So it's superior to BTC, but its market cap shouldn't be more than BTC? Search backwards for my post about transaction usage about ETH & BTC, it's inevitable ETH is going to flip. Obsessing about price as of this minute is the wrong way to look at it; the real driver of future value is going to be usage/utility. Eth has better fundamentals of both, and it's not even particular close - I've been saying that for months. The market will sort out the rest as it becomes even more obvious. Here's yet another catalyst: Huobi & OKCoin adding Ethereum is huge. Thats 75%+ of the Chinese market that now has access to Ethereum. Look at this:

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/china-waking-ethereum/

Ant financial is a subsidiary to Alibaba. A year ago if you were to google around March 2016 they had an interview about them developing a private blockchain, but no mention of Ethereum. Key quote here:

“The services provided by Ant Financial and its affiliates cover payment, wealth management, credit reporting, private bank and cloud computing. Ant Financial is experimenting with Ethereum technology to improve their global payment platforms.”

Now if this were to happen, thats 450M users right there. 14 months ago they were going to build on their own private internalized blockchain, but now it seems they're experimenting with only Ethereum. I wonder why they're not using BTC? Because it's broken/will never fit their needs. Like, it pained me to say that for the longest time because I was a believer in BTC for a very long time; I wanted it to work. It took me probably 50+ hours of hard research/analysis to finally convince myself to ditch BTC (because I had done well with it) and really understand what the true drivers of value were. I'm lucky I figured this out before the market has (which seems to be in the process of doing so right now).

That's good they're being transparent. Still though, I'm personally not convinced it's a better alternative to just holding Eth. The ICO Stats is interesting and kind of backs that sentiment up.

Adreny, re: Golem/Augur,

My background isn't computer science/cloud, so I can't technically comment much on Golem. I don't have much of a truly educated opinion on Golem, so I'm the wrong guy to ask about that one. I'm not personally looking to buy any of it.

Augur I'm much more bullish on but once again it depends on how they deliver their product to the market. I could see a huge market/adoption for it, if they make a brilliant user interface/app that is extremely easy-to-use. As far as investing goes, I plan to download/be an early user soon as they go to market and just put on my investment cap/decide from there whether it'll go places. It's something I need to use and then decide, as right now it's too much risk for the current market cap in my mind. It definitely seems pretty cool though...

ETH's tech is superior but the coin's usefulness and user adoption is not even close. Where can I buy porn/drugs/gambling with ETH? I don't think it's at all inevitable that ETH will overtake BTC even if BTC remains as a worse method of transfer both in terms of cost and speed. You could build a better facebook/reddit/google tomorrow and it does not mean you would overtake any of those companies because you need the users.

Also, just because people are building on top of the ETH blockchain as opposed to BTC blockchain does not necessarily mean that value of ETH > value of BTC. BTC may do just fine as a currency while ETH may do just fine as a dev platform.

Users will naturally gravitate toward a superior product. You're basically saying "where can I find porn, news, books on the internet?!" in 1995 because all you knew were magazines and newspapers and, rightly, the internet didn't offer those things...yet.

You're right that BTC may do completely just fine as a currency. That's its ceiling - it's why I ditched it.

The rest (not surprisingly) I strongly disagree with. But it's good to have discussion and not just an echo chamber and it's not a bad thing there are users who are skeptical and not just trolls, I mean that sincerely. If you believe the above, and it's a part of your investment thesis, then definitely BTC is the place to be for you personally. I also think it'd be great if they both do well, I just personally see Ethereum continuing to grow as well as cannibalizing BTC over the next year and inevitably becoming the larger Market Cap of the two.

As for drugs, the biggest DNM Alphabay accepts them. As for gambling I expect to see a decentralized poker network this year. Will probably be collusion and bots like crazy, but at least you can play your friends with much lower rake if you want. Not sure if Ethereum users typically pay for their porn. A funny story on this, I trolled https://www.reddit.com/r/GirlsGoneEthereum/

Wrong. User's only gravitate to a superior product if it's some order of magnitude better than their current product. Why hasn't Dash/Doge/Litecoin overtaken BTC? They're all superior tech to BTC. Ethereum is the only one with substantially better tech. I know it seems that ETH will continue to improve and get better and overtake BTC at this point, but there's always the off chance of it changing too quickly and creating a fork or crashing to zero. With BTC there's very little chance of that happening because development is so slow. Right now this is very bad, but it could turn out to be a very good thing if ETH does something dumb like the DAO fork again. Neither coin's code will stay stagnant forever. Of course ETH looks more promising right now, but BTC can change and improve with time just as ETH can. As long as the gap between the tech does not get too large where ETH tech >>>>>> BTC tech like it is at the moment instead of just ETH > BTC, I don't think ETH will surpass BTC in terms of users.

I own both ETH and BTC and am bullish on both long term, but right now, today it's absurd to me that ETH is > 50% of market cap of BTC when you can't do anything with them except trade them for BTC essentially.

This is what I'm talking about

GirlsGoneEthereum
12 readers

GirlsGoneBitcoin
7,818 readers

The last ETH run up was timed nicely by the whales to FOMO on day 1 and sell the kik news and conference end.

This run up really feels to me like every whale wants to be 100% ETH within 6 hours from now to sell to the chinese. I think they will quickly assess the chinese demand and ride it up carefully until cashout time. How high is up to the chinese.

If you have access to the chinese exchanges this really looks like an easy +20% deal.

This really looks like yahoo front page. Making up **** everyday to try and explain why the market is up or down.

BTW, whales don't become whales by following strategies like "This run up really feels to me like every whale wants to be 100% ETH within 6 hours from now to sell to the chinese. I think they will quickly assess the chinese demand and ride it up carefully until cashout time. How high is up to the chinese."

This is troll box talk.

How easy is it to arb the chinese exchange? I hope it's easier than the korean because the spread was like 40% during the last run up

Prediction on first major (e.g. >20m USD raise) ICO failure to deliver a product?

How do you define failure to deliver a product? Success seems much easier to measure, even if there could be dangers lurking in the future even for a "success".

GAMBLE www.etheroll.com is already go!

2min into: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/video...t-bounce-video

Now we just need Dan Bilzerian to buy in at the top and then the real dump can begin.

On a (more) serious note, I really think ETH is very limited and many ongoing projects are simply not really useful.

Look at the following page, which summarises various ETH based projects:
https://dapps.ethercasts.com/

I fail to see any project that is a really killer-app. Most are gimmicks or small projects with no real utility.

Regarding the Augur discussion:
I like the general idea, but the user interface is terrible at the moment. Check it out and see for yourself...

https://app.augur.net/

They need to improve the usability by a giant margin otherwise this project is going to fail miserably.

Gnosis looks better at the moment, but is ridiculously overvalued.

I think it's really hard to know if any of these dapps will take off. I remember hearing about Uber in it's early days and thinking it was dumb. Wtf do I need I smartphone and app to call a black car for? Having said that I kind of agree. A lot of these projects just seem like scams or are way overvalued. Augur is the only one I have been legitimately interested in, but I thought it's ICO valuation was too high and am certainly not buying REP tokens at current prices. I will give it a try as a user once it launches though. I don't think the UI matters as much as the liquidity and bet limits. If they can offer limits on par with Pinnacle they will do just fine even if the UI sucks.

Translation:
Look at this random page on the internet that gets a miniscule 2,000 unique visits/day and forces users to submit their project to get listed. The page was built by a youtuber who has 3k subscribers. Let's all base our opinion about ethereum's future on this random website's list of ongoing projects.

Feel free to post a link to a better resource or information if you have it. Criticizing links without providing better info is not helpful to the discussion.

anybody joining to WGR ico?

No. I actually don't know what it is so assume it's not good or noteworthy

There will be blood when the ICO bubble explodes. The greed is going to be bite them in the ass.

Whose greed?

failure to deliver the product outlined in their white paper/yellow paper


Since every ICO is launching without a business plan and/or product I can guarantee that a lot of these 20m raises will end up with 0 product at the end of their burn.


e.g.

aeternity
cosmos
and soon,
polkadot