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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum has the right play here though. They go to where the gold rush is and sell the shovels.

I think the exchanges are the ones selling shovels and am certain that they have a horse in that race; e.g. Kraken added support for trading EOS yesterday, started at $1 now it's at $4.16.

With potential ROIs like that (all across the board) I am certain that Wall Street cowboys are all over this market.

But at least we have the SEC to protec..oh we don't.

I find EOS especially hilarious. Per their own FAQ[0]:

"The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform."

And:

"We believe that EOS means different things to different people. We have received numerous amazing interpretations of what EOS stands for or what it should stand for so we have decided not to formally define it ourselves."

[0] https://eos.io/faq.html, last week's mirror: https://archive.fo/m3D1T

At least they're honest about it.

> At least they're honest about it.

Or, they expect legal action and they see it as a possible disclaimer.

The thing about proverbs is that you shouldn't apply them literally. "selling shovels" here means: Instead of taking part in the hype something that is used by hype-seekers to fascilitate their yearning is sold. It's often very likely that there are a lot of different kinds of businesses who profit this way. Sure the exchanges are profiting, the hash-box-producers profit, the VCs profit. In the original sense there were also different businesses profiting from the gold rush. Besides shovels you also had to buy food, other tools, shelter, a claim to a piece of land, etc.

The special thing about Ethereum here is that they act like a participant in the gold rush to some degree. I actually thought they produce coins and try to find a meaningful use for them, just like bitcoin. But in fact they provide an infrastructure for coin producers. That's really interesting, imo. Since no matter how it goes, they will profit from it, and can easily exit any time when they feel the profits are diminishing too much.

Ethereum has no "play" here, it isn't a platform made for token sales (aka "icos"), it's a generalistic platform that happens to have projects that do this sort of token sales.

The Ethereum founders do: they've managed to turn themselves into a certification/approval stamp of sorts. I've seen them slapped on as advisors for umpteen of these ICOs.

If I were them, I'd create a regulatory company and take a cut for "Ethereum-approved ICOs."

And a lot of those were actually fake / without any sort of authorization. Some projects also just put ppl as a "advisors" because they answered a question that one time.

Btw, Given is the number of Ethereum founders is small, you're probably referring to some of many devs working for the foundation as contractors.

Vitalik has conceded this was a mistake and has stated he will no longer have any formal role in outside ethereum businesses. He also stated that he was not paid for any of these advisory positions he held.

He is 'invested' in a lot of these coins though. Seems to be able to own them before they ico. HMMM

I've personally seen the price sheets for what he's billed out per hour, and sat through advisory work meetings with him. While it's possibly he wasn't officially paid for those specific ICO advisory positions, he certainly was getting paid for advisory work.

Yes, he meant specifically for ICO advisory positions. Certainly (like almost every other developer) he has been paid for contract work/consulting for some project at some point.

>happens to have

Sorry but ethereum has no use case, nor is technically ethereum's architecture makes distributed computation possible or even is decentralised. There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working.

> There is not one single dapp that is decentralised and working.

Sure there is. ENS, for one example. Plenty of gambling apps for another (I don't find them particularly _compelling_, but they are there and they do work)

ENS is a great example of a centralised system plus its only about eth based names, no application other than just a method by to collect money by the platform for offering services that are only about the platform and work in the platform.

What's centralised about ENS?

Also, it can be used to resolve any resource you want - although you're shifting the goalposts, since that wasn't originally a requirement.

1. the whole blockchain it is based on 2. root signatures in ENS

Okay, I'll bite. What's 'centralised' about Ethereuem, without twisting the word beyond all recognition?

ENS is implemented as a set of smart contracts with some multisig management. Are you arguing that this is centralized? Also, money that is collected by the ENS contracts is only held as a deposit.

Yes, I am arguing it is centralised. Read about the centralised root signature system that is the way to add new TLDs to the system.

Also this is worse than the current system we have in the world because it wastes more energy in doing so!

It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.

> it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc.

The "etc" is important here, because it refers to richer resources such as content hashes. With this, you could load the entire "frontend" for a website from a decentralized datasource, e.g. Swarm. Meanwhile, the backend could be the Ethereum blockchain/smart contract methods.

No etc is not important because it is essentially a centralized mapping of a string of text to another, thats all.

You seem to have very (some would say ridiculously) high standards for 'decentralised'.

If the root multisig was deleted, would it be 'decentralised' in your book?

> It claims it is a decentralised naming system, though looking deeper you will find it is just clever marketing and underneath is it is only ethereum-platform based naming for anything like your address etc. will only work in eth browsers, not all etc. which I have already mentioned in my OP.

It doesn't claim to be DNS. DNS is not the only naming system.

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