Topic: What is Ethereum??? - page 2. (Read 2946 times)

I don't think its a scam. There is not much to show for millions of dollars. I would be interested to see if there is any accounting for the money at all. It should be public record after all its the public's money.

Is it a scam?

A once insider, now an outsider looking in... what path do you see Ethereum ultimately taking?  They seem to have the attention of big players (IBM, Samsung) - it lends a certain credibility.  But from your response they don't seem to be what they are purporting.

I never understood what this coin was bout, including similar coins.

NEM all the way

What the hell does that term even mean? It's all vacuous and made up bullshit. The single biggest problem we face in the cryptospace is the mobile problem. The vast majority of users are on cell phones and these are curated and controlled platforms. When the majors (Microsoft, Apple and Google) enter the space (and they will). We will see a federated crackdown on apps that don't conform with their business models. No more darkleaks, no more dash, etc. Break the mobile embargo and liberate apps. That should be the focus not jargon that is meaningless and expensive to pursue.

Ethereum will be Internet 3.0
And it is the outcome of years of researchern the cryptoeconomic science.

Ethereum is the last chance for crypto, if it fails the whole idea of using the blockchain for more than just a currency will die.

I heard they dumped out all their BTC and the public wallet is empty!

Thankyou for your eye opening post.

Despite spending months of my life trying to figure out the legal and tax implications of it and even moving to Switzerland for three months, I was always against the ether sale and wanted to take VC money. It made a hell of a negotiating point for valuation, but introduced a terrible moral hazard of having no fiduciary responsibility behind the enormous sum raised. Also no formal due diligence process would be applied to the core team.

If there was to be a sale, then I wanted two organizations to form with a VC funded for profit building the initial protocol and then a sale at the time of launch to fund a foundation with a separate board managing it. This would create a clear separation of concerns and avoid conflicts of interest. Second, the risk to ether purchasers would be substantially less and would have eliminated the need and justification for a premine altogether. Obviously that didn't happen and the project decided to use the sale to fund some sort of bizarre swiss NPO funding a pesudo for profit in England two months after I left in early June.

Since then they've apparently spent or lost 14 of the 18 million raised and have missed two launch windows for a command line barebones version of the software. Second, they've experienced terrible mission creep with a mandate to re-invent the internet as opposed to simply giving the space a much better foundation to build cool blockchain centric applications and protocols. I'm honestly not sure what ethereum is anymore? Whisper, Swarm, Golem, Holons, Open Org, 4 new programming languages, DAOs???

In any event, don't blame people you've never met for things you know nothing about. Ethereum would be a very different project if I was still there. I'm not and they don't even have me listed as a founder nor did Mihai even mention me once in his history of the project. Thus I suppose I never played a meaningful role. 

I don't agree with the way they went about raising funds, it was probably Charles Hoskinson's idea. I didn't purchase "ethers",  considered it more a donation than an investment.

Faith is good.

I'm not saying anyone is going to run off with Ethereum ipo funds. Let's face facts:

They were paid upfront so to speak. No one to answer to and no contracts. Nothing binding, no time frame, nada. The money is theirs, no strings, plain and simple.

I reiterate the OP's question: Innovation.

Bring in 30,000 btc on the power of faith is bloody amazing. That's innovation.

Well, I believe he isn't going to just take the money and run without giving his best effort. I don't know him personally but he doesn't seem like the type.

Conditions of the IPO were crystal clear:

"Risk that the Ethereum Platform May Never be Completed or Released
Purchaser understands, that while the Ethereum Team will make reasonable efforts to complete the Ethereum software, it is possible that an official completed version of the Ethereum Platform may not be released and there may never be an operational Ethereum Platform."

They promised nothing and they were upfront about it in writing. Whatever Vitalik 'said' is moot.

That's not entirely true. Vitalik promised to make it scale or die trying.

They promised nothing but they have produced some code. In fact, counterparty utilizes some of it.

Actually the programming language on the blockchain has been around since pre-funding.

Decentralized exchange, government, etc has already been built.  It isn't that people have trouble explaining it - there's just much hostility from the altcoin forum.  I would chalk it up to the IPO but much less hostility has existed towards outright scams (Paycoin, Blocknet, etc).

Kinda impossible to build a programming language from the ground up on the blockchain and do nothing.  Maybe it will fail but there's a reason IBM picked Ethereum over bitcoin codebase. 

It in the future. No one actually knows at this point even though they are so desperately trying to explain it. Major speculation.

What makes it innovative? The most money ever brought in by IPO on the promise of NOTHING. That is innovation my friend.

I suspect that was true for much of the legitimate BTC that went in.  Who would buy into an IPO, when for the longest time, they admitted Ethereum would also include proof of work?  You like paying for coins that miners, after you, will be getting for free and subsequently dumping for 100% profit?  

Ethereum's smashing huge hit was supposed to be Smart Contracts, but now there's like 4-6 projects doing the same thing, and  the 'Ether language' which strangely I've not heard about in the longest time.. (was it abandoned or did they realize that nobody cares about a new programming language that'ld  probably take 15 years to educate a generation of developers to program in it and to stamp out all the bugs?).

Indeed, IBM is interested in the technology: http://www.coindesk.com/ibm-reveals-proof-concept-blockchain-powered-internet-things/
As I see they want to fork Ethereum and use it as a smart contract subsystem for their proof of concept IoT system.