jnpn

>That's technically true but not actually so

Not sure what you mean by this. In case you need a refresher, this is how hardforking works: http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/1952/what-is-a-h...

exploit: "a software tool designed to take advantage of a flaw in a computer system"

The exploit was on a poorly written smart contract, not ethereum itself, correct -- I never said otherwise.

>the judgement of the Ethereum devs to have ultimate control and veto power over anything

This is the misinformation I'm talking about. The Ethereum devs had neither control nor veto power. That's simply not how hard forking works.

It was made clear multiple times that the decision was up to the community.[1][2] The decision was coordinated via a decentralized community hashpower vote,[3][4] and executed via a majority hashpower commitment.[5] Exchanges and the foundation carried on with the longest chain[6] as is intended with nakamoto consensus.[7]

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4r9yud/the_curren... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ro2p9/options_in... [3]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tlb1y/hard_fork_... [4]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tffta/hard_fork_... [5]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tsl16/new_blog_p... [6]https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2016.07.15-Ethereum-Hard... [7]http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/

The original blockchain was deprecated on 3/14. Neither ETH nor ETC are using it. http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/introduction/the-homestead-rele...

For those who havent been paying attention to the drama: this is a breakaway blockchain for people who want to use ethereum but refuse to use a blockchain in which a $50MM exploit was reversed. There's a lot of false information out there, particularly about how/why the exploit was reversed. Don't take anyone's word for it; ask for sources.

There are many services in this world which require a trusted intermediary between users. The fees these services charge are _not_ a function of compute cycles. They are, however, often a function of pricing power derived from competition (or lack thereof). Where decentralized computation is less expensive than the fees charged by incumbents in the trusted intermediary business, there is the opportunity for a new entrant to leverage the tech to profit on the spread.

Kind of ironic how much this argument was used against bitcoin back in the day...

Look at the full stock price history of any company which became very valuable, and you'll see bubbles and busts along the way. Whether the market's calculations of Ethereum's potential is correct remains to be seen, we'll have to see what gets built on it over the next few years.

The cost comparison you want to look for is where people pay a very high premium for the execution of business logic by a trusted counterparty. In other words, its not cheaper computation in general, it's cheaper computation for trusted services (eg. financial instruments).

The Ethereum foundation has been putting a lot of resources into scaling research. Theres some promising proposals involving sharding the validation process, in addition to the off-chain scaling protocols that Bitcoin is pursuing like the lightning network.