cslarson

Account portability works exactly like this in the UK. I can't say that banks here provide a much better service than I received in the US.

Sure, if these projects were already blow away successes and completely disrupted their respective markets we wouldn't (hopefully!) be having this conversation. And I agree that skepticism is warranted here but at least with regard to Ethereum it is way overblown here on hn. Even if these projects haven't fully proven themselves yet what I think they do show is the strength and merit of the platform that has made them possible.

> and "smart contract" systems like Ethereum seems to still not show any productive output aside from scams and severe bugs in wallets and contracts that lose millions of dollars

Ethereum is a vibrant, growing ecosystem with many many ambitious projects that have or are nearing release (maker, golem, swarm, bat, you need to do some research because the list is extensive). the above statement is really ridiculous but unfortunately the kind of throw away comment that gets voted to the top of an hn thread. what a sad place this is!

This really misses the picture of what's going on. Fedcoin could be coordinated by the federal but live on or be connected to a public smart contract platform where that, now digitised asset, could be used programmatically and interdependently with many other systems in a much more efficient and easy to assemble way than can now be done. This may not sound like a good idea to most on hn but it's at least new.

This is the future of the web. Platforms and networks that offer better incentives for participation will replace those of the old (current dominant) model. Rather than users-as-the-product, users will be in the driving seat - with agency to accept or reject changes that are offered as well as be rewarded for their contributions. But it will go much further than this as even the basic corporate structure (passive investors only interested in monetary gain and managers beholden to them) may be challenged by new organisational architectures where all kinds of incentives and agendas can be baked right into the protocol.

Space elevators?

There will still be mining, just no block reward. The "payment" would instead be solely from transaction fees.

Blockchain may be a tool to experiment with different business models.

I'm quite torn on this one myself but for now the downsides are outweighing the good. Just the fact that it is very contentious is a big problem. It just isn't worth another possible network split or negative pr it would bring. Ethereum is trying to be a particular kind of base layer blockchain - it needs to encourage the development of non-hard fork solutions to these issues, like better auditing, insurance, etc.

Nope. Users are in charge when they make the choice of which software to use.

This EIP has not been enacted via a hard fork and from the looks of it doesn't have the required support.

The ETC fork happened very early and affected some large percentage of available tokens - I think 15% or so.

Ethereum Classic also hard forks in order to make changes and other upgrades to it's protocol.

Ethereum has not yet hard forked to enact this proposal. At the moment it looks very unlikely to gain the support needed.

> USD 0.5-1 per transaction

This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.

Technically the bracket could be owned by another contract rather than a normal account so in theory at least it's possible.

I don't think it's that the team is not crucial to delivery, but rather that incentivising that team by giving them such an upfront, guaranteed reward is not ideal.

I think many people involved in Ethereum community now believe the current ICO model to be fundamentally broken despite being the platform most of them are hosted on. Vitalik, for instance, has said "fund ideas, not teams" and proposed the DAICO model - which makes it easy for investors to move their money to whoever is most likely to get the job done. ICOs were for 2017. Hopefully they will be replaced with something superior.

Oh the cynicism here is so sad. To everything there is a season, I guess. Anyway! Does the Dai stablecoin not undermine this idea that nothing worthwhile can be built on Ethereum? Don't like ICOs? Neither do I. While the evolution of ICOs in 2017 was really interesting I think DAOs (and things like DAICOs) will see more prominence in 2018. It is an exciting world!

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.

I think anyone looking for an interesting use case for Ethereum smart contracts should check out how the Dai stablecoin works[1]. Using it is an eye opener, too (https://dai.makerdao.com).

[1] https://medium.com/cryptolinks/maker-for-dummies-a-plain-eng...

I recently (yesterday) calculated[0] that Ethereum is roughly 64% of the GPU mining market by power. That's a lower bound - it's likely much higher, maybe 75+%. Hybrid POS/POW is expected in the fall and will likely come with a healthy drop in the block reward. Following that will be full POS (2019?) after which, at least on the main Ethereum chain, there will be no mining. I'd like to see the block reward dropped much sooner but that's a long shot request.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wufiq/ethereum_i...

Chainlink is a project to enable a network of decentralised oracles.

Took the family to see a kids movie yesterday. There was an like 30 minutes of ads at the beginning. I don't think they realise how jarring that is and how that's not something I want my kids to experience. Will reconsider going next time.

Gemini is a nice exchange.

> hey don't blame me I just used some library, it's the library's fault

Who really says that?

FYI, in the first paragraph you misspelled Ethereum as "Etherium".

The risk of that happening depends on how dependent the functioning of the token is on the company that held the ICO. It's precisely why the effort to decentralise governance for the project and give token holders influence is such a crucial consideration when investing. Unfortunately it seems there has not been too much pressure recently for projects to incorporate decentralised governance models.

Oh right.

You can make Ethereum transactions for a few cents that take only about a minute or less to complete. There's also a lot more you can do with them than just transfer them around.

US GDP is $18.5 trillion so yeah it has some debt but also some decent revenue. Yeah, I'd be interested.