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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to verify these have really been sold? Is there any third party involved that can verify? Something doesn't feel right and we know Cryptocurrency users are suckers for juicy hype trains.

But I do like the concept of p2p distributed servers.

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Are you meaning to suggest that some of the people involved might have borrowed funds with promises to return them, or offered some parties deep discounts in exchange for temporarily putting up full prices on large amounts of share, in order to falsely prop up the 'market' value for these assets and create the social proof needed to dupe larger numbers of inexperienced investors into participating?

Inconceivable!

> Is there any way to verify these have really been sold? Is there any third party involved that can verify?

What do you mean? Just look at the blockchain address where the funds are being deposited [0]. I've done several buys and all of them showed up instantly...

[0] https://blockchain.info/address/36PrZ1KHYMpqSyAQXSG8VwbUiq2E...

Sold to actual developers.

It could be that the team sells ethereum to itself with their own bitcoin. The transaction shows up on the blockchain but nothing happened. They both owned the ethereum and bitcoin before and after the transaction exactly the same.

They've posted terms of sale promising not to do that. It's possible that they're committing fraud by taking money under false pretenses, but I'm guessing not. They're well-known people with good reputations and a team of lawyers advising them.

Oh for sure, I'm not investing in them because as a developer I'm not looking for ethers, especially not at such a price level when developers ought to be able to develop on a testnet for free. My decision has nothing to do with the extent I trust them to be honest, there's absolutely no indication that they're dishonest.

I just wanted to say that the fact something is on the blockchain is meaningless in and of itself because at near zero-cost you can create trades with yourself. That doesn't mean I'm saying they do this or implying it. Again, no reason for me to suspect it, just arguing the point it's possible.

You can develop on the testnet for free right now. The ether currently for sale are for the production network, and won't be available until launch.

Luckily, no one has yet come up with a currency that allows for anonymous online purchases, so there's no way they could do this without being caught.

Seeding the jar with BTC is speculated to be what Mastercoin did as well, it's not an unreasonable idea in the least.

It's essentially free except for the encumbered funds being unusable for a short period.

Ethereum isn't about distributed servers. It's not like a VPS. Like Bitcoin is to banks, Ethereum is like to any contract or transaction in the meeting of the minds.

Is there a way to do that with Bitcoin and if so how?

Bitcoin has a more limited scripting system. For details on ethereum script's added abilities, see the whitepaper on ethereum.org, pages 11-13.

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