yes, ethereum governance is far superior to bitcoin's. there's no infighting and there's a clear roadmap for the future. even argumentation about contentious improvement proposals to the protocol such as reduction of eth issuance for miners is done in a civil manner. this doesn't mean we shouldn't be cognizant that it's still in an unsafe experimental stage and it can very well fail and for which reasons, though.

yes, i believe that it will. also, ethereum has already passed btc in transaction volume, trading volume, mining reward, nodes and google trends several times. it has never passed it in market cap.

probably not. however, it should be noted that the current paralysis is not working completely against it. it's definitely strangling bitcoin slowly but surely, but despite all the bloodlust for power over the protocol, the incentives are balanced well enough to make the network function just well enough to serve as a great alternative to the current methods of store of value and medium of exchange. this sort of immutability in the face of such a vicious struggle for power between many, many people is a good demonstration of the feature of censorship resistance.

for full disclosure, i sold every one of my bitcoins for eth earlier this year because i believe ethereum will overtake bitcoin in total market cap. i am also holding etc as a hedge.

Thanks for the reply. I have a PAYE job, so assume that wipes out the tax free part??

I don't have much invested tbf, I would guess it would be pretty tough to even spot tbh.

thanks TC, invictus, aggo and 2shae for you reasoned and well articulated posts.

kazuya, I find your posts long-winded and poorly argued. How deep your position is in the cryptospace is totally non sequitur. It would be better for this thread and this forum if you and the rest of the moonkids refrained from posting unless you have something of value to say.

Well I am pretty sure you still get the £11300 tax free even with a job but if you have more invested than that then you are likely to get taxed at 20% depending on your yearly salary.

Best thing to do is call a few local accountants and they will just tell you all you need to know in 10 mins for free

Oh and yeah if you don't have much invested it's very unlikely that you will get caught (just withdraw to you bank in under 10k increments over time! I would definitely be trying to get away with it for under like £50k with a poker background behind me!

He explained in a logical way why he mentioned his position. What I don't understand is why all the ETH haters have to constantly add in personal attack comments like "moonkids", "ethtards", "mETH heads", etc. Talk about adding no value to the thread...

Kazuya, please keep posting your opinions and ignore the haters.

There is so much misinformation in the last page I'm working on addressing it. The value of my Ethereum is a non-sequitur and I never claimed otherwise - it is however, a data point in my favour of actually understanding the underlying mechanics of everything that is going on, more so than the people who were also in this space years ago who missed this boat. However, stating your asset allocation in %'s isn't a non-sequitur in my mind. Someone not having enough conviction to put investment $ worth they have behind their words while typing with such conviction, okay sure you can do that and ultimately it doesn't matter to my bottom line. But hey, did you know you can also play with poker with playmoney? Or trade a phantom portfolio? But if you're smarter than the herd and have an knowledgable edge, why wouldn't you profit off of it? Let's be serious here.

Tom Collins, Aggo's arguments are disingenuous at best. I don't say that because I have more cryptocurrency than them, I say that because they are plain wrong. I will address them purely on technical merit. It'd just be great if Aggo specifically stopped posting at a rate he does because by the time I put sources & links to disprove a claim in one he already has posted 12 more factually wrong arguments. It's whack-a-mole in the last page, and you're likely too obtuse to even realize that I'm not spending time arguing against them for my benefit or my ego - I'd rather be researching more about different ICO's or listening to the Dev meetings. I could care less dude, I bet it bothers posters like yourself that I was already set-for-life before crypto and didn't need to be 'right' on this to become wealthy. The profits are a way to keep score, but what I care about is being correct in my plays, both before, now, and in the future. And I feel good about my chances because I already have a high confidence rate on what to do because I have a proven framework that adapts on how to best decipher and filter all the information in this sphere. My posts would be more valuable towards posters who haven't yet spent hundreds of hours actually understanding the nuances of crypto, who likely don't yet have a very confident handle on what's FUD and what isn't.

I'm going through Tom Collin's post like I said I would and it's already so damn long. It's 1 of 3 things:

1) I don't address all his misclaims on technical merit.

2) I address each and every one and type 8000+ words on top of his 3000 words.

3) or I can simply state they're wrong.

Well, what does everyone want? It makes no difference to me although to be honest I don't want to spend hours on a forum defending Ethereum when there's a lot more interesting discussions to be had (and because I personally already know exactly how and what he argued, and why it's wrong). Please put what you feel is your strongest argument forth (scaling? It's a scam? It's uncapped? What?) and I will address it directly and head on.

I'd say just address the points you feel most important in a concise manner..

In other news, litecoin has shot up

Also SetzerG:

Two Shae & Invictus for example (+ many others, I'm just using them because they've both posted on last page) both of them come across as good posters because they're being both fair/objective and their arguments are sound. My above post applies towards Tom & Aggo, who I personally believe are intentionally being deceitful out of spite.

Can you explain why you think Tom is being deceitful?

I actually think his posts have some merit.

Also I enjoy reading both sides of these arguments, even the crazy aggo ones.

^ Yeah, I will go through Tom's post later today and respond to what I think he feels are his strongest arguments in it. Just trying to greatly condense it. I'll ignore all his opinions (which technically, everyone can have, even if they're wrong) and instead only address the parts of his post that are factually wrong or distorted truths.

Really appreciate most of the posts in this thread. Currently I'm a long-term hodler of bitcoin. I have a speculative position in Ethereum, but have trouble finding it a long-term hold.

I see ETH's long-term (>2 years) potential drivers being: proof of stake, The EEA creating a mass following in coding ETH, and highly successful ICOs.


My questions are.

Do you think Tezos/Rootstock/ or others will hurt Eth's position in the ICO market for 2018 onwards? Are you at all worried about ICO regulation? Any concern that when some or most of the ICO's fail the locked portion will flood the market driving the price down?

Most of the crypto investors I know feel Eth is #1/2 and the safest play with Bitcoin scaling drama. Do you worry about the masses gravitating back to bitcoin if segwit or a scaling solution is deployed?

The Homestead milestone was deployed behind schedule. Do you think Metropolis/Serenity will be deployed anytime in the near future <1year? If they are massively delayed is that an issue for you?

If PoS is successfully deployed, do you have any concern with ethereum always being silver to bitcoins gold due to 5x+ supply?

With ETHs recent trading volume and ICOs spiking the blockchain has bloated quickly. Any concern additional transaction volume or a few successful ICOs going live could cause major issues?

Have I missed anything besides a BS event that could be a major ETH holder concern?

Thanks

Re: TomCollins manifest,

Condensed for clarity. * * are click through links. Original text is Tom, I am bold. I cut out all the opinion stuff and looked to address any specific arguments he seemed to think had merit.

Cliffs - Turns out you're pretty much wrong about everything. I used to think you might be the Steve Bannon of cryptocurrency in this forum, it turns out your posts are more accurately portrayed by Sean Spicer. Stop intentionally misleading people.

Market cap would be a bad metric to decide whether ETH is a scam (it is) or not. A ponzi can get really big, even if it has no value proposition.

I would concede that Ethereum is not a scam (with the caveat that a really big part of available ETH is owned by a very small group of people), if either of the two following options happens:

1. A genuinely good Dapp based on Ethereum, that has an actual use-case and is superior to a non smart contract based execution of the same business idea. I´m not talking about only the idea and a fancy whitepaper, but an actually executed idea.

So far, there are exactly zero of these and it´s not looking good:
https://dapps.ethercasts.com/

Please tell me a single one of these projects, that has a real use-case and is better than a non smart contract based implementation. I know that it´s too early to assess the execution of many of these projects, but just looking at the ideas should tell you enough.

2. ETH commits to a governance mechanism that prevents stuff like the DAO disaster from happening and takes power away from guys like Vitalik. The guys, who currently run this scam implement a mechanism like this and give away their power to a truly decentralized governance mechanism.

Even if one of these 2 conditions is fulfilled (which I highly doubt!), the problem of the really unequable distribution of ETH remains.

If I were you I would sell your 8k ETH immediately, while you still get a nice chunk of BTC or fiat for it. I would only hold if you really enjoy losing the amount of money it represents as of today due to a masochistic disposition

I appreciate a sincere post. My thoughts are bold. I definitely think there will be useful Dapps/applications coming onto the Ethereum platform in the future, so I'll pass on the selling, but thanks for response . Let's revisit this in a year.

Imo www.blockjack.io fulfils this.

So if Vitalik has .005% of all available ETH he has 462847.965 from what I can gather.................. Just $166,625,267.4. Broke ass.

the ICO is the first big use-case. ETH, right now, is allowing for anyone, located anywhere in the world, with practically any amount of capital, to invest in a company/product/idea and reap the rewards. Most may be "scams", but the use-case is big. These types of returns have been typically reserved for bankers/VCs/thosewith$$$. now the little guy can participate equally in ventures of any size.

these were squeezed out of bitcoin by the current state of things. you can be sure, lots of people are happy that they (OMNI, colored coins, counterparty) are not using bitcoin, but the use-case, demand, and dev energy had to go somewhere.

Why do these ETH apps always look like some crappy site from the early 90s?

I can play blackjack with some hot Russian host live on Pokerstars, or I can take a step back in time and play Atari blackjack with ETH.

Yes, we should revisit this in some time. I have to concede that the current state of the Dapps could also be seen as a huge advantage of ETH by showing that a ton of developers are working on Ethereum projects while other cryptos are mostly 1-2 guy shows.

Another issue that is not related to ETH being a scam, is the planned change to Proof of Stake.

What do you think of Ethereums plans?
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wik...f-of-Stake-FAQ

My opinion:
I already posted in the Bitcoin thread that I read a ton on the different distributed consensus algorithms, and as of now I´m inclined to say that Proof of Stake won´t work.

Read this for a starting point that adresses several problems in the supposed solution of the Ethereum team at github, which I linked above:
https://blog.sldx.com/whats-wrong-wi...e-77d4f370be15

There are several other attack vectors that are not mentioned, which also endanger PoS.
I would be more confident in the future of Ethereum if they would continue to use Proof of Work. As I said in the other thread Satoshi Nakamoto decided on Proof of Work as a consensus algorithm for a reason.

This is your killer app? Come on heltok, you can´t be serious. Besides, we had both blockchain based games as well as provably fair games before without the need to run it on a smart contract.

Have you actually tried to get into of these ICOs? This reads like some utopian vision, which is detached from the actual experience of people trying to participate.
Not to mention, that it´s possible that this use-case will soon be under scrutiny of the SEC.

+1

Smart contract, provably fair gaming with hot Eastern European women!

what is that reason? why did he choose it over proof of stake?

Appreciate Kazuya's posts even though I don't think there's any reason to address TomCollins, who decided Ethereum was a scam when he met 19 year old Vitalik for 2 minutes and didn't get his question answered.

As for the state of dapps on eth, it's still too early. If another year from now there's been countless more ICOs and zero progress on product delivery and adaptation, then I'll be a lot more concerned than I am now.

Because pos wasn't invented

exactly. but lol vanguard doesn't know that.

if a killer app does arrive on the ethereum scene, does it not soon after expose the elephant in the room, the scaling problem?

waiting for payments on bitcoin to confirm is annoying but generally worth it. when your entire dapp grinds to a halt, you are screwed.