RexetBlell

No it is not backed by real dollars in a central location. It's a kind of a derivative. The way it works is very interesting. Recently Andreessen Horowitz and others invested 12M into the project.

In the future it will be possible to use Ethereum Dapps even if you don't have any ETH. The way it works now is that ETH is needed in order to pay for gas. However, it will be possible for the contract to pay for gas in the future. Developers would be able to add some ETH to their contract, so that it is free to use (or some parts of it are free) if they wanted to.

Censorship resistance. Twitter could delete your account (or some of your tweets) if they wanted to. They could also prevent your tweets appearing in other people's feeds. And they have done this to some controversial figures.

Basically a Dapp is a more neutral platform that costs money. Probably not worth the cost for the average person though.

The Dai stable coin. Many different smart contracts are constantly working together to keep the token worth very close to 1 USD: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/

The modern day tulip mania has nothing to do with Bitcoin. This is the modern day mania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_(Leonardo) Someone paid almost a half a billion dollars for that painting

They should add support for the Ethereum stable currency DAI: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/

Most people don't want to use a currency for payments that is volatile.

Respect to him for owning up.

Yes, because they pay dividends in the form of new baby crypto cats.

He was 19 around the time when Ethereum was raising money.

Why would anyone want to exchange their Bitcoins that are worth over $10,000 each on Coinbase (and can be converted to real dollars) for some tokens that are backed by nothing?

Why would anyone ever use rsk? They created a centralized clone of Ethereum and charge 20% fees, or something like that.

Here's a truly revolutionary scaling solution by the inventor of Bitcoin's Lightning network and Vitalik Buterin: https://plasma.io/

Also here is an Ethereum's equivalent of the Lightning network, which was deployed on main net recently: https://raiden.network/

It's funny because the trading volume of Bitcoin is huge - about 250 million dollars worth of Bitcoin is bought and sold per hour around the world, 24/7.

My guess is that the reason we see the horizontal lines is because let's say someone places a large sell order (say 1000 Bitcoins) at $11600. It takes a few minutes for the market to absorb it. The price stays flat until the entire order is bought.

It's definitely not the lack of trading that's causing this. It's funny that you would even think that haha.

What's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?

Why can't you replicate gold? What is gold? It's some elementary particles (like quarks) arranged in a certain way that we all agree are valuable. We could easily agree that some other arrangement is valuable (such as Aluminum).

That's not true at all. If someone gives you a gold bar right now, would you be able to tell if it's real or not? What if, for example, it's steel on the inside coated with a thin layer of gold. Or the gold has a low purity, etc. This is why there are specialists (who are very expensive) who can use special tests to check if it's real (and even then it's not 100%).

It's easy to tell if the Bitcoin that you just received is real or not. (Definitely much easier and cheaper than with gold).

This painting sold for millions: https://nypost.com/2013/05/15/43-8-million-for-this/

Reason: it's complicated. But something that's DEFINITELY required for this to be possible is scarcity. The artist is not alive any more. It would never sell for that much if he were still alive.

True digital scarcity is a hard problem to solve (because computers are good at copying things). Bitcoin was the first system that was able to solve this problem.

A long time ago, when Aluminium was more precious than gold, people made what was considered good looking jewelry out of it: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/05/aluminium-co... "Its shininess combined with its almost ghostly lightness compared to other metals made it an ideal metal for jewellery and it wasn’t long until the French elite were wearing broaches and buttons made of the aluminium." Aluminium also doesn't get rusty and can be kept for centuries, but nobody makes jewelry out of it any more. Reason: It's not scarce (any more).

The only real thing that makes gold valuable is it's scarcity. If it stopped being scarce because an asteroid containing a lot of gold was brought back to Earth, people would stop valuing gold and stop making jewelry out of it.

Bitcoin has the same important property of scarcity as gold.

Totally. We can add things like million dollar paintings such as this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Newman#/media/File%3... and expensive old postal stamps to that list.

It's considered to be beautiful because it's expensive and valued. The causation is in the other direction than most people think when it comes to gold and beauty.

It's the same with expensive paintings. A painting is considered to be beautiful (some are actually ugly) and have some deep meaning only after it's sold for a lot of money.

No ICO is ever sold as investment (as far as I know). In a many cases they explicitly say that the tokens are completely useless to not get in trouble with the regulators. For example:

"The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform."

It's (almost) impossible to find words like "invest" or "investment" on ICO websites or white papers.

Having too many forks makes it confusing for newcomers (and even hedge funds). So naturally avoiding a fork and keeping the community together is good for Bitcoin, which made the price go up.

In the past 30 days, over 30 Billion dollars worth of Ether has been purchased. 2 million is nothing. Source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/monthly/

There is a new field called cryptoeconomics that studies the application of game theory to cryptocurrencies. Here's an interesting talk about it: https://youtu.be/pKqdjaH1dRo

I used this service a few weeks ago to get a response from a VC that I wanted to contact, and it worked great! The cool thing is that you pay only if you get a response.

This new language for Ethereum by Vitalik is exactly what you said: https://github.com/ethereum/viper

Can't you say the same thing about software that uses encryption in general? For example your browser, yet you still trust it. Also, what you said applies to critical software in airplanes, and cars like Tesla, yet you still somehow trust it without reading the code.

Maybe you should replace the word "Ethereum" with "sotware". "Software in general makes sense is all the following are true"

Proof of work (mining) is needed to be able to come to consensus on the next block in the chain. A better and more efficient algorithm is being developed. Ethereum is switching from proof of work to proof of stake in the next year or two, so there will not be any mining any more, which should reduce the cost of deciding what the next block is. Read more about it here: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

It's also useful if you want to buy something online and don't want it showing up on your Credit Card statement.

Not quite. You could make it a legally punishable offense to provide incorrect information to a weather oracle. The provider would be sent to jail for defrauding the oracle.

I'm just saying that it's possible to solve the problem the same way that it is solved today.