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Comment by johnnydoebk | Hacker News Reader

>> There already exists a common currency through which we can trade. It's called ether

> Exactly. For every ICO that pops up, ask does this use case require a special token?

Well, creators of Ether have already got their share, didn't they? What should be the motivation of "dApp" developers in your opinion if they can't earn the way Ether developers did? Do you expect them to use Ethereum for the love of humanity? Because, you don't really need Ethereum to create decentralized applications. There were decentralized (p2p) forums way before the crypto movements. There is a decentralized (p2p) search engine that works just fine without Ethereum. If not ICO, why would I pay the Ethereum network to deploy my contract, develop an app, promote it, and then convince my users that they should pay the network to use my app, too (assuming that I hold 0.0000 of Ether and don't care about the rise of its price)?

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> If not ICO, why would I pay the Ethereum network to deploy my contract, develop an app, promote it, and then convince my users that they should pay the network to use my app, too (assuming that I hold 0.0000 of Ether and don't care about the rise of its price)?

If you want to enforce the same properties that the Ethereum network can, but you don't want to use anything associated with the Ethereum network, then you need to write something similar. And it turns out this takes work.

So you could either:

(1) write your own separate distributed cryptocurrency system, which is not exactly a "crush some Red Bull and hack it in a weekend" project; or

(2) use Ethereum, which already exists.

As you don't have to do it yourself but you still benefit from it, some people like (2) instead of (1).

>> write your own separate distributed cryptocurrency system

You don't need "cryptocurrency system" for most of the cases, do you? E.g. you don't need to solve double spending problem if all you want is a decentralized forum / messaging app / video chat. I'm not a decentralization expert but it seems to me, DHT has worked so far. And its advantage over Ethereum is that users don't have to buy some currency and pay for every message. They subscribe to the content they like and support it by hosting it. It's easy as that.

You need Ethereum if you want an easy ICO, but if it's a bad thing now, then I don't know why would anybody use it.

> If you want to enforce the same properties that the Ethereum network can, but you don't want to use anything associated with the Ethereum network, then you need to write something similar. And it turns out this takes work.

I fail to see the reasoning behind why it takes work, or considerably more work to just write a new cryptocurrency from scratch. Basically you can just fork bitcoin or any existing cryptocurrency code, and do the changes you want to do.

In fact, as far as I understand, many organisations are for example taking ethereum code, and then just running private version of it, with their own token & mining.

The actual reason to run your ICO on ethereum network is that you get the easy money from the ethereum investors, who have gotten ridiculous gains from the ether price appreciation and are spending it accordingly. At some point the stupid money will run out.

> creators of Ether have already got their share

Ether at ICO sold for 30 cents and raised around $30 million for development. Compare that budget to Mozilla or similar organization.

Yeah, just $30 million for development plus 12 million of ETH which is in current price like what $4.5 billion? I'm against of this kind of taxes. But if this is the way it works in crypto world, why should it be OK for some and not-OK for others?

I am not judging Bancor etc. Just saying ETH had reasonable plan for raising money.

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