Ethereum price goes up nearly 50 percent in under a week
coinmarketcap.com
coinmarketcap.com
Here's a description from the website for what the EEA aims to do.
> "The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics, and technology vendors with Ethereum subject matter experts. Together, we will learn from and build upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real-world production – Ethereum – to define enterprise-grade software capable of handling the most complex, highly demanding applications at the speed of business."
Some big names that are a part of the Alliance include Microsoft, Intel, J.P. Morgan, and Accenture. The rest are on the site!
Imo the Bitcoin ETF rejection produced a knee-jerk reaction and caused a lot of potential (in-case-of-approved-ETF) Bitcoin investors to diversify for now with other cryptos as well, then or at the same time cryptotraders started pumping more.
A lot of altcoins are in a crazy pump-and-dump cycles at the moment, so be cautious.
As for Ethereum, no one in their right mind would base something so crucial on such risky and proven-damaging language/platform. Print all the press releases you want to present yourself innovative etc., but it's a rotten foundation if you care about security and reliability. At least I hope we will see some evolution on that side instead of dirty-patching security issues.
This is a bold statement to proclaim while providing no evidence. It's the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, for Christsakes!
On a sidenote, the 3rd largest cryptocurrency is a instant/premined scam[1] and the 5th largest is a super-centralized system that you can barely call cryptocurrency. So marketcap doesn't prove much.
Also, the DAO is separate from Ethereum. It's a contract running on ethereum, not ethereum itself.
You are being very hyperbolic with your criticism.
After the hard fork I stopped going to these meetups and hackathons.
If it is possible in ETH to build smart financial contracts but also encode state into the "wallet", such that reputation was earned or lost, then they really might have a winning strategy.
There is no real reason why distributed Uber/Lyft shouldn't exist.
I disagree. First let me say there are two types of companies, those that make use of IT and those that are themselves about IT (ie Microsoft, IBM). Now those that only make use of IT often ignore what their own tech people tell them, and so they are susceptible to tech fads.
But the IT companies pay very close attention to their IT people. And the IT companies have lots of IT people as smart or smarter than you who are quite qualified to look at Ethereum and figure out if there is anything valuable there. The fact that lots of IT companies are getting behind Ethereum says to me it is really going to be valuable, at least for their sorts of businesses.
Let me add that nowadays, banks and other finance institutions are basically IT companies that happen to also have a lot of people that deal with customers directly. So if they think they can use the blockchain to eliminate intermediaries and in the process save billions of dollars, I tend to believe they are correct.
You may be right, however, that a lot of the people at Ethereum meetups don't really understand it.
On the other hand, the skepticism in this forum (albeit from people who are far more knowledgeable about crypto currencies and markets than me) makes me feel like I should 1) sell it all, or 2) sell only enough to recoup my initial investment.
Either way, the money I put into it was just fun money and wouldn't hurt if I lost it. It's a bit of a thrill to watch an asset appreciate in value that much within such a small period of time. The ultimate question is when to realize the gain or the loss.
Humans have a distinct disposition wherein we tend to sell gaining assets earlier than we sell losing ones (the disposition effect), even in circumstances where it's detrimental to us. Is this playing out in my mind right now?
Personally I develop smart contracts on Ethereum for a living, and business is good. The ecosystem is developing fast.
All my work so far is on startup projects for the public chain, but there's also corporate work for the EEA's private chain efforts. They said there's a severe shortage of skilled people.
I've gotten two other full-time job offers and one for ongoing freelance, without really promoting myself at all. I'm just active in the community and blog a little.
But be warned, it will be a long time before it matures, and it will be a bumpy ride.
We haven't seen the last of this.
Opinion
> ethereum is a blockchain with a turing-complete programming language built on top of it and enables decentralized code execution
Fact -- but double edged sword (my opinion, of course).
I have personally been skeptical of ETH for years as their team have been promising the moon for a variety of use cases.
For me, the biggest blow to ETH is the revelation that "the code is NOT law". This is in contrast to the line they were pushing for years that the code IS law. Then someone found a bug in the first major DAO and the code was quickly changed.
So much for that. If you think that is gonna be the last issue along these lines, I've got a bridge to sell you, too.
Considering Ethereum Classic has all the features of ETH and it follows whatever your distorted definition of 'code is law' means, the fact that ETC is at it's all time low (compared to its price in ETH)). The question remains if ETH violated 'Code is Law', then how come market doesn't care.
Clearly the biggest blow to ETH is NOT the DAO fork. If ETH is not above bitcoin, then among all the reasons I can list, its decision to hard fork is not one of it (because if that is the case then ETC would have been the market leader).
I'm not sure how my view is distorted - it might be naive, I concede.
My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
In my world view, if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties.
Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication.
Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain.
Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough. It wasn't a bounty contract. If that was known beforehand, then there is no way it would have accrued $150 million worth of ethers.
> My view is basically the person who found a flaw in TheDAO code deserved to be rewarded for it, even if it was not the intent of TheDAO, because I was sold (perhaps improperly) on the code being the arbiter, not people or politics.
Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that Ethereum is never going to succeed because they didn't honor the hacker's bounty?
I don't disagree that Ethereum should have forked, but that is a human response. If we can take human responses to these contracts, then they aren't any different than normal paper contracts.
One lesson is not to trust ANY contract to be immutable if it manages an outsized chunk of network capital. Another is that Ethereum will beat its private competitors, since for contracts to be trustworthy they will need to run on the biggest and most diversified network there is.
The point is, the code is not law, and no solution seems to exist that would make it possible to say it is. This stands for all cryptocurrencies.
There's no reason that smart contracts require Turing completeness (no real world program requires it, for that matter), and software theorem proving will be required for me to take smart contracts seriously. We need to be able to prove things about the contract execution for it to be safe to trust "code as contract".
Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so.
> I'm personally waiting on an ETH successor with non-Turing-complete, verifiable code.
Absolutely! My premise is that with turing completeness comes more chances for shooting in the foot.
> Im not as upset about the hardfork as many people, though. Social constructs should be changable by politics, not indelible and absolute. That's not what they were selling, but all the same, what they were selling was dystopian nonsense where humans are chained to machines, not their masters. It's a feature not bug of social constructs to be changeable through politics. What matters is the political process to do so.
This is great insight. I think for me, personally, the problem I have is that it seems like there isn't much politics involved at all... a completely centralized and small group made a decision and the great majority of users followed right along (as we would expect them to).
This is not quite how it is (or was anyway) sold to people as a concept.
98% of all bytes and blackbytes will be distributed to
current Bitcoin holders who bother to prove their
Bitcoin balances during at least one of distribution
rounds.
Then the number of bytes and blackbytes you receive in
each round will be proportional to the balance of your
Bitcoin address in the snapshot block of that round.
Similarly, Id want a proof-checked VM for the currency, which ETH is pretty far from supporting.
So verified-ETH would be a larger, more bug-prone project than starting from first principles, developing a language and VM in parallel. (Also, starting a new project gives a chance to change the economics and/or technology used; depending on your views, this might be a benefit.)
https://medium.com/@pirapira/ethereum-virtual-machine-for-co...
I either missed it or it didn't exist last time I looked in to ETH. (About a year ago, pre-DAO.)
Either way, this is a major component of what I'd like to see in smart contracts! (The other two major pieces being a verified VM that supports that spec, and a developer library of "standard" contract pieces -- I don't recall being impressed by directly coding for the EVM, and easy-to-use contracts require a library of "standard legalese".)
Glad to see ETH is putting in the effort.
My priority is on keeping the formal definition in sync with the Yellow Paper and the implementations.
This is a very valid concern, in my opinion. Although some people seem to be working on that, it looks like still in its infancy: https://medium.com/@pirapira/1-000-ether-bounty-on-a-proven-...
I'm also afraid that 'smart contract' is sort of a misnomer. Where regular "social" contracts between people and entities define all sorts of relationships, the contracts that are put on a blockchain-serialized VM can only express relationships in terms of value transfers.
More like the Netflix to BTC's VHS
I personally equate it to DOS vs Android. The potential for ETH is massive... granted security concerns, scalability, POS are equally massive hurdles to overcome.
The current ETH price trend started in February. The other thing that happened in Feb. is that ETH's transaction volume started to rise after being essentially flat for the year prior. [0] The rise in ETH transactions roughly coincided with Bitcoin's blocks being consistently full and large backlogs in the Bitcoin transaction mem pool. [1] You can also look at Bitcoin's transaction volume graph and see that it's transaction volume has been growing throughout the year long bull market it is currently in. [2] ETH's price on the other hand was flat until February when it started to benefit from congestion in Bitcoin. Make of that what you will.
[0] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year
[2] https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all
Instead, you can use a cryptocurrency which supports declarative smart contracts, which a lay-person could read, write and understand.
Declarative smart contracts, over at https://byteball.org/
m / m^3 = 1/m^2
Which is the unit for fuel efficiency. It's expressed in imperial units but it's physically sound, not 'crap'. ;)
In other parts of the world you'll see this expressed as "liters per 100km" usually.
MPG is more pervasive than you might think. Even in metric, European Ireland it's the typical unit, despite speeds being in km/h and fuel being sold by the litre.
Since you seem to be interested, let me also add that litres are only accepted by, not part of, the SI. Also the SI spellings are "metre" and "litre".
I'm actually quite interested in the fact that any equation can be "sanity checked" by solving it for units only (without values). It's always handy to make sure I didn't forget some exponent here or there. And knowing extended units as a composition of fundamentals (some variation of mksa) is kind of entertaining intellectually.(e.g. Newton = m.kg/s^2, which really makes sense when you think about it). Going down to Planck units and their significance in this universe (discrete spacetime manifold? Is reality ultimately non-continuous?), and here I am wishing our conventional units (of time, distance, all) were integer multiples (e.g. Decimal exponents) of Planck units. But I'm digressing, aren't I.
As far as fuel and efficiency goes, I'm not much of a car person. I didn't know that mpg was used outside the US, that's an interesting historical artefact.
What you pay in transaction fees is the amount of bytes used to represent your data.
Byteball can then also store immutable data of various lengths, if you are willing to pay for it in the price of bytes for the storage of bytes you like to store.
Makes sense.
That means you can have a decentralized application and also have the security of the bitcoin network, for example.
Byteball is live right now, Iota is still in closed/private beta testing with less features.
http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/01/03/byteball-vs-iota-token/
http://www.the-blockchain.com/2016/12/11/happy-holidays-byte...
They both seem like interesting projects.
They dont even use the same underlying technology, unless you consider DAG to be a technology rather than a data-structure. Iota nodes are written in Java, Byteball is all in Node.js
As is usual in cryptocurrency world, if you want news and technical documentation on Byteball, you ask the Byteball people, do not ask Iota, and vice versa.
IOTA has something like "Monte Carlo Random Walk for Tip Selection by most Proof-of-Work" while Byteball has 12 trusted witnesses to stamp and order transactions as they see them, stamp only when satisfying consensus rules, a Main Chain can then be built from all possible transaction histories (branches). No proof-of-work aside from signatures.
Today all witnesses are run by main developer. A hub on the Byteball network can push witnesses, if users trust a particular hub they can check a box to pull the witness list, this is just user-friendliness.
The witnesses are supposed to be selected by humans by talking, like a popularity contest. There is no automatic protocol-selection process aside from described below.
Each user/transaction is allowed 1 mutation in the 12 list, so technically there can be more witnesses than 12 in the network, but only 12 selected in each transaction.
Then, when enough transactions have replaced same witness with a new one, the stability point, ie best parent, can be advanced and next witness can be replaced. See the whitepaper for more details on this advancing of "best parent" in the Main Chain. Like a snowball.
The process is user-driven, the costs to replace it by malicious intent is too high due to transaction fees, the limit on 1 mutation and hence slow time to actually replace all of them or a majority is also to ensure human herd-behaviour doesnt make bad decisions.
P.S. as I write this, poloniex went down.
1) Bitcoin transaction fees increasing and ETH being the main alternative available on Coinbase, even though ETH is not meant to be a currency, more like AWS credits, and its supply isn't fixed so isn't a good store of value.
2) Everyone was holding onto their BTC in case the ETF decision lead to a surge of new money into bitcon. Now that is off the table they are seeking bigger returns in alts.
Also new money is being pulling in by Dash hyping their version to those who missed out on the bitcoin bull and since Dash is nothing special now people have the idea that any other alt could be next.
No, the hard fork for TheDAO did not sacrifice our principles.
No it wasn't a centralized bailout.
Yes, there were SOME shady things that went down, but all very minor. It was a very confusing time for all.
Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one. Congratulations. Let me direct you to Ethereum Classic. You can't complain about a hard fork when you have a community that upholds the original version. Go complain there. The rest of us are moving forward and helping develop a technology that will ultimately be fully decentralized and uncensorable. In the meantime, our community respects our centralized development team that is super awesome and competent and are committed to changing the world.
Best analogy I can come up with is Elon Musk trying to develop automated driving cars, and a few people tragically get killed along the way due to it. That doesnt mean automated driving cars are bad, or that development of the technology should cease.
Here's a great list of upcoming projects
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5slji5/its_all_sl...
As an observer, yes, it definitely did.
It's the thing that has most turned me off of ETH.
Your team has always been a bit combative with regards to criticism, from my experience.
That said... I am actually more interested in using ethereum classic than I am ethereum, uh, central.
Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one.
You literally sacrificed your principles. Now you're here trying to justify your own actions to yourself. This pointless noise you're making? You're trying to convince yourself, because you clearly know you're in the wrong. It's just as obvious from over here.
Let's say that Hard fork never happened, lets say if tomorrow due to a certain smart contract, 90% of the Ether holders sell off, and go join Lisk or some other Smart contract platform, would you say because 90% of the Ethereum supporters sold off their currency, therefore the smart contract has been 'stopped' and that they should remove "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" from their website?
Literally what happened (and there is no way of saying it otherwise irrespective of how you approach it). A group of developers forked Ethereum into their own blockchain, so all the investors evened up with currency in both the chains. Then people sold their 'original ethers' and moved to the new ethers.
The current price of original Ethers (known as Ethereum Classic) is 90% less than what it used to be.
> Ethereum sacrificed its principles to stop/censor a contract, and still keeps "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" on the website.
You do understand that Ethereum is not like Apple or some other organization. It's a technology and "IT" does not have a website. You're talking about Ethereum.org which is the website of Ethereum Foundation.
And maybe I shouldn't presume knowledge on other people's (like your) part, but in a decentralized technology like Bitcoin or Ethereum, thousands of miners (or in PoS system stakers) are the real entity here. Miners too merely follow the price. This is why initially when Hard Fork happened, a lot of miners went back to mining Ethereum Classic after momentarily jumping to the forked blockchain. Then when it was clear that the market/investors don't support the idea of letting a theft continue, they jumped back to Ethereum forked chain.
Clearly Ethereum Classic hasn't 'sacrificed' it's principles, they too have a foundation, and you're free to invest and use ETC.
If I can write a piece of code which can be used to steal your emails and bank accounts, then your emails and bank accounts are already 'exposed'. They don't 'become exposed' when I write the tool.
Ethereum blockchain didn't become something different fundamentally when this hard fork was implemented. If you consider hard fork as 'mutating the blockchain' (which I heavily disagree) then it didn't become mutable when the hard fork was implemented, rather it was mutable from the day the it was created.
And funny thing is, by that measure, literally there is no such thing as immutable blockchain. Bitcoin can be mutated in the same way Ethereum was.
> No it wasn't a centralized bailout.
> Yes, there were SOME shady things that went down, but all very minor. It was a very confusing time for all.
> Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one. Congratulations. Let me direct you to Ethereum Classic. You can't complain about a hard fork when you have a community that upholds the original version. Go complain there. The rest of us are moving forward and helping develop a technology that will ultimately be fully decentralized and uncensorable. In the meantime, our community respects our centralized development team that is super awesome and competent and are committed to changing the world.
What's to prevent a similar situation in the future and why should anyone believe that to hold?
> Best analogy I can come up with is Elon Musk trying to develop automated driving cars, and a few people tragically get killed along the way due to it. That doesnt mean automated driving cars are bad, or that development of the technology should cease.
In your analogy the company set up by Musk would get sued and possibly shut down. It wouldn't stop the concept itself from being developed or promoted by others and doesn't speak to the concept itself. I'm not saying Ethereum should have "given up" but sacrificing the core point of transactions not being able to be backed out is pretty damning.
Ask yourself if this was a centralized hard fork ordered by up high, or as users we chose to opt in to this change. Clearly we opted in, because Ethereum Classic exists for those who so wish. Therefore, the Ethereum Foundation did not "force" me to do anything that I didn't agree to.
Yes in my example Musk might have gotten sued (although really? is he at risk of that right now? I doubt it.), but a mistake early on in development should not hinder the advancement of the technology.
If you are going to say smart contracts are useful, but we should abandon the Ethereum blockchain, then BY ALL MEANS please go to Ethereum Classic. You'll be welcome there with open arms. But the main Ethereum community clearly prioritizes pragmatism, as do the majority of the world. We're not idealists. We're actually trying to put out a meaningful technology to help people. So you can throw Musk in jail or let him get back to work on saving lives.
The analogy to the legal system is that mob rule supersedes (digital) contract law and property rights.
If people want to go down that path they're free to do so but I'm not a fan.
> Yes in my example Musk might have gotten sued (although really? is he at risk of that right now? I doubt it.), but a mistake early on in development should not hinder the advancement of the technology.
> If you are going to say smart contracts are useful, but we should abandon the Ethereum blockchain, then BY ALL MEANS please go to Ethereum Classic. You'll be welcome there with open arms. But the main Ethereum community clearly prioritizes pragmatism, as do the majority of the world. We're not idealists. We're actually trying to put out a meaningful technology to help people.
Eating the loss doesn't stop you from developing better software. Heck, I'd say that it's a pretty good way to prevent things in the future by giving people a real incentive to prevent bugs in the first place. If it's socially acceptable to roll back the clock because somebody wrote a dumb smart contract then it's a sign that writing dumb smart contracts is socially acceptable.
> So you can throw Musk in jail or let him get back to work on saving lives.
That's a false dichotomy. In the analogy Musk doesn't go to jail unless he willfully released something that he knew could kill people or otherwise programmed the cars to drive on the sidewalk.
In ETH's case they could have absorbed the loss, hardened the systems, and moved on. Honestly it would have added a lot more credibility to the whole endeavor by showing that they were willing to put their (ETH) money where their mouths are.
That's basically true. I don't dispute that. That's basically how Bitcoin works as well. There's currently a coup attempt going on to overthrow Bitcoin Core. If the mob grows big enough they will succeed.
>Eating the loss doesn't stop you from developing better software. Heck, I'd say that it's a pretty good way to prevent things in the future by giving people a real incentive to prevent bugs in the first place. If it's socially acceptable to roll back the clock because somebody wrote a dumb smart contract then it's a sign that writing dumb smart contracts is socially acceptable.
Eat the loss or not eating the loss doesnt affect development. The development track is the same either way. One saves a sad sack of idiots from losing money and the other doesn't. It's not the development team's job to teach people basic life skills about risk. Users had a choice to be on the chain where they lost money or the one that they didn't. Shocker, they chose to recover their money. Has nothing to do with developing better software or not.
>That's a false dichotomy. In the analogy Musk doesn't go to jail unless he willfully released something that he knew could kill people or otherwise programmed the cars to drive on the sidewalk. In ETH's case they could have absorbed the loss, hardened the systems, and moved on. Honestly it would have added a lot more credibility to the whole endeavor by showing that they were willing to put their (ETH) money where their mouths are.
No one willfully released TheDAO code to suck. It just sucked by accident. Absorbing the loss would NOT have hardened the system. Everything would be exactly the same. It wouldn't have made Eth any more or less credible if we absorbed the loss. And if you are put off, that's fine. If you want to join a blockchain with perfect credibility, good luck. Bitcoin has forked ~3 times, and Ethereum Classic has forked 2 or 3 times now as well.
Maybe blockchain technology is too nascent, or it just isn't for you. But the takeaway here is that _we are all still striving and working hard to make this technology be meaningful for the world, so stop shitting on it just to get your rocks off_. Not you personally, but others clearly do.
Imagine if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties.
Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication.
Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain.
Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough.
Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that and joined say Lisk or some other smart contract platform, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that 'mob rule has superceded the contract law and property rights'?
And who is deciding what that intent? Right now, the mob, so the parent is right :)
Your analogies to courts defeats the entire argument against that.
Courts were, in fact, set up as deciders of that thing called "law".
If code is law, so to speak, you don't need them. There is no intent.
Considering we can decide to abolish the constitution in America (or in any country) any time, does that mean we don't have a constitutional republic in America? Technically we can never say that we have a system X which is not Mob rule because the mob can always abolish it.
Literally speaking, there is no such thing as 'code is law' because in your definition there is no such thing as law, because anything which can be modified by the mob is not law and everything can be modified or abolished by the mob.
The former is not correct, so the latter is nonsense. The constitution has no provision for abolishing it, the same as it does not have a provision allowing secession.
There is actually even caselaw on this, and it's very clear that it is about a perpetual union.
"Technically we can never say that we have a system X which is not Mob rule because the mob can always abolish it." That is 100% not what has happened here. In the constitutional system, there is a process for amending the constitution. it is not mob rule, or anything close to it. it is possible for basically 100% of the people to be against or for a thing, and them be unable to make it happen directly. (even if they call a constitutional convention, they send representatives, not a mob, etc)
In the other other case, the rules are 100% made up by whoever has the largest mob, directly. That is mob rule.
There's a huge difference between a blockchain that just started out, effectively in its beta release and learning the ropes, doing a hard fork under extraordinary circumstances, and a mature blockchain doing a hard fork to reverse any old major Dapp hack.
If Ethereum does hard forks to reverse hacks of third party applications at a mature phase of its life, I think its chances of succeeding and becoming the main platform for global asset management will diminish significantly. On the contrary, if Ethereum stays true to its principles, and becomes reliably immutable, even in the face of major hacks, I believe there is very little that can stop it from becoming the defacto protocol for global commerce. So I think being overly pragmatic is actually dangerous. Idealism is what sets principles, and principles are what give a platform credibility.
Remember, a hack of a third party application, no matter how major, cannot seriously harm Ethereum. A contentious hard fork and a discrediting of its principles can.
Look, ETC is still there, and currently it's at its all time low. Clearly the market didn't care about the DAO situation.
In other words, if a company makes a decision X which you think is a bad decision, and nearly none of their customers oppose them for it, did they really make a bad decision?
If tomorrow another DAO debacle happens and another such thing happens, I for one expect Ethereum Foundation to take steps to safeguard the integrity of the network by thwarting the theft.
If after Mt Gox theft had bitcoin been forked to undo that theft, then I would have jumped on to the forked chain (again no promises, but in principle I'd have gone to the forked chain).
On the other hand I presume you'd have stayed on the non-forked chain.
In other words, there are two kinds of cryptocurrency investors. You and I belong to two different groups. If you like Ethereum but are worried about 'code is law' violation, then please go join ETC.
The hard fork was inevitable and it exposed the most glaring problem with the whole thing - there's no use case for a ledger that's supposedly decentralized and immutable but is in fact subject to the decisions of a particular group, however "super awesome and competent" who have significant vested interests in the speculative value of the currency. I'm not even talking about the DoS hard fork which you can explain away as fixing a core ethereum bug. The fork that unilaterally decided to nix the ethereum of the hacker who exploited a flaw in theDAO's smart contracts, the action that was taken purely to roll back the losses of those who had their hands in the speculative ethereum cookie jar, makes ethereum as an implementation of a great concept impossible to take seriously. If code isn't law, then what is besides the whims of the ethereum community? Any sane individual would much rather take such a contract dispute to a U.S. court where at least one has an idea as to who is pulling the strings. Labeling such concerns as "dumb stuff" is simply a knee-jerk reaction to criticism that endangers your own stake in ethereum's success.
"Our unregulated-free-market-dream-but-still-controlled-by-a-group-with-financial-interests-in-it cryptocurrency has two fundamentally incompatible versions, and may very well fork into a third at the whim of Ethereum's developers"
wew lad
I used this spike to cash out half of my ETH bought in July, which basically gave me back in $ my initial investment.
Interestingly, since July, roughly speaking both ETH and BTC doubled their prices. I was expecting ETH to go up, but I wasn't expecting BTC to be equally strong.
tezos = google
choose