The consensus I've seen is that it's really hard to have a post "IPO" price that is higher than the pre IPO price because:

1. It is the most promoted coin launch ever.

2. Coins launched without much press stand a much better chance of being a good short term investment (excluding any actual value that a coin may or may not provide) because as people find out about the coin and buy it, the price will go up. With Ether I think many, many people who want in will be buying their Ethers now.

3. Ether has 25% annual inflation, forever. The market will not only have to support the value that has been invested so far, but also find multiple Ks of fresh bitcoins in the first year just to keep the price flat, let alone keep it from falling.

4. Ether will be used to fuel transactions and this will help compensate for the extremely high inflation. That said, it's going to be a while before the functionalities that eat Ethers are built, then even longer until they're used widely enough to have an impact on 25% annual inflation.

5. Of the six original founders five are left. You have to count on those people executing a huge project fairly well. Additionally, there are over 30 people who will be receiving the pay promised to them pre IPO shortly. Those people and others as they are brought on will have to be managed quite well to avoid burning money. I assume Vitalik will focus on coding and vision while another founder(s) will manage finances and the lower level employees. I hope Vitalik gets the support he needs from his cofounders.

stop repeating something you know to be very misleading.

I don't know that to be misleading. Thank you so much for the wonderful explanation though and keep up the good work.

In that case, you should do more research before posting?

Hint: Ether is less inflationary than BitCoin.

Perhaps you can enlighten the people who will read this thread and wonder what you're talking about without having the time or inclination to research it themselves, myself included. It would be a big step up from critiquing other people's posts while not adding anything useful yourself despite having the answers.

As a heads up, Bitcoin has just one capital letter. I'm not going to drop hints and make you research the correct spelling yourself. See how that works?

vs

What I get about ether is that they are preselling, and the number of total ethers is still being decided.

This is a horrible idea. Personally buying a digital asset when the total quantity is unknown is a bad idea, and second whatever you decide the total supply will be post pre sale it's going to piss some people off who bought in the presale as everyone will have wildly differing expectations of it.

If it's anywhere near 10^18 ethers then 1 BTC for 2,000 ethers is a horrible price. Guessing it wont be that much but who knows how much less it will be.

There won't be 10^18 ethers. As of right now, best guess is probably 75 million ether. That's magnitudes of magnitudes away from 10^18

Are you referring to the smallest subset of ether? Wei is 10^-18 ether.



Also, BitCoinboom, pointing out errors does not obligate anyone to explain why it is in error. And I'm allowed to have my own capitalization conventions without it being an error. But nice pedantry.

Of course that is possible. If the platform is used to trade bitcoins back and forth, and there's no scarcity of ether, then the platform could be very valuable without ethers having huge worth. It could, for instance, drive a massive growth in bitcoins usage/price while ethers themselves only achieved much smaller gains.

Counterparty have a similar thing where many of its features can be used without needing XCP. It could allow their platform to take off in a huge way without the price of XCP matching that growth (not saying that XCP don't have value.)

Wasn't responding to anyone in particular, sorry if you thought I was specifically refering to you.

If somethings value is derived almost entirely from it's scarcity, then surely you need to have a rough idea of it's scarcity before you buy any. That isn't pedantry, that's a pretty major detail.

Actually in about 7.8128247*10^14 years there might be.

https://epicenterbitcoin.com/2014/01...ionary-future/
https://www.google.se/webhp?sourceid...8%2F(18*10%5E6)

At first I was not a big fan of the low disinflation of Ethereum. Satoshi was pretty darn close to what looks best in hindsight given the history of altcoins imo. So many things he got right a the first time...

But given that Ethereum might be more resource intensive than bitcoin on the miners there might be a good reason for the slightly lower disinflation.

It is easy to forget but bitcoin-owners pay a very high "cost per transaction" right now. Over time it will fall and hopefully the number of transactions will grow to make up for this. But Ethereum might be a bit more sensitive to this, so maybe a more mine-rewarding system actually is good.

I assume some of the guys behind eEhereum are much better at understand this than I am, and they also have the empirical results Satoshi didn't have.

Sorry Loz, just realised I misunderstood the entire context of this thread!

you are wrong with regards to pretty much everything you have said.

<3

http://coinprices.io/articles/analys...ble-investment

The internet today isn't ready for counterparty or ethereum to succeed IMO.

Really (literally) two sites in the world utilizes tipping as a feature, and basically the only people who do use it are those who post in the virtual currency forums. If you want to argue that "liking" is a kin to tipping that's fine, but look at exactly how many pay for model websites (e.g. news) outside of porn actually work. Soon enough people will torrent the NYT.

That is really the only feature in ethereum and/or counterparty that is immediately feasible for worldwide adoption. Everything else simply exists as theory in terms of "wow neat idea, but would 100m people actually partake in this 10 years from now?" -- nah, they'll still use etrade.

It is very difficult to know or predict people's behavior in the future. It's easy to think the world will be like it is today forever. The incumbent solution is clearly the favorite in the future but I would not rule out something like this disrupting it in the future.

People already "pay" for sites by watching ads. It's not that unrealistic in the future that people would be willing to either

a) earn ether by watching ads to access content or
b) buy a bunch of ether and never have to look at ads on a site anymore

Take youtube for example. The going rate is something like $5/1,000 views to the content creator if he/she enables ads. This comes out to 1/20 of a cent per view. I would happily pay 1/20 of a cent per youtube video I watch to never watch another ad on there again. Obviously google is raking in more than this from advertisers so my actual cost with youtube may be something like 1/10 of a cent per view, but that's the point. Ether is trying to cut out the middlemen so the actual content creators make more money.

We're all already "paying" for these sites. Ether is creating a more efficient marketplace by cutting out the middleman(google) and making the content cheaper for us consumers and increasing the bottom line of the content creators.

did you write that? it contains inaccuracies and lots of unsupported assertions.

but hey, i already bought in to Ethereum, so my ROI goes up if no one else buys in the pre-sale.

I agree that Ethereum is VERY risky. But the potential upside is also unkown and some claim it can be VERY big. The people often quoted on http://www.reddit.com/r/Rad_Decentralization such as Vitalik and Amir might actually be onto something. For example OpenBazaar is not only a replacement for Silkroad, it's also does Ebay, craigslist and Amazon. So many companies today earn a lot of money doing something a few lines of code could do, imo this equilibrium is not stable and is ripe for disruption. And Ethereum might be what will be used to develop run it.

If you have enough bitcoins to be superrich if Bitcoin succeeds imo you should really consider putting 1% of those coins into Ethereum, which imo is the most likely candidate to replace Bitcoin.

Why do you rate Ethereum over platforms that do similar things (Bitshares, Nxt) and have a headstart over Ethereum? The only advantage Ethereum has is it has more hype. It's just vaporware and you already have it lined up to replace bitcoin.

If Ethereum is actually useful, then there'll very likely be plenty of time to pick up ether at good prices once it's released.

It has more hype. Also the turing completeness which some claim will enable more future things.

Nxt I don't really believe in, because of the premine. Bitshares I havn't looked at too much, and I assume as many other have as have ethereum.

As it being vaporware, that's semantics. Project up and running on github I don't consider being vaporware, but sure they might scam us/be hacked. But for some reason I put a lot of trust in people like Vitalik. Him being a scammer just does not seem likely, based of my understand of similar people I have come across in life. I might be wrong, I guess we will see. If it fails it will fail spectacular

I'm waiting for my bank to get connected to my coinbase account, where can I go to buy a little BTC using a debit in the mean time? Everywhere I've found is like $100 more than the current market rate. Thanks for the help.

Fair enough. By vaporware, I meant that nothing is released yet. I don't doubt that they are working on something. But people are paying a heavy price for something that hasn't yet been released.

I don't know much about turing completeness, but Nxt are working on a few scripting languages, one of which is supposed to be super turing complete (whatever that is).

Nxt didn't have a premine, they had an IPO (similar to Ethereum). Anyone could buy in for an initial stake of Nxt for a 2 month period. Different to Ethereum, very few believed in Nxt (when it was vaporware) or trusted its creator. So it turned out that only 73 people got all the Nxt for a bargain price of 21BTC between them. Talk about a good investment!

I certainly don't think Vitalik is a scammer. However, he does seem to be a perfectionist so I expect delays on the release. Also, I don't think he wants ether to be something super valuable, I think he'd prefer a system where ether is cheap and plentiful and his platform is super useful to people. Which would be good for the crypto industry but might be bad for ether investors.

Meh, you all convinced me to buy my first altcoin with a bit of Ether. Its the first coin that's been substantially discussed in this thread so far and I'd hate to be the "They are trading at a ridiculous 0.0005/bitcoin which is hilarious for a currency that no one uses" guy a couple years from now. I think there's a pretty good chance it's worth <10% what I paid, but it seems unlikely to me it will go to zero. There's just too many smart people working on it.

Turing complete just means everything you can create with one thing you can create with another. So when people say ethereum is turing complete but counterparty or mastercoin or bitshares isn't they mean that you could create any of those platforms(say counterparty) using ethereum, but you could not use counterparty to create ethereum.