relinquished one of this seats on the Foundation Board, but up until a few months ago he held enough votes to veto anything that the rest of the board proposed.
Now with the declining value of ether, added to the overpayment of early contributors and their losses on bitcoin depreciation, the entire project is in peril. They are very, very close to insolvent--so much so that Vitalik posted on the Ethereum Blog that they would only be able to work on the core protocol and that all "middleware" would have to be developed by the community itself.
I have a sinking feeling that they will go bankrupt very soon, which is tragic. With all the delays in the initial "Frontier" beta release, I doubt they will make it to "Homestead" (the middle phase), and almost certainly not to "Metropolis" (full release with GUI, etc.).
Genius, mismanaged, is a terrible tragedy.
***Full disclosure: I invested in the Ethereum presale and made a profit from it. I no longer hold any ether--I sold the first day because of the aforementioned management issues.
Project is close to bankrupt now. Ethereum is brilliant and probably every bit as revolutionary as Dash, albeit with a different niche. It's really sad to see that it's almost back down to the presale price ($0.42 right now; presale price was about $0.30). The have just suffered so severely from mismanagement and delays that it's going to take awhile for confidence to recover--if they don't run out of money first.
Vitalik is a true genius in every sense of the word, but he's far too naive and inexperienced to run a business or manage others, IMO. Under his leadership, Ethereum lost $9 million (half of its original funding) by not selling its bitcoin holding at higher prices. Vitalik has said that he was afraid if he sold too quickly and damaged the bitcoin price, that bitcoiners would hate him. He literally lost $9 million because he was afraid some people wouldn't like him!!! (With a daily volume in excess of $10 million per day, there's no reason the Ethereum Foundation couldn't have unloaded $18 million worth in 2-3 months with minimal impact on the price. They would have lost some, as the price was trending downwards the whole time, but they wouldn't have lost nearly as much.)
Not only was the endowment severely mismanaged, but the project was overly-ambitious and fraught with delays from the beginning. According to what I've read on their reddit, developers would barely talk to each other for the longest time, and there was no sort of project management structure in place. Instead of focusing on getting one implementation coded and out the door, they divided their resources amongst three different implementations. While this reaped rewards in terms of security and helped them stop a number of bugs from being released into the wild, it also drained their resources three times as fast and led to innumerable delays.
Originally Ethereum was expected to be developed in less than a year; in reality they missed several self-imposed deadlines (including the infamous "March 20") and finally launched at the very end of June (2015), almost eighteen months after beginning their project. The ether awards Vitalik promised to early contributors were based on his expectation that the project would take less than a year to launch, so in the end, those who left early ended up getting "paid" a disproportionately high amount.
Ethereum lost it's CEO (Charles Hoskinson) and it's CCO (Stephen Tual) left after the overpaying early contributers debacle. Vitalik only recently relinquished one of this seats on the Foundation Board, but up until a few months ago he held enough votes to veto anything that the rest of the board proposed.
Now with the declining value of ether, added to the overpayment of early contributors and their losses on bitcoin depreciation, the entire project is in peril. They are very, very close to insolvent--so much so that Vitalik posted on the Ethereum Blog that they would only be able to work on the core protocol and that all "middleware" would have to be developed by the community itself.
I have a sinking feeling that they will go bankrupt very soon, which is tragic. With all the delays in the initial "Frontier" beta release, I doubt they will make it to "Homestead" (the middle phase), and almost certainly not to "Metropolis" (full release with GUI, etc.).
Genius, mismanaged, is a terrible tragedy.
***Full disclosure: I invested in the Ethereum presale and made a profit from it. I no longer hold any ether--I sold the first day because of the aforementioned management issues.
How are they bankrupt when they had funing for another 7 months about 1 month ago? Do you have anything but FUD to spread or should we just invest in Dash cause its so much better and not at all instamined by devs? /sarcasm
