Do you have any evidence of this?

Homestead is releasing March 14. It's likely shortly thereafter more exchanges will have eth

Is Ethereum actually blowing up becasue its good? Or is it some sort of bubble most likely?

If it is a bubble or not the future will tell. But there is a reason it is hyped so much, it can do some pretty cool stuff. And it should be decent as a currency with low transaction times, low inflation, good scalability, decent leadership, decent community and decent support from companies(IBM, Microsoft).

The fact that everyone's extremely hyped on reddit forums about it going to the moon makes it feel like a bubble.

Regardless, not many people outside crypto know about it right now and the long term prospect of the technology itself is very promising.

What makes me worried the most when it comes to buying ether is that as far as I know, Ethereum could be very successful and yet the price of ether could still be low.

Ethereum is actually really revolutionary IMO.

It takes the core inventions of bitcoin and upgrades them into a platform that allows for development of applications (both literal and theoretical) in a manner that actually is decentralized and distributed. When I say this, I don't mean politically-- I mean that you can build applications that directly interact with Ethereum's blockchain that make it immutable and distributed in a manner that cannot be stopped. So as much as bitcoin is a currency, and that's where a lot of its value lies, Ethereum has tremendous social value as a digital asset.

For instance, you can create an independently verifiable fair poker application where all events are executed on Ethereum's blockchain that is completely shielded from censorship. There are serious advantages; all transactions are self audits of a fair game, the application cannot be shut down by a government, and most importantly there is no domain or banking seizure that can take place. An example of an application that is very similar to this is Augur (google it). In a sense, think of Ethereum as an internet within an internet that can be accessed as a program on your computer.

Another aspect of Ethereum is its protocols that execute transactions. Inside of these transactions you can abstract them to signal more than just transfers of value, hence smart contracts. Meaning that transactions can be programmed to represent more than just Ether moving from 1 place to another. In bitcoin, you'd have to be a degree of freedom away from its blockchain to accomplish this, and that degree of freedom is as wide as the ocean because you lose decentralization and security of the entire network, hence sidechains.

if you bought the ethereum presale, you basically paid 0.0005 ether/btc. Today (tonight) that ratio is 0.02.

You can decide for yourself if its bubbly or not.

I've been getting this feeling of ETH gaining traction over BTC over the last couple weeks. Why does it seem complicated to find out WTF ether is. Nothing in google seems to pop up answers like they would with bitcoin.

1. How are ETH mined?

2. How many ETH are there?

3. What is the cap of ETH?

4. Does ETH have a page like blockchain where you can see stats on difficulty and transaction and what not.

5. I see a lot of companies talking about wanting to use blockchain technology. Is this their solution? Or do they still just do their own thing.

6. How about just a page with good info that isn't overly techinical/ mysterious.

im making some serious $$$ off ETHER

this is a once i a lifetime opportunity with a fresh market with endless possibilities.

Boy do I feel like an idiot for not getting some ether during the presale.

some food for thought.

1) ETH is definitely cool tech. no one will argue otherwise.

2) the amount of ETH pre-mined was huge. i dont know the exact number, but upwards of 10-30% i think. that means that a small room of people (VCs, board members, vitalik,...) have made >100 million usd to date. [edit: to add, there are ~80 million ETH now with a very small fraction (<1%) currently on the market]

3) yes, it has been a great ride from IPO to here. having the ability to buy low and just hold for >100x gains is not easy.

4) ETH itself is not "once in a lifetime". Cryptocurrency is . Obv Bitcoin has had huge gains over the years. LTC had runs from ~0.01-50 (once) and 1-50 (twice). NMC has had huge moves 3 times. Nxt profits were insane. This year, its ETH, etc... Monero (XMR, the privacy-centric coin with adaptive block size) is quickly rising and up %300 this yr and could easily do another 5-10x. There are, and will be, other opportunities. so keep placing bets, and hodling.

1. Right now PoW like Bitcoin but with a bit memory intensive algorithm making ASICs expensive to make. Difficulity adjusts dynamically for each block with a 14s target time. Soon they will switch to PoS.

2. Right now 77,527,495 ETH

3. There is no cap. Inflation with current PoW is 11M/year forever. With PoS it will likely be lower, Ethereum foundation has claimed 0-3%/year with a PoS in about a year. So I guess 90M seems like a good guess for the cap.

4. Many
https://etherchain.org/
https://ethstats.net/
http://etherscan.io/

5. IBM claimed that they forked Ethereum for development but intend to switch to Ethereum once Ethereum becomes stable. Bitcoin may have have gotten a few blows the last few weeks, but is still the dominant currency and likely many companies intend to use Bitcoin blockchain technology.

6. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/co...youll_need_to/
http://www.ethereum-101.com/

Why is currently less then 1% ETH on the market. Is there some sort of lock up period that prevents others from selling?

What's the number for Bitcoin or USD? And where did you get the figure? Kraken has ~2% so the number seems a bit on the low side:
http://etherscan.io/address/0x291054...200b3e800a63d2

I guess a lot of people are waiting for the beta to be over to either buy or sell on for example Bitstamp. ETH had a different issuance and I guess more should be tied in contracts so I would expect some differences here.

i dont know why. they have stated they are selling to secure some fiat funds. also ~60 million ETH was purchased in the IPO. no lock up period. so ETH is out there.

the number comes from looking at the major exchanges trading ETH. poloniex, kraken. both have <300k ETH on the sell side.

on any given day, across all exchanges, i'd guess there are >210k btc for sale on the books. so maybe 1-3% of the market cap? just a guess. and that % can also get really low during the ends of the bubbles.

I'm gonna have to thank Amaya and their greed for this. They got my into BTC poker some months ago. I started reading about the tech behind other altcoins and Ethereum got my attention. Traded half of my BTC holdings at 0.002 just before the madness started. Obviously lost a chunk of it daytrading, but HODLing the other part. Not playing poker anymore.

Bubble or not this I believe this is just the start. China is on the sideline. Big exchanges will be added soon. The hipster DEVs are surely gonna start writing dApps. ('decentralized', or 'without banks' sounds at least that it's for a good cause while you're filling your own greedy pockets. Hipsters love it (I'm one of em))

So fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride, while wasting your day in the Poloniex trollbox munching Ramen. Same than before without the stress of chasing flushes.

Hope this post lurks some rich poker players into the Ponzi!

any idea if dapps like ******** or ether poker are planning to put every hand on the ethereum blockchain?

edit: why is poker-eum censored (without the dash)?

im also kicking myself for not buying during the presale or after. i remember deciding january 2014 that i was gonna buy ethereum despite the fact that i had no idea what it was.

given that it's parabolic up now, would getting in now be a part of the buy high, sell low strategy?

It's market cap is 10% of Bitcoins. Assume that one cryptocurrency will win or no cryptocurrency will win. If one of them wins the upside would be about 10000x for BTC or 100000x for ETH. So first ask yourself if you think there is more than 1/10000 chance that a cryptocurrency actually wins. Then ask yourself if you believe it is more than 10% likely that if one currency wins it will not be Bitcoin but Ethereum.

Even though 60x is a lot, Ethereum is still in its cradle. The beta is not even out and almost nobody is using it for any practical purposes. If you invest now you will be an early investor, it's like buying Bitcoin at $40 in 2013.

I'm not convinced it's like buying bitcoin at 40$. I think a lot of people are hoping it is like that. Bitcoin actually had use cases (silk road) in the real early days. Is anybody using ether for anything other then speculation at this point?

http://www.itworldcanada.com/article...nstream/381374

I love bitcoin, but have always thought it has huge flaws. Seriously.. anything that takes more then 10 minutes to transfer is not the currency of the future. The whole mining thing is ridiculous too.

When reading up on bitcoin and what not I can't count the number of times I've read about huge companies exploring blockchain technology. If any of that catches on to ETH it's way bigger then BTC. I'm still learning and don't understand what exactly is going on, but I'm placing bets on ETH as a lottery ticket play.

In the history of technology, when has the first thing in an innovative area ever been the king?

Ofc Ethereum today is not like Bitcoin 2013. But buying it is in regards to being an early adopter and the potential upside.

Hope linking to other forums is allowed here; this thread is worth a read (about ETH):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361602.20

its up 15x in 2 months.. feels more like buying bitcoin at $180 in spring 2013 i'd say, or $20 in april 2011, although the volume on google trends is far less than then, which makes me think this rally is being driven by a handful of big players pumping, not general interest. this rally started like a textbook penny stock pump too fwiw.. also bitcoin and ethereum have different goals.

any idea if the 2 decentralized poker dapps are planning to put all the HHs on the ethereum blockchain? looking at ethereum's definition of dapps i assume this is the case.

also, when i think of decentralized applications, the biggest ones that immediately come to mind are bittorrent, Tor, and bitcoin. openbazaar could def join that list. ethereum claims to be a platform for building decentralized applications, which require ether/gas to fund the contracts. on some level ethereum seems to be centralizing decentralized applications?, requiring them to pay ether/gas to run on their blockchain.

i'm probably investing at some point, but it feels fishy to buy in a nearly vertical stage of a parabolic move.. might wait this out.

OK, just when you said its like buying bitcoin at 40$ in 2013 that's what I thought you meant.

This seems a little to pumpy for me, there's to many people like you saying its like being an early bitcoin adopter. Props if you bought the pre-sale and made some money. But I think I'll hold off for now, realizing I very well could end up looking like one of the bitcoin bears early on in that thread.