Ethereum Blockchain Project Launches First Production Release | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum Blockchain Project Launches First Production Release

coindesk.com

83 pointsca98am7927 comments

Among the interesting things about Ethereum is that they built a billion-dollar "company" in a totally nontraditional way. Instead of VC, they raised money in a presale, the developers have liquidity from the beginning, and none of it required permission from anyone. Just people buying into the concept. Seems clear that this sort of thing being possible stands to change things for regulators, investors, and other market participants.

This appears to have become the standard way to fund blockchain-based companies.

Storj is using the same approach - https://storj.io/

Is that really a valid valuation? If they tired to liqudate even a small fraction it would surely tank the price to essentailly zero.

The same can be said for any public company.

Not really. Is there any public company whose entire product is essentially printing stock certificates?

The product is actually internet hosting as a service. It is being administered by an autonomous artificial intelligence, who runs the books and decides who owes who how much. That AI is its own corporation, and is a separate entity from the Ethereum Foundation, which created it and organized the initial public offering of web hosting tokens. The tokens can be exchanged for hosting.

They have some value on the open market which is a function of how much people are willing to pay for Ethereum hosting and how much people think people will be willing to pay for it in the future.

Ethereum amd blockchains are incredibly exciting to me.

For an example of Ethereum innovation, musician Imogen Heapis using Ethereum to create music sharing and remixing, with smart connections among artists, producers, and fans.

Article: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/06/imogen-heap-sav...

"her current project: to bring to life an entirely new landscape ... spurred on by the technology originally designed by libertarians to create the crypto-currency bitcoin, she’s releasing her next song as an event and an experiment. What she hopes to emerge is the core of a revolutionary system she refers to as Mycelia. It could completely transform the music industry."

Not really related but maybe interesting anyway... When etherium got started they gave away 100 "ethers" to anyone who wanted them to drum up interest. I just sold mine last week at $12 each. Only time I can recall someone literally giving me $1200 for nothing...

"...to drum up interest..." <--> "...for nothing..."

Many altcoins do these giveaways, also ripple gave those ripples away. I personally don't think that giving out free money is very good strategy, they should instead just focus on building something useful.

Can someone help explain why the "hard fork by consensus" in Ethereum is any better than the "hard fork not by consensus" in Bitcoin?

At some point, a hard fork will be required for Ethereum that the community will not want because they've got vested interests that differ from Ethereum's developers.

Ethereum is defined by a spec, rather than a reference client. There are seven independent implementations so far. So it's already a less centralized development model.

Once the transition is made to proof-of-stake, the incentives of its "miners" will be more closely aligned to those of the community.

The existing miners can't prevent that transition. They're also using general-purpose hardware that can be repointed to other chains or sold to gamers, so they don't have a strong incentive to fight it anyway.

So it's more like HTTP than an open source Skype. How is that spec managed and controlled?

By a nonprofit foundation. The clients are tested against each other, and the spec is modified if there are any discrepancies due to misunderstandings.

If the community ever loses confidence in the foundation's leadership it can transition to another arrangement.

But Bitcoin has a foundation as well

They aren't too official, and there has been controversy recently over how much power they have.

What I'm getting at is how is Ethereum immune to the social factors currently plaguing Bitcoin? I don't see anything except "trust us".

I thought my comment amounted to more than "trust us." Development is less centralized, since Ethereum is defined by a spec and there are seven independent implementations, and proof of stake aligns incentives better than mining.

But I'd only claim it's more resistant, not immune.

The reason I likened it to HTTP is because of the browser wars and how the big players can influence the spec. Now we're talking about money and the same possibility of big players emerging.

It sounds like what you're saying is "yes, big players will emerge but something will keep them in check." What is that thing?

Anyone know how many transaction per second the Ethereum network can handle?

Also, how fast does the blockchain grow in size in GB/month?

According to this it can handle more transactions per second: https://www.quora.com/How-scales-ethereum-in-comparison-to-b...

They've hit 8 tx/sec in production and 25 tx/sec on the testnet. Proof of stake should increase capacity to over 100 tx/sec, and a simple sharding scheme to at least 10,000 tx/sec. Long-term they hope to do even better.

Blockchain size is increasing rapidly, I think it's up to 40GB already. But they plan to implement pruning before it becomes a serious problem.

I think the current size is about 8 GB, not 40 GB, according to some recent posts (not running a node myself though).

You may be right, I'm just going by hearsay myself.

I have heard a lot talk about these DAPP's. Is any DAPP seeing market adoption? I saw binary option marketplace earlier, don't remember the name, anyone have idea how active is it?

Nice to see hacker news slowly catching upto news from two weeks back!

Here's some previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11197592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11284912

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