I don't know any good Ethereum developer that isn't a millionaire

This is a good place to remind people that currencies that are not designed to lose value over time can never be stable (that's why normal currencies are designed that way).

Intrinsically worthless tokens engineered to have better than market risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted, real returns compared to real productive investment will always be unstable and fluctuate increasingly wildly as they get more popular.

This is a result of physical limits of production. As people hoard worthless tokens, their price increases which causes more people to hoard them instead of investing in real businesses with real production capacity.

This eventually causes production capacity to drop. That's right, when enough people do it, token hoarding displaces investment in businesses and factories and lowers global production capacity. This means token hoarding causes a drop in things available to buy with these tokens.

Eventually there will be people who want to buy real things with their stock of tokens. The tokens will be chasing fewer goods which means prices for stuff will rise (tokens will lose value). This might happen suddenly when people with large stockpiles of tokens notice that value is droping and that there are tons of other tokens waiting on the sideline to make it drop even further. Hoarders might rush to get rid of their stockpile all at the same time before they're worthless which will cause their fall to worthlessness. This drop will bring the tokens closer to their natural intrinsic value of zero. The cycle can then start again, such is aggregate economics.

The 1920s and 1930s suffered from this type of cycle but with gold tied currencies instead of cryptocoins. It happened to a lesser extent in 2007 when western world central banks failed to keep inflation rates high enough. It's important for the world's sake to not let deflationary currencies become too popular.

When savings or financial promises are insufficiently tied to future production or to accumulation of real goods, there will be disappointment when a lot of people try to exchange them for real stuff. That is true for crypto currencies as well as government currencies (that is why the system is designed to make banks invest people's money in real businesses and minimize the proportion of money that is stockpiled idly).

Haha, oh man, history lessons from the dotcom period should be a mandatory part of any CS education..

> I thought it was expensive one year ago when it was at 13 dollars, but today when I see the possibilities created by the technology I think it's cheap.

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> He explains he's most important reasons why cryptocurrencies aren't a bubble:

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> They really believed in Aragon, even before we had a real product, so they agreed to convert an investment into ANT tokens during the token sale.

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> Right now we have infinite runway

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it - get in while the going's good people.

Any Ethereum developer that isn't a millionaire isn't a true Scotsman of course.

Just in case anyone missed it, this is a sales pitch, not a market analysis.

There are millionaires and there are millionaires.

The kind that people take seriously are those whose wealth is either a) highly liquid or b) somewhat stable, or c) some mix of these.

If you own a million dollars of T-bonds, you're a millionaire. It's boring and highly liquid. If you own a million-dollar apartment in Manhattan, then also a millionaire, with a modest lag to liquidate it.

If you own a million dollars of penny stock -- still a millionaire, but you might not get a bank loan on it. And while the bondholder and the apartment owner can turn their assets into cash in a single transaction, the owner of the penny stock is not going to be able to do that. The pool of capital on the other side of the exchange is just too small and too inactive.

This might change, but so far it looks as though most companies are less interested in currencies (they report to their shareholders in USD, Euros and so on, not BTC) and more interested in a replacement for EDI and settlement systems.

Ha, that headline takes me all the way back to https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-... . Those were interesting times.

This article seems to be an odd mix of reported speech, quotes, and an interview. It reads really weirdly.

"One of the most interesting is someone building a stable coin pegged to global currencies, that will follow the dollar or the euro's value in the markets."

I just love the naivity of these guys.

His project sounds very dubious to me. Promising something like "Death to paperwork. Avoid useless intermediaries." or "digital jurisdiction" sounds to me like the guys don't really know how the world works.

https://aragon.one/

I still can't tell how easy or difficult it is to inflate cryptocurrency values with suitable buy/sell orders. I'd rather own $100m in cash than $120m in Ethereum at this point though, since it's unlikely that I could cash in on the latter easily.

Nice PR piece.

>finding a solution for people that want to escape bureaucracy.

So that's the business model?

answer: just wait a few months.

What about the bad developers, who are also millionaires?

I know solidity and would love to be your friend.