Hacker News Reader

If your definition excludes Ethereum your understanding of the term so differs from everyone else's that we aren't talking about the same thing

View on HN

Ethereum is a great utility token. Smart contracts absolutely have utility in the digital economy. It's just not a cryptocurrency, is all. It had a massive premine, there's no supply cap, it's subject to OFAC censorship, and has effectively demonstrated that just ~4.8% of the total ETH supply can vote to cause rollout and widespread adoption of a fork that reverses transactions.

We need different words for these fundamentally different things, because conflating them causes real confusion, as this very hack demonstrates. People are surprised that an admin can lock transactions precisely because the word "cryptocurrency" led them to assume properties that don't exist in stablecoins.

Where did the 4.8% number come from? Is it based on the validator stake? How does that compare to the number required to fork Bitcoin as a function of it's supply?

There was a vote after the DAO incident to roll back. 87% of those that voted voted yes (for the rollback), but only 5.5% of the total supply voted at all.

Those are all arguments for why Ethereum is a bad cryptocurrency, not for why Ethereum isn’t a cryptocurrency at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com