ICO startups band together to create $100M grant fund for Ethereum projects
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I think that's what is meant by "a trusted source of information from the outside world". You can have as many layers of smart, trustless technology as you want sitting between the dapp and the data source, but it always comes back to relying on a trusted (and potentially corrupt/compromised) real-world source. Maybe it has to be multiple independent sources? Sorry - there's still no way for those sources to cryptographically disprove any collusion.
Honest question, do blockchains do this? My understanding is that blockchains operate under the assumption that collusion is common and bad actors are rampant and are designed to mitigate it, not that they can prove collusion is not happening.
Hypothetically, if every mining node provided a real-world value in every broadcast, then wouldn't the consensus mechanism operate as an oracle just like the transactions operate as a ledger?
Of all the cryptocurrencies, ETH at least has a story about why it might have intrinsic value in the medium-term, beyond pure speculative passion: i.e. its use as a platform for smart contracts. But that potential only gets realised if more people use it for more significant purposes, rather than just for functionless ICOs or trivial games.
On the other hand, if this injection can help ETH grow this year, the backers of this fund should more than make their money back.
It's going to be an interesting year, I think. It's easy to shout bubble bubble bubble, and easy to shout buy buy buy. My hunch is that the reality will be more interesting than either.
But the number of Ether is fixed at 100,000,000ish. Which means that if the platform is successful, the coin will increase in value indefinitely. But I don't see why those who 'miss out' on the presale etc. (think banks, governments) would choose to hop on board at a later date - essentially gifting money to early adopters - when they'd be better off simply creating a new coin (or indeed forking Ethereum and awarding themselves more Ether). It all just seems very unstable, game-theory-ish situation.
This exact same argument has been repeatedly given to explain why Bitcoin would never break above $10, $100, $1000, whatever, or why Ethereum was doomed to stay in the pennies. Clearly the late adopters see more value in entering than they see a problem with gifting money to earlier adopters.
Creating a new coin or forking doesn't solve anything, they would be alone and it wouldn't have any value if nobody wants to trade in.
The value is what people value it at. Just because the supply is bounded doesn't mean its value will increase indefinitely.
Well, is the point of Ethereum to make some cash at the expense of later investors (basically a Ponzi scheme), or does the platform have some intrinsic value? Point is, the platform itself can be duplicated at little cost (it's an open source project after all, just fork it), so the cost to the (new) user should be low (or more importantly, stable), even if the value proposition is high.
This logic leads me to conclude that almost all the value of Ether is purely speculative and could disappear at any time.
The intrinsic value of ETH is to use it to pay for transactions on the Ethereum platform. These transactions are used to form dApps that can be run without censorship. I would have said the value of that is TBD but now I'd stay that some minimum value has been determined (ICOs, DAOs, the Dai system, games, etc.)
They should certainly do this if it would result in a system with the security profile that meets their requirements.
[1] https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-eng...
- Is it legal for effectively crowdfunded projects to then fund other projects?
- Ethereum has integrity, willing to change its core technology in order to become more scalable. But...
- Is "paying off" developers to build apps for it just evidence of the lack of apps naturally/organically being built?
- Yet Seed Stage funding from traditional VCs has dried up, so is this effectively a market response from technical-oriented now-wealthy investors, to make up for it?
I think these are hard yet important questions. Obviously, who doesn't wish they were rolling in this kind of cash to dole out? At the same time, we already have people building P2P dApps with our system (https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/auth), you know, the ones that Ethereum/Dfinity/etc. can only dream of doing even after they hit their scaling goals (realtime character-by-character updates on decentralized social networks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3akdQJs55E , 3D multiplayer VR games - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_m16-w6bBI , etc.), so it seems nonsensical that so much money is being offered to build Ethereum apps - is there genuinely a lack of developers?
Most of those are connected to some kind of dApp project.
This makes me wonder, people (presumably) bought into an ICO to fund a specific goal and not to enable a new age of venture capitalists.
Though this could be another classic sign that we are witnessing a bubble in its pre-bust stage -- would seem to fit with the "spike the punch bowl" phase but with replacing central banks with core cryptcurrency advocates methinks.