my guess: ~30k btc raised

Already at 5350 btc

Was just at an ethereum meetup in toronto. An ama should be on reddit soon.

There is no set amount of ether. It depends on how much is bought. The more that is bought the more there is available to buy. What a way to dilute your investment.

Why? Seems like the platform they are building and the people behind it it could very easily/ realistically be top 4 in market caps, it might be close already by the end of the IPO

it's not an IPO. the product isn't even fully developed. it may not be. assuming it is fully developed and functional...

these are all my thoughts, possibly quite wrong and misunderstood:

- ether is used to run applications on ethereum. there is no need for the value of ether to be high.

- ether is divisible 1 x 10^18. Tiny fractions of ether can possibly be used to run apps.

- rather than paying to run the application with ether, ether itself can be almost completely devalued, and the cost may be 100 ether to run the program, but the program itself can require payment in bitcoin or other currency on some basis to maintain the contract.

- the apps can be used to make contracts or payments in any currency, including bitcoin. so if a contract is created, to me it makes more sense to make the contract payable in bitcoin than in ether.

- there is already a lot of investment, and the value of ether is being heavily diluted.


I'm having a hard time explaining. It's possible I just don't understand it very well, but in general I see ethereum as an amazing platform and technology but I don't necessarily see the value of ether. Rather than it being costly to run applications, it should be extremely cheap or free to run these decentralized applications. Although it is divisible 10^18 times, a high value of ether will either make it expensive to run apps or an arbitrary and annoying amount such as 0.0000000001 will need to be paid in ether.

I guess overall the reason I'm hesitant to invest are:

1) possibility it never even comes to work
2) security risks
3) don't foresee a high value of ether
4) don't think it will usurp bitcoin
5) think the value bitcoin will outperform it

Just having a hard time seeing how 2000 ether is or will be > $600 USD.

I have a hard time figuring out how the value of ether makes sense. I need to study up on the details, but the abstract is you need ether to "execute code". So if ether is too highly priced, no one will use it to execute code, and if it's too low, then miners won't mine the contracts. So the amount of ether needed to execute a contract or part of a program seems like it needs to float. Not sure if they are accounting for this. This could be something like mining fees in some sense.

Housenuts what you describe is very close to CounterParty as I understand it (which is 12th in market cap and has showed steady growth), except with a like INSANELY talented team behind it responsible and ~30M in funding to fill out all the features

Edit: TC interesting points, will try to talk to some ethereum people to see if I can get some thoughts on it

25% annual inflation forever is a bit high.

$15,000,000 going towards development is super awesome for the devs.

https://www.ethereum.org/pdfs/IntendedUseOfRevenue.pdf

I recognize the talent of the Ethereum team. Probably the best in the cryptocurrency environment.

I see extreme value in the ethereum platform. It can possibly be revolutionary. I'm just not sure how Ether can have much value.

Right now, assuming btc is $600, one ether is worth 30 cents.

One major aspect of decentralization is to remove fees. There isn't much room for ether to grow if we intend to keep fees down. Like Tom said, if the value is too high, people won't use it, if the value is too low, people won't mine it.

I guess we can look at it this way...

Say miners get a 25 ether reward.
Whereas an app may only cost .0001 ether to run.

If the value of ether is high, the miners would be healthily rewarded, while the cost to run apps is still low.

Add to my list of issues

6) scalability - if ethereum grows exponentially, I think the scalability problem is much bigger than the supposed problem bitcoin could face.

some discussion spawned from TC's comments:

https://forum.ethereum.org/discussio...a-friend?new=1

7k BTC already invested in this. Very impressive.

Personally, I think it's better EV to hold bitcoins right now and just wait to buy ether on the open market. 6 months is a long time and BTC could spike any time during then.

What isn't clear to me from that answer is when a contract executes, can I deterministically know how much ether it will take to execute? If so, then it seems like the price is fixed. So if ether is cheap now and gets more valuable, the same operations will cost more in the future. Or if it's floating in some sense (today miners tend to mine storage operations with X ether per op, computation operations with Y ether per op), and you send enough ether and hope it works out for the best, or it stays unmined.

If I understand it correctly, it's the first, a fixed ether cost. This presents an economic problem, in that the amount of ether doesn't really show anything at all. While some of the brightest crypto minds are involved, I'm not sure anyone with economic knowledge close to that level is involved. That being said, it's a really cool experiment, and we may end up with some details that don't quite work right economically but can be corrected.

To put an analogy to the Bitcoin world, imagine if all fees had a fixed BTC/byte ratio. So you have a fee of .01 BTC per average size transaction that gets included. There's no such thing as paying a bigger fee to get it included, and no such thing as being able to send a fee too low. In fact, if you send a fee too low, you just end up losing the fee and the transaction rejects (car running out of gas).

Now at first, this becomes far too small of a fee. Bitcoins are easy to obtain, and the network can still be easily spammed at no cost with junk transactions with this "low" fee. But now the price goes up and the network would be far less useful if you had to pay a fee of .01BTC per transaction.

Bitcoins economic flaw is the reward for miners which arbitrarily sets the security level of the network. It's possible there is too much reward going to miners, meaning we waste a lot of energy securing something that doesn't need that level of security (imagine hiring a full-time bodyguard for some nobody), or it might be too little. The chances that 25 BTC/block provides the ideal amount of security is so unlikely, and even if it does today, it wouldn't tomorrow or next week. But, it probably is on the high side, and was designed that way so that the security would get beefed up early and either make something valuable or worthless very quickly.

That's where I have a problem too.

So I have a contract set up to pay my landlord rent on the 1st of every month. Are we to assuming there will be an ether cost each time it runs/processes that contract?

It may cost 1 ether on the 1st of each month to execute that contract. If that's the case, when the contract is first created an ether may be 50 cents, negligible to my rent cost. If ether skyrockets and is now $20, I'm paying a substantial amount extra per month just to run the contract.

I guess a decent solution would be to make the process/execution cost be equal to say 50c USD in ether, whatever that may be, at the time of execution. So if the value of ether skyrockets, or tumbles, it may cost .001 ether per execution or possibly 5 ether per execution.

This way at the time of creation you'll always know what you're paying to run the contract on the ethereum platform.

http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=22-07-2014#764497

Mircea Popescu, founder of mpex.co is selling ethereum futures dated 15th March 2015 @ 5000eth/BTC (@40% of current value).

gamble?

it's a gamble paying him money for a promise. his bitbet site is a joke. i would not trust this guy with my money.

if there was a reliable 3rd party escrow i would. not sure how you escrow futures.

You can escrow futures fairly easily. Escrowing options gets trickier, though.

Jed McCaleb's project is online.



https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing-stellar/

It's basically a Ripple fork with way better distribution. I think this is what Jed intended Ripple to be.

You can get $10-$20 worth of free Stellars for signing up and linking a valid Facebook.

+1

In the same boat. I'm tempted to buy ETH just to flip it once the markets launch and the price likely goes up.. but I dunno, seems gambley. Like you guys have been discussing it's just insanely hard to know what the value will be once it launches, or if the devs can fully deliver.

Tough spot. I think XCP is a better bet since they have a working product already.

Thanks for the tip. Looks interesting.

I might get some ether, but getting 2000 now or 1970 while having waited a bit and seen if it does fail or not seems like the higher price might be worth it. Anyone of you guys know how long the price will be 1970ether=1BTC?

2000 = 5xxx, it launches at 7xxx (roughly 40% higher), so it will be that price at closing at the end of the series of days, who knows how market will value it after launch

When you press buy you get to see the price over time.

If you are gonna invest do it today or after genesis block imo.

This presentation convinced me to invest:
http://www.slide[REMOVE]share.net/ethereum/the-ethereum-experience

Also good reads:
https://eris.projectdouglas.org/
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wik...r#applications

What's the difference between counter party and ethereum? Aren't they trying to do the same thing? I guess counter party is more stock market focused whereas ethereum is more broad based and trying to replace social(twitter, FB)?

Think it's worth buying some ether and xcp? xcp has lost 70% of its value vs btc since its launch in January. http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/...loniex/alltime