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Comment by adwhit | Hacker News Reader

My understanding of Ethereum is that it markets itself as a smart-contracts platform, and you need to have an associated coin (Ether) to pay people to run the platform.

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.

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> 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

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.

> 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.

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 software can be duplicated but the network of devs, users, validators, etc is harder to duplicate.

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.)

> when they'd be better off simply creating a new coin (or indeed forking Ethereum and awarding themselves more Ether)

They should certainly do this if it would result in a system with the security profile that meets their requirements.

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