Topic: [ANN] Ethereum: Welcome to the Beginning - page 1294. (Read 2003970 times)

Vitalik hates NXT - nothing ever mentioned by him or his magazine about it. He pretends as if it non exists!
Go figure...
 

it is not a IPO, it is a gambling.
good luck

Exactly this!

I'm willing to invest in ether, but I'm hoping you guys have some marketing specialists to bring this to the masses since I (an electrical engineer) can't even follow all of this after the first view/read through.   I know it sucks but you have to find a way to communicate what exactly this is to the masses.  The facebook to bitcoin's myspace is a good start.

See http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html#p5

I'm curious as to why ETH should fetch a large value. Bitcoin has value because it is explicitly a store of value, as well as a payment system. Transfer fees are pretty much insignificant (cents). Ethereum's value only comes from it's ability to run decentralized Turing-complete code. Since you're paying per execution, most people will actually want the value of ETH to be low as possible, so they can execute their programs as cheaply as possible. This will lead to people rapidly dumping when they feel the price is too high, and sitting on the sidelines to wait until prices are reasonable and then buy in and quickly run their scripts at a cheaper price. Or, more likely, most people won't hold ETH at all, and only buy in a small amount at market price to cover the cost of whatever script they need to run. Large initial inflation combined with no software running on the network in the beginning will mean ETH effectively won't have any intrinsic value until the first programs are released. Any rises in value after the IPO and before the release of programs will be purely speculative.

Then comes the issue of copycats. Unless the developers put safeguards in place to prevent programs on the ETH network being able to run on Cheaper-ETH network, what's to stop someone from creating a copy and convincing everyone to move their programs over due to attractive low fees that is bound to attract an exponentially larger userbase?

Lastly, while it may seem the developer's interests are aligned with the project with their 50% premine, this is not particularly true. They are basically making investors pay for their 50% ETH. So they have no incentive to preserve it's value. Whatever value they dump it at, it will be 100% pure profit on top of the millions in USD they get.

They are also paying roughly 500 BTC for someone to develop a client(s)? Seems like excessive spending, IMO.

All of these factors make ETH an extremely unattractive investment to make. Sure, some people believe in the idea behind it. But the fact is that if there is no incentive to balance out the huge risk investors are taking, then they won't take the risk.

After

Technically I suspect it can, not sure it that would be a wise move though. You could also set up contracts based on Peercoins as underlying value in Ethereum, that would be more attractive IMHO.

Someone was having their dinner 

If it snows more than 2 inches on thursday or Friday, buy two lift tickets for Saturday at the ski resort.

If my favorite sports team wins the wednesday game, buy 2 tickets in Section C rows 10-16 for the friday game.

If a samsung galaxy tab 2 is offered at ebay for < $x, buy it. 

In the first part of this series, we talked about how the internet allows us to create decentralized corporations, automatons that exist entirely as decentralized networks over the internet, carrying out the computations that keep them “alive” over thousands of servers. As it turns out, these networks can even maintain a Bitcoin balance, and send and receive transactions. These two capacities: the capacity to think, and the capacity to maintain capital, are in theory all that an economic agent needs to survive in the marketplace, provided that its thoughts and capital allow it to create sellable value fast enough to keep up with its own resource demands. In practice, however, one major challenge still remains: how to actually interact with the world around them.

http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=10/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i

I'm a very procedural programmer, so I am having trouble wrapping my head around your contracts system because it seems to be very abstract.

Can you please explain in more detail (preferably with an example) of how to make a useful contract in more of a real world scenario? Since it obviously can't do anything useful inside the ethereum network without also communicating outside of the network?

Write a FAQ ASAP!
http://wiki.ethereum.org/index.php/FAQ   <--- this is empty....

Also I cannot access the blog.
So I wasn't able to read about the said specific PoS that will be used.
More centralized information on this hybrid PoW/PoS is urgent. Ratio, etc.


PS: nobody care and it will certainly not be changed, but to my personal taste:
Higher reward on the first week is way too low.
60 days IPO is way too long.

I do not understand one thing. If the inflation is going to be maintained at a 0%, does it mean that Ether coin price will never increase? Sorry if the question is nonsense but do not understand economics so much ... less in the context of cryptocurrencies. If the answer is yes, then buying Ether anytime is just fine, right? (expect for the fact that fiat value is depreciating everyday)

Mining starts after iPo or along side with iPo?

60 days IPO sounds good enough.

1 sentence Summary of the Ethereum discussions so far:



Ethereum - Welcome to the END


OP needs to come and have a Q&A, some serious PR needs to happening right now

So what does PoS stand for?

To bring back sanity to this discussion, this is why Ethereum needs all the money they will raise. All power to them. Vitalek please use the money wisely and stay in charge of Ethereum fully and all the way.

http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=53/ethereum-now-going-public

"We will be able to develop fully functional and robust Ethereum clients with as little as 500 BTC funding with current rates; basic implementations in Go, C++ and Python are coming close to testnet quality already. However, we are seeking to go much further than that. Ethereum is not "just another altcoin"; it is a new way forward for cryptocurrency, and ultimately for peer-to-peer protocols as a whole. To that end, we would like to be able to invest a large quantity of funds into securing top-notch talent for improving the security and scalability of the Ethereum network itself, but also supporting a robust Ethereum ecosystem hopefully bringing other cryptocurrency and peer-to-peer projects into our fold. We are already well underway in talks with KryptoKit, Humint and OpenTransactions, and are interested in working with other groups such as Tahoe-LAFS, Bitmessage and Bitcloud as well.

All of these projects can potentially benefit from integrating with the Ethereum blockchain in some fashion, simply because the layer is so universal; because of its Turing-completeness, an Ethereum contract can be constructed to incentivize nearly everything, and even entirely non-financial uses such as public key registration have extremely wide-reaching benefits for any decentralized cryptographic product that intends to include, for example, a social network. All of these projects will add great value to the Ethereum ecosystem, and the Ethereum ecosystem will hopefully add great value to them. We do not wish to compete with any organization; we intend to work together.

Throughout the fundraiser, we will be working hard on development; we will release a centralized testnet, a server to which anyone can push contracts and transactions, very soon, and will then follow up with a decentralized testnet to test networking features and mining algorithms. We also intend to host a contest, similar to those used to decide the algorithms for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2005 and SHA3 in 2013, in which we invite researchers from universities around the world to compete to develop the best possible specialized hardware-resistant, centralization-resistant and fair mining algorithms, and will also explore alternatives such as proof of stake, proof of burn and proof of excellence. Details on this will be further released in February.

Finally, to promote local community development, we also intend to create public community hubs and incubators, which we are tentatively calling "holons", in several cities around the world. The first holon will be based inside of Bitcoin Decentral in Toronto, and a substantial portion of Ethereum development will take place there; anyone who is seriously interested in participating heavily in Ethereum should consider giving us a visit over the next month. Other cities we are looking into include San Francisco, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and some city in Asia; this part of the project is still in a very early phase of development, and more details will come over the next month."
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  Thank you was waiting for someone to bring back some sanity into this, sidetracking the subject into Proof of Work while we were clearly speaking of Proof Of Steak and the aftermath. Thanks Leo.