I think jihan is going to renege at the last moment

Great discussion about the Fork debate with Jimmy Song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwGSPMHCVi0

assuming you are referring to his tweet here, he is referring to slashing conditions.

he doesn't actually have the ability to destroy people's money at the push of a button.

ETH is simply speculative with no value behind it. Of course markets can be irrational for a long period of time.

The market is quite thin, so it doesn't even require that much dumb money, but there is PLENTY of dumb money with crypto gains being where they are. One of the biggest drivers for ETH is the ICO rush right now. ICOs are almost entirely scams (google "App Coins are Snake Oil", website is getting censored for some reason). Since you need ETH to buy ICOs, that drives demand for ETH, which then locks them up (See https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was...m-804c9a906d36).

Add in that this is a completely unregulated domain with a ton of young and inexperienced investors with huge gains ready to try to catch lightning in a bottle twice. Gee, have we ever seen that in history before? Oh yes, we have: http://www.coindesk.com/cryptocurren...h-seas-bubble/

The fundamental issue with Ethereum is that it solves NO problems better than alternatives except raising money from fools. It is incredibly good at that task. Though when your entire model requires a never-ending supply of fools who will lose money, you are Groupon (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30...roupon-936640/). It can last a while... then it doesn't.

A lot of people usually respond "but the same can be said of Bitcoin!" There are certainly some similarities, but its important to know the difference. Why do you hire Bitcoin? (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYkQBBg55q8) or (https://medium.com/@alpalpalp/what-i...n-b7309be442e3)

So what makes Bitcoin valuable and useful? Is it cheap/fast transactions? I've argued no for quite some time. Bitcoin is incredibly terribly designed for this! Bitcoin is slow and expensive (just looking at how it's designed, not what the fees may be). It requires a massive amount of energy to synchronize the ledger through mining. It requires 10 minute average intervals between blocks. It's terrible at this! But many people were fooled early on and believe this still. Maybe a few more years of high fees and slow confirmations will finally make people realize that no matter what block size is used, it simply cannot be done.

So why else? One reason is the goldbug's dream - a more portable, verifiable, transportable gold. It's sound money, where the parameters are locked in through mathematics rather than physics. But you can store any amount of it in your mind if you need to. You can keep your wealth from being confiscated from despots or thieves. You can take it anywhere with you in the world. Not only that, but the supply is fixed and every single participant can verify it with something as weak as a raspberry pi!

It's also quite hard to censor (though right now mining centralization is failing here). Every single person on this site should know why that's important. You can send money to places that banks don't allow without anyone stopping you. You can gamble with it. You can send it to dark markets. You can use it to pay Wikileaks. Any cause a government would want to stop you from doing, no matter how good or evil, now cannot be stopped. You pay in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin also offers irreversible payments. If you get paid, you know no central authority or third party will be able to revoke it. You can still build reversible layers on top, but you will know when something is finally settled and reversing it would be uneconomical (miners would have to mine other blocks on a longer chain that double spend it, something that after a small amount of time, is not economical).

So how does this compare to Ethereum. Ethereum is not verifiable (it has such bloat to the blockchain, they stopped verifying transactions other than miners who do it). You are using a trusted model. If you want a trusted model, there are far better options, such as using a sql database run by a central authority. Ethereum has perpetual inflation rather than a fixed supply. Furthermore, Ethereum scales poorly because rather than keeping the base layer simple and meant to be expanded on top, it tries to package everything in the kitchen sink into that layer.

Etheruem is trivially censorable. It uses accounts rather than addresses. It also has a central authority (Ethereum Foundation) that can decide the rules of the system, and can change them as it suits them. And it certainly isn't irreversible, as the DAO pointed out. The so-called "smart contract" turned out to be just something that central authorities could reverse at will. Guess who governments will come to whenever they need some other rules enforced?



Ethereum promises the "Smart contract", but in reality, there has not been a single use case (other than raising funds from rubes, or those seeking greater fools), that provides any actual value, better than things that already exist.

Will the price rise in the short term to even more irrational levels? Perhaps. Will the mania and FOMO and large scale investors who don't see past buzzword soup keep investing it and get it above even Bitcoin? Perhaps. But Ethereum will continue until it cannot any more, and it will be ugly. It's the equivalent of tech startups that never produce a profit or generate any revenue but somehow become unicorns due to vanity metrics.

I've been bearish on Ethereum since I first met Vitalik over 4 years ago. He couldn't answer even the most simple questions. The whole project is built by marketing hype over substance. When Peter Todd visited their HQ, he saw there were far more marketers than actual development. It's closer to Onecoin than Bitcoin.

What did you ask vitalik 4 years ago? Is interesting you met him!

I wish I could remember the specifics. He was at a conference I was at prior to the unveiling of Ethereum, they were speaking there, no one really knew what it was then.

I remember asking him about contract upgrades/bugs, along with just the whole KISS philosophy vs. the Ethereum philosophy. He was an incredibly odd fellow, and I can see why many might mistake that as genius. He came across as a junior programmer type that had smarts, but no experience in the real world. Lots of big dreams and ideas, but nothing practical at all. I'm a bit more weathered in the industry- it's easy to think you are going to come in and change things, but a lot of times things are a way for a reason and difficult to change.

It wasn't an incredibly long conversation, just ate near him at lunch and a lot of people were also asking him questions.

TYVM for the post. That's what I was looking for.

I recently listened to an interview with Szabo and I was surprised that he was relatively positive about Ethereum. This made me think I should understand it a bit better.

I'll go back to patiently waiting for Bitcoin to go mainstream. 8)

Bip148 compatibility was merged

https://www.f2pool.com/page/announcement-20170616


Ppl withdrawing support from segwit2x?

You sure it was a new one? Szabo has been blasting Vitalik lately. I can at least somewhat understand ETC rather than ETH, but ETH is gonna end badly. Possibly with Vitalik and Co. in prison for SEC stuff.

Not quite. The true 148 compatible one was not used, but the code that was merged is more likely to avoid a split.

I am reading it this way. It's a way of supporting SegWit without saying you are supporting it. Face saving. Barry can claim to be the hero even though it was really BIP148 supporters that scared the **** out of miners.

For their crowdsale in 2014 that the SEC has just sat on for 3 years? Lol.

Tim Ferriss from early Jun but not idea when it was recorded.

Very possible that he's thinking very long term and that a Turing-complete blockchain could be useful.

Frankensegwit back on deck

if you don't remember the specifics, why are you talking all this **** about him being unable to answer simple questions? what simple questions did you ask and what simple questions was he unable to answer? stop attacking his character and attempting to use that to discredit him.

"i don't remember what we talked about but he is an odd fellow mistaken for a genius and his big ideas are all **** trust me i've been in the industry for way longer than him"
what happened to you? your posts used to be good.

also, you've stated several times here that proof of stake is not going to work but never responded why. so why is it not going to work?

I am a complete btc and altcoin noob but I remember reading a story about a hack of some BTC and there was a 'rollback' that basically restarted blockchain at a previous point, reversing transactions that occurred during that period.

Isn't that the definition of 'reversible'?

yes, ethereum did this not bitcoin

just one of a dozen reasons ethereum is a joke

No, he's right. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vu...#CVE-2010-5139

well to be fair, that was in Aug 2010 and the hack basically ruined the blockchain. There wouldn't really be a point of continuing to use bitcoin when one user has 184 billioin bitcoins lol. The dao hack was a different situation imo.

But I guess I'll concede I was wrong.

What's the best way to go from BTC to USD, coinbase?

there is absolutely no way tom didn't know about this when he brought up ethereum's lack of irreversibility.

Yup bitcoin fork 'stole' bitcoin from a 'rightful' owner back then. Same as eth hard fork.

'steal' and 'rightful' in this context is highly debateable. in both situations, someone exploited a bug and got 'rightfully' rewarded. is it okay to 'steal' from the 'rightful' owner? if it's okay in ethereum's dao case, then it's okay in the bitcoin fork case as well. the cases are identical, but one is way worse for the network than the other because of the amount. then, is there a threshold at which doing so is okay? if so, what is it?

but that's not even relevant. the point being made was that the bitcoin blockchain is irreversible. and this example proves that it clearly was not.

That's really a semantics debate. The blockchain is irreversible. The 184 billion bitcoin chain still exists, unreversed. No one mines and no one gives it value.

Likewise, the eth chain still remains not reversed. It is called eth classic.

The ethereum chain is also not reversed in a semantic sense. There is a series of blocks on it, none of which have been reversed.

All blockchains are mutable. To say they aren't is wrong, or simply a semantics debate.

The main argument for immutability is that a bad actor or group of bad actors tries to alter the chain, their forked chain should have no value. The market will decide which chain to give value to and in a technical sense none of the blocks on that chain will be reversed whether they actual were or weren't by forking means.