I wouldn't care where people worked before hand. It's the fact that Ethereum seems to be designed to screw investors. It almost seems like it's designed wrong on purpose.
I'm willing to say it's possible that it's just a philosophical disagreement. A lot of very smart people can disagree on these matters. I'm willing to watch how Ethereum does but I'm not going to be investing in an IPO where it's 1000 Ethers a Bitcoin. That is so over priced that it's almost ridiculous. 50% premine is even more ridiculous.
Say what you want about the IPO but as an investor it's just too much risk. On top of that the design is extremely ambitious but also presents security risks as well being that it is turing complete. Using virtual machines and sandboxes may help but it's also going to make it much more expensive and difficult to develop than people here realize.
I like the technology, so from that perspective I think its pretty cool. But from the perspective of an investor I think it's not worth the risk to me when you have Bitshares, Mastercoin and others which aren't going to inflate for eternity (for no apparent reason).
If you're going to dilute our shares don't ask for 50% premine. Don't design it in such a way so that it is as unattractive to early investors as possible. We aren't stupid.
Help me add words to the
questions if I'm missing things. I'm trying to get through the noise and summarise community concerns. Ethereum has the potential to be a great project, but who would want to bring a project to this community if the response is totally out of control. If their responses suck and the community feels they can go to hell, then that's cool if we got organised and had proper discourse.
You also know I'm working with tacotime on MC2, so I'm trying to learn so I don't have to cry myself to sleep when there's more community engagement with that project.
Okay.
1.)
Ask them to make the case for why we need Proof of Work and the inflationary model of crypto-equity distribution?
In my opinion if the inflation is unjustifiable then it's unjust because it robs future generations and early investors of value for no apparent value in return. For Bitcoin it was necessary because inflation is how Bitcoin is marketed. Miners are important in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Now that we have plenty of miners and plenty of more profitable coins to mine like Dogecoin and others we don't actually need Ethereum to be Proof of Work.
But let's say they decide to go with Proof of Work? Shouldn't they aim to have the lowest level of inflation possible when Ethers cost so damn much? 1000 Ethers per Bitcoin? That is maybe $1 an Ether we are talking about? Inflation should be extremely low and in fact it should as close to 0% as possible.
They give no reason for why we need the extreme levels of inflation. Ethercoin? No it's not a coin. It's a protocol and Vitalik knows this. As a protocol which we have to build stuff on top of it, it will never have much value as a coin because it's primary mode is not that of a currency.
In fact I would argue that Ether is supposed to be a unit of measurement in the mold of a perpetual coin. A perpetual coin should not inflate or deflate, it's supposed to be static. If they aren't going to use it as a perpetual coin but instead use it as a currency, then I would argue that the primary mode should be deflation.
We could achieve the deflationary mode simply by requiring that the Ethers spent are destroyed.
2.)
If Proof of Work is necessary for securing the blockchain, why aren't they going with a deflationary model which requires Ethers to be destroyed when spent to offset the justified inflation if it must be mined by Proof of Work?No one has to lose but they are setting up investors to lose. Inflation might have to exist to secure the network but a case hasn't been made that Proof of Work is the only way they could secure the network or that inflation rates would have to be so ridiculously high to give incentive to miners. 2+2!=6.
Consider this to be constructive criticism. I offer some ideas which can actually help the product.