Topic: [ANN] Ethereum: Welcome to the Beginning - page 1305. (Read 2007155 times)

My layman's definition of 'price stability' infers that street prices of consumer goods and wages remain mostly the same. The value comparison you make here is only with the USD which impacts some % of all Canadian imported goods, but albeit a small overall % (we import most of our widgets from Asia). Sure ~70% of our exports are to the USA and thus the export companies and their employee's wages may be impacted, but again, they are a small % of our total economy.

The $5.00 Starbucks coffee you bought last year, likely still costs $5.00 today ? Likely, your wage is probably still the same or +~2% (CPI)?  Stable prices and wages = price stability.   When  year ago you paid 2000% more for anything priced in BTC than you do today... that's not price stability. Even when compared to 10% devaluation of the CAD vs USD, BTC's volatility is still 200 times in magnitude greater over the same period of time.

You are right in saying that crypto currencies are not mature and this is a catch 22 problem. Until they are widely accepted and massive liquidity exists in the system, they cannot be considered currencies because lack of liquidity = high volatility.... and you can't get them widely accepted quickly because... well, people don't like high volatility currencies ;-)

However, to purposely design a highly deflationary currency (i.e. bitcoin), puts the potential of it being accepted as a currency decades into the future - as you said, after all mining is done. More than likely if bitcoin were allowed to proceed unperturbed by governments, it will cause a global deflationary black hole for all fiat currencies. In other words, everyone will dump all paper money and trade it for bitcoins and the global economy as we know it will collapse. More than likely, governments will shut down bitcoin well before this, whether through legislative means (i.e. bitcoin is now illegal for all businesses to use (aka. China)), or by technical means : TCP port 8333 is firewalled at Tier 1 ISPs - and don't think they can't. At most BTC would only continue to function for black markets.

In regards to Ethereum, I think there's recognition that bitcoin's deflationary model is somehow flawed, although the devs don't offer a thesis for this... but suffice it to say they are taking a significantly different approach closer to our existing Keynesian system. My previous commentary was to suggest that they need more expert brains at work on the economic model to offer justification for what they came up with... else, somebody else will eventually do it better, and Ethereum will eventually be replaced.


And now back to the Ethereum discussion...

Hi Vitalik,
I would like to echo this sentiment. I understand accomplishing something like this would be difficult, and since you probably have some wealthy investor backing they may frown upon this kind of setup. But the little guys are looking for any and all help leveling the playing field.

The video published on the project's main page mentions Dropbox as one of the examples that could be recreated as a distributed system with this project, but I couldn't find any info on the more interesting question: how?

Which of its facilities would be useful for that? Who would store the data? Would it be a separate system which just happens to use ethereum for user authentication, or would it actually has anything to do with data storage? How would the insanse amount of data stored distributedly in a way that it doesn't choke the individual nodes, but would be readily available any time?

Dropbox really stands out of the other example applications and without at least some basic techincal description it sounds like just a marketing stunt... so can we have some more info?

Sad.

I'm not so sure about that.  Have you seen CAD / USD lately?

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=CAD&to=USD&view=1Y

Considering we've got $61+ Billion in circulation here in Canada, I would consider our dollar to be anything but stable. -10% over a year is volatile imho.

Besides, no cryptos are mature yet.  Once a crypto is completely mined out (in terms of new blocks of coin), then my best guess is that it would be no more or less stable than the CAD or USD.

 

The people behind this seem to have established, through their prior work, the appropriate connections in order to place this where it has the highest chance of succeeding . ....while doing so legally.

Is that why newbie restrictions were lifted and this thread is immune to normal categorization rules?

Wonder where these <10 activity Bitcoin Professionals come from?

So I watched the youtube video a few times and read through the website and wow, all I can say is wow. I plan on investing quite a bit into this. This is truly a piece of work.

The clusterfk called Mastercoin raised a small fortune, is guaranteed to fail in the long term, but still turned out to be a fantastic investment all the same. If you are investing to make money the changes that speculation will drive you into insane profits is pretty high already.

This seems a bit sketchy.


They are giving you near nothing of ETH, for X thousands of dollars in btc. And it's an unproven concept.


I'm ready to invest, but, i'll wait and see

So you like corrupted politicians etc too?

I already figured that out.

Ok, 30,000,000-60mil for IPO.



That is not the totaly supply of eth, that's just the initial.

An initial investment will just degrade over a period of time, as its mined to death, instead of grow. We'll see, could be potentially huge or fail entirely.

Vitalik,

If this is Turning complete, what is to stop someone either writing a malicious script or accidentally writing an invalid script, both of which could run an infinite loop for example. As far as I was aware, Bitcoin was deliberately written not to be Turning complete on purpose.

Based on this quote from OP "There will be a hard cap of 30,000 bitcoins that if reached will immediately end the fundraiser"
They said they were selling 1 ETH for 0.001 btc.

Math

30,000 x 1000 = 30,000,000 Million ETH for the IPO.

Does that sound right?

Where? nothing mentioned in the initial post. I reflected my post to match what will be generated for the ipo

all already answered

So 30,000,000 - 60,000,000 Eth will be created if you reach the hard cap of 30,000 BTC.

1) How many eth will ever be created?

2) How many eth will be mined/created by the end of the first year cycle?

Gives details on what the supply of eth will look like.


Seems no one on the eth team wants to answer, this is very important for investors.

Commentary on  the Economic Model:

IMHO, the brainiac eclectic Ethereum team is missing an economist (or two - ideally from different economic schools of thought). The vast majority of countries have now regulated Bitcoin as a commodity because it fails the test of being a currency. The number one reason (aside from the fact they can't control it via their central banksters) is because bitcoin lacks "price stability". Let me put that in upper case, because it seems to escape the minds of every crypto coin developer I've seen to date...

*** For a monetary unit to be a globally accepted currency it must have PRICE STABILITY!  ***

This is not a government mandate, but rather a mandate of people all around the world for centuries. The minute a currency fluctuates wildly, people stop using it. Whether to hoard it (deflationary currencies) or to get rid of it ASAP (inflationary ones).
In order to attain price stability, you must have very low inflation or very low deflation, with 0% being ideal (Keynesians would argue that 2% inflation is ideal). From that perspective, Ethereum's philosophical design appears to be on target... except the details matter.

The inflationary design of Ethereum imagines that it will be more fair if it targets 0% inflation.  Unfortunately, you can't target 0% inflation, when your protocol is completely disconnected from a wide range of real world dynamics such as production capacities and efficiencies, resource availability and overall costs of living to name a few. It is academically erroneous to claim to target 0% inflation, when what you mean is targeting 0% dilution after a certain time period - that is unfortunately not the same as 0% inflation. Because your coin will lack Price Stability, it will immediately not be considered a potential global currency. Because your coin will not be a currency, but rather another commodity like bitcoin (albeit with different characteristics), it will always be traded and valued against a real accepted global currency such as the USD, and thus, even if you design an eventual 0% dilution target into it, simple supply/demand will actually determine it's real world value in a foreign currency, and thus you will have inflation or deflation regardless of how much effort you placed into Ethereum's inflationary design code.  I should also add that talking about Ethereum in your whitepaper and saying that it is inflationary like bitcoin is highly confusing, since bitcoin is predominately deflationary. Some word clean up is required there to get your meaning across.

To be clear, I'm not pro USD, and despise various aspects of it, but one thing is certain - on a day to day basis, consumers have price stability - despite the fact that over much larger periods of time (i.e. 100 years) it looses significant (98%) purchasing power... but that's by design (2%/yr inflation), not accident; and the result is *practical* price stability that can be used to conduct Commerce and operate businesses (i.e. pay employees static salaries each month, pay suppliers the same price for goods with the possibility of only 1 or 2 yearly adjustments)etc.

Lastly, the irony is not lost on me… you put brain power towards achieving 0% ‘inflation’, but then turn around and call it a platform and not a currency. So which one is it supposed to be? ;-)