Coinbase is down lol. Shock!

ethtrader is 100% for the luls

279 right now

dropped to the 250s, back over 300, makes sense

Thanks so much for both of these. I guess I need to read up some more on basic blockchain technology now too.

I wonder if all this tech jargon is a hurdle that the meanstream will never get over? Maybe they don't need to understand it? But I feel like its different than understanding the tech behind your VCR or you phone because its going to be where you put your money. Money is different.

Coinbase down too... I was going to buy more under $300

I bought more this morning at $315.

Tried to buy @ $260 , but LOLcoinbase

lol you mad?

If you don't believe in Ethereum, don't invest. Leave the personal attacks out of it, you're hurting my feelings:

Lol

XPost: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...ostcount=20588

So... sell at $1000?

"I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men."

Tom,

That truly reads as 100% FUD you posted in the Eth thread and I don't even know where to start. My only motivation to systematically respond to that post is I don't want to have people read that and somehow think you're a voice of reason and know what you're talking about (which would almost be implicitly implied if I didn't bother to have a rebuttal).

And to those people I have a preface said with zero attack/animosity behind it:

Tom by his own admission isn't an investor (source: TomCollins). I mean you have no obligation to say that on your posts and you owe the forum nothing, but I'm sure naive readers would like to know you are only interested in the technology/blockchain aspects of cryptocurrency from a purist point of view and AFAIK have zero exposure to any cryptocurrency including BTC. At least when I post something, I have ~8k+ Eth standing behind my viewpoints. I'm motivated, to say the least, to stay on top of everything happening in this space and make the best decisions possible from an investment point-of-view. I mention that, not to brag but so readers are aware that if you want to listen to a guy tell you BTC>ETH while not even owning anything (including BTC) that's your prerogative. My posts are all from a viewpoint of: I am a long-term investor in the crypto space. I care what the market values, and my investment decisions are rooted in what will best grow my investment. This decision making process involves looking forwards toward the future and understanding what actually makes a cryptocurrency valuable. That's why I sold all my BTC when it's market cap was ~98% and Eth's was ~1.X% despite reading at the time how Eth is just a scam (by TomCollins and many others). Time has already started to shown who's right on this, it's just now that the market caps are about to switch the Bitcoin maximalists come out of the woodwork because they're really bitter about getting this wrong and their reality being nothing would make their dicks harder than Ethereum failing.


Regardless, I will still respond fully to your argument and whatever merit you think it has because I want to at least make impressionable posters AWARE that they should definitely go down their own research, and that just because someone has pretty good blockchain vocabulary does not make them more knowledgable/right and thus better at investments. That applies to both Tom and myself; I hope no one is just reading my posts and their only due diligence is my words. Everyone should read your post, and then read the one I'll post in the next day or so, and then go read more and question everything. That's what I did and that's what you have to do in this space - it's complicated to say the least. But I will respond and waste an hour+ going line-by-line through that post despite knowing it will never change your viewpoint, but there will hopefully be value for those who are still in the early stages of educating themselves on cryptocurrencies. And that's partly motivated because I don't want others to make the same mistake I *almost* did way more a year ago (which was taking your radical viewpoint that is shared by many as something to put investment decision weight into)

Also just quickly. This is to Tom and whoever else believes Ethereum is a scam:

Just for the record can you tell me at what point (if any) you will concede it's not a scam? Does it need a market cap of 100B? 1T? More than Bitcoin? Or is it about how many ICOs that turn out well (or that fail), or which companies use it? Or perhaps how many years it's around (Bitcoin is 8 years old, Eth around 2.. so 6 more years?) Genuinely curious: According to you what metrics or milestones would have to occur for it to not be a scam, or will it always be one?

what about the fact that developers are on Ethereum? Bitcoin is just toxic at this point where it's going to take a hard-fork to even begin working towards a scaling solution.

I think Tom's point about ICOs is somewhat valid -- at some point we will start to see the first wave of failures of "successful ICOs", some outright scams, etc and that should weigh on the price of ether. But that doesn't mean that ethereum itself and various dapps being built on top of it won't be large successes. Crypto has a long way to go infrastructure-wise (to make it more usable among non-tech savvy people) before there can really be killer applications on it, so participating in these sales is very risky and speculative.

I think it's safe to say that a lot of stuff in the crypto space is overvalued like the whole Bancor fiasco -- there will be huge losers in the space (think Pets.com from dotcom bubble) but there will also likely be large winners (google, amazon, etc) with orders of magnitude greater market cap than they have right now.

lol @ the Krugman quote, what an ass.

Zomg kazuya u saying u got 2.7ish USD milly of ETH?

has the bitcoin landscape changed with this supposed move towards segwit2x? are the august 1 doomsday predictions still valid? @kazuya et al

all of the dotcom businesses were actually viable businesses. the problem is that they came 15 years too early. e.g., the pets.com of today, chewy.com, was sold for some $3 billion earlier this year.

and just like the internet in 2000s, while blockchain applications make sense in theory, their practical application is still a long way off. if you're going to speculate on cryptocurrencies, you need to decide whether or not it's like the internet of 2000s. in the financial sense, making a bet and being too late or too early is the same as being wrong. if it is like the internet, then it makes sense to wait until the exuberance fades and its value is not purely based on speculation about its future potential. if it is not, it makes sense to get in right now.

i contend that it is not like the internet of the 2000s. one of the reasons the dotcom business models did not come to practical fruition until 15 years later was because it needed the ubiquity of the internet to function. due to this current ubiquity information travels much faster than it did 15 years ago, and ethereum only needs a single good use case for a decentralized application in order to provide actual value. coupled with the fact that everything is built on top of ethereum now and the expanding size of the ethereum enterprise alliance, it's only a matter of time before at least one such application emerges.

bitcoin actually needs the scaling solution way less than ethereum does.

even if the transaction fee becomes $100, bitcoin still will function extremely well as a store of value and as a medium of exchange for high value transactions because the alternatives are so costly. to provide some examples, people pay way more to store money in swiss vaults and it's still very hard to transfer a million dollars as fast and as cheap as you can with a single bitcoin transaction. bitcoin doesn't need to do much beyond this to survive.

ethereum, however, runs decentralized applications which run on gas which needs ether. the upside is that it solves bitcoin's intrinsic value problem. if the utility provided by a dapp is in demand, it will need ether to run, which will in turn give it value. and it can already be seen that in its current state the network will not be able to sustain a highly demanded dapp because of how congested and unusable the network gets during heavy ico traffic. ethereum is in a much more precarious situation because the proposed solutions of the move to proof of stake to enable scaling are complex and may not even succeed.

At least they have a plan that most of the community agrees on, and they have some leadership. Bitcoin has been stuck in neutral for 3 years and is heading for a contentious fork. Ethereum hasn't even been around for 3 years! Think about that.

You are of course right on the "store of value" part of bitcoin. But one of the biggest values of bitcoin is its network effects, and if the flippening occurs, and ethereum passes btc in transaction volume, then doesn't that really crush those network effects? Would we even be talking about bitcoin is it didn't have the first mover advantage?

(for full disclosure I'm currently long both but longer eth)

1- great post invictus

2-



There actually have been some very interesting academic studies like:

http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf

that clearly indicate that bitcoin does need to "scale." These guys show that when there is insufficient block reward, it becomes more valuable for a miner to preferentially confirm transactions than to simply select the highest fee'd txn being broadcast on the network because the value of possessing a confirmation will outweight whatever arbitrary fee you can assign to a txn. This is most easily explained when bitcoin reaches some "high" value relative to USD-- having a confirmation printed onto bitcoin's blockchain becomes paramount.

Although this paper does not discuss the "fee" market, the exact same principle they describe in their paper can be extrapolated to it. Meaning at some point the cost of broadcasting a txn to the network in order for it to get confirmed will become so burdensome that the utility of the network begins to degrade. The good news is that apparently people will happily pay 500 satoshis/byte on a regular basis, and we probably havent seen anywhere near the limit where transacting on bitcoin's overtly congested network becomes a net negative for people.

Back to scaling--

scaling to fix the two above mentioned issues in bitcoin is actually pretty easy. Increase efficiency of txn size, raise inflation rate, raise the blocksize, and funnel more txns into layer 2.

Scaling on Ethereum is a lot trickier because validating txns and smart contracts on a node is not trivial for the cpu (vis a vis to bitcoin). storing all of these txns will be very burdensome soon. If smart contracts and dapps actually ever get used on ethereums network (i'd venture to guess that like 90% of smart contracts on eth right now are erc20 token accounts & 8% multisig, and 2% dicking around) the amount of bloat and congestion will be mind boggling.

I havent even gotten to the fact that no one knows for sure if these dapps may even be economically feasible because layering smart contracts inside of smart contracts has tremendous impact on gas expenses and blockchain bloat. Meaning what happens to Augur when it costs more to run the platform autonomously in gas than the market can charge in fees? No one has any idea what happens to dapps like Augur when the entire economic incentive to be a fair reporter is completely removed. As ethereum's daily txn volume rises, this problem for dapps will only become worse because gas costs will rise no matter how many times Vitalik tells miners to lower minimums.

"please accept lower fees,
no, **** you, blockchain is 10 tb and it costs real $$ to keep nodes up."

finally a note on "store of value"

Its a very nuanced argument and not something thats very obvious. Bitcoin was not a pre-mine, it was not an uncapped ICO, when **** got stolen-- friends did not preferentially bail out each other. These things may seem trivial or idealistic to some, but I am relatively certain that if digital assets like cryptocurrencies ever become mainstream, those things will actually matter to those who are picking which assets to store their "money" in.


and finally, no one gives a **** about who here has in eth or btc or equties or bonds. The only people who do are the idiots who want to live in an echo chamber and have such low iqs that they cannot evaluate an argument on its own basis without involving personal biases

Could someone smarter than me dumb this down please?


https://www.gov.uk/government/public...yptocurrencies

Cant open the link on my phone but I have read it before, I guess you are referring to UK tax on it?

I contacted 4 accountants the other day to ask their opinion. They basically all told me that you have to declare it as capital gains tax of which you get £11300 + original investment free per tax year then it's (roughly) 10% on your first 45k (unless you have a tax paying job) then 20% on anything above that.

One of them also said to me with poker history you may get away with it if you withdraw in small chunks over a period of time but not sure what I will do yet!