I don't think you can compare tulips and the housing market or whatever other bubbles have occurred in the past with cryptocurrency. It's so completely different than anything that has ever existed. 99.9% of people have never even heard of ethereum. We are still in the infancy of the technology and there's a long way to go before we get to the mass hysteria stage.

And Tulips weren't? And the Internet (and the companies poised to make money off that) weren't? That was going to revolutionize commerce. And cars weren't?? And South Sea trading in the 1700s wasn't?

Bubbles are always new and special and incredible and amazing like nothing before it. That's why idiots buy in, and it's why they create bubbles.

Ethereum, looked at objectively, is a piece of **** that does very little that's unique or new. It doesn't really solve problems that can't and haven't been solved in other ways. It's not scarce (all kinds of blockchain competitors are being developed). It's no different to a new type of flower or a new vast trading realm/continents opening up or a new personal transportation device being mass produced or a new and incredible way of doing commerce and communicating (the Internet). In fact, I'd argue it's far less interesting and compelling than any of the above were in their respective times, had you lived in them.

It's a lot higher than 1 in 1000.
Maybe. Ultimately it has to have fundamentals to support its price, and what fundamentals does it have? At least Bitcoin has the fundamental base of being the currency of choice of a multi billion dollar scumbag economy.

I mean, it's at $20 billion dollars, the use case is far less clear than Bitcoin to dumb money - there's no question that most people are buying because it's going up like Bitcoin did - and it's obviously into a bubble (even the crappiest of crapcoins are up 1000% - it's a bubble).

I'd love to see some robust analysis why this is going to $200 billion from where it is now ($20 billion ish) due to bubble dynamics. Money inflows have to go through the roof for that to happen.

Hello, I was speaking on a Gaming panel at the Ethereal conference in New York, sponsored by ConsenSys.

The ETH blockchain projects under way include poker (Virtuepoker), Predictions (Gnosis) and esports (Challengeme and FirstBlood.io).

I really like the potential for smart contracts and gaming/betting. I've been waiting for good apps to come to market since the white paper was published.

lol, you might want to hold onto it for a while .... I didn't even though I got it for $.30 in the pre-sale.

I'm on my way out, but this is worth 10 minutes of your time.

Here is a lay-up use-case for the Ethereum platform. Everyone loves to talk about valuations. Well we all know what WhatsApp was worth according to traditional markets, and WeChat is likely worth a multiple of at least 4x that. (I'm lowballing) The guy presenting in link below is no joke, just google him if you're unsure who he is. Okay so obviously this is still in an infancy stage of progress, but let's dream big and say this works as describes.

Tell me what you value an application like this at and its effects on the Ethereum ecosystem? That's a bullcase right there. I want to remind you this is just one use case of many that are developing right now and using this platform:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IJ6uWQzzwk

I can't and won't try to address price, but I believe you are mistaken about the usefulness of the underlying technology. Ethereum basically added smart contracts to the basic blockchain technology that is the bais for bitcoin.

I was interested in BTC and its technology and spoke on its utility for gaming in 2013 at the first Bitcoin Foundation conference. (Somewhat ironically, it was the day after DOJ seized Mt.gox bank accounts in Maryland.)

I became familiar with the extent to which SatoshiDice leveraged blockchain technology for gaming purposes, but that had limitations and actually caught BTC community flack for comprising over 80% of blockchain transactions at the time.

When the Ethereum White Paper was later published, I became intrigued at the possible application to gaming and betting, in ways which would avoid problems arising from limits in the bitcoin technology.

The development of apps is underway finally, both in gaming/betting and other more mainstream uses. Some of the details likely will be posted on YouTube from the Ethereal Summit panel I was on last week.

Again, I can't address ETH as a store for value or whether or not X is a good/bad/speculative/bubble price; but as an Unfrozen Caveman Gaming Lawyer, this I do know .... the technology looks very promising to me even if it's not the greatest thing since the invention of fire.

I don't doubt the usefulness of blockchain applications, which is really just a public ledger (hardly new) + encryption (hardly new). Corporates are building and using their own in big ways. It's the infinite supply of them that's the problem for any particular blockchain.

If Ethereum was patented I'd say the price may have more to run over the next decade.

Since it isn't, perhaps it will become the #1 ecosystem and perhaps that will stick. The value right now seems to be tied to nothing however - correct me if I'm wrong but it seems the blockchain creates little of value at the moment. Since it's not really a currency beyond speculators buying in, it's hard to see an economy that supports a billion dollar, let alone $20 billion dollar (now), let alone $100 billion dollar (5 bagger) valuation.

It seems that buying now is doing nothing but riding a speculation bubble and hoping you're not the bag holder.

Anyway, I can certainly see the use cases in no-cheating-possible gambling, escrow services, prediction markets, and so on. That'll get it to Bitcoin's economic size when Bitcoin had a $3 billion market cap. Then what?

It seems this is a long game if you want to be in on Ethereum, and the price rise now is priced for short term bubble (just look at the other, totally crap/useless altcoins if you want evidence of that). The odds that you can get FAR better prices seems fairly high.

The bank won't lend you money to buy Ethereum/Crypto but these exchanges will. At insane interest rates (~.35% per day) and people are doing it.



https://www.bitfinex.com/features#trading

Cool, good to have your perspective on here then.

Brutal.

First day I had consciousness about both BTC and ETH, ETH was $48... Waited till ~$90 or so to get in.

You may be right about pricing in general. I am a terrible judge of price; bought my bag of ether at $ .30 and sold it last year because I thought a bubble might be looming then, and I was impatient regarding development of apps.

(However, think of ETH as fuel for powering transactions written using smart contracts. You can buy and sell gasoline or some other fuel all day, but it is user demand that will drive the price. You may be right about current pricing, to the extent a price is based upon storing value rather than its value as a fuel ; a renewable fuel at that to power a decentralized, worldwide, pretty disruptive market place for all sorts of contracts and transactions. It basically is like the internet except with a functionality built in for including contracts, secure escrows and payments.

Then add in a crypto-trading platform like Shapeshift.io and a provider of services will be able to sell/convert across whatever crypto a customer may hold to whatever crypto blockchain the provider operates on.

(Remember when the largest pool of convertible virtual currency was probably PokerStars dollars and players on other poker platforms would swap Stars dollars for chips on whatever other poker platform they wanted to play on ?)

Yeah but on finex you can't get USD if that's your fiat fwiw. At least for now.

Subscribing

Yes definitely not endorsing the site. Just showing there might be a little of that leveraging/over extension going on in the market.

The thing that this misses is the network effect. Eventually, 1 crypto will become THE crypto. Bitcoin had it all locked up, and pissed it away because of a ******ed scaling debate that didn't need to happen for 10 years or more (or ever probably).

That left the door open for anyone else to walk in and lay claim. Eth has the best shot because 1) it can do more than BTC 2) it's the largest (in terms of adoption) smart contract platform. With #2 being way more important than #1.

You mentioned it doesn't have a patent, so it's not securely in the #1 spot for smart contracts, but Facebook isn't a patented idea, yet no one can touch them. Why? Because everyone is on Facebook, so that's how a lot of the world communicates. You can make an exact clone of Facebook and no one will go there. You can make an exact clone of ETH and no one will go there. Hell, someone did make an exact clone of BTC (LTC) and nobody goes there.

With crypto, someday everyone will be on BTC or ETH or $hitcoin, and whatever coin wins will be worth...some ungodly amount.

How come I currently see ETH going for around 188-192 US dollars but when I go to purchase it on coin base or gemini they are trying to charge 215 lol. I mean 25 extra is a bit much, anyone? What is the up charge and where is it going to? Is there a way around it, I'm a complete noob but want to load up at 190 but that 25 extra is rubbing me the wrong way. HELP!!!

doesn't matter what price you get in at if it's going to infinity your ROI is the same

This is 100% wrong.

This is very important IMO. With a company like Facebook, they had first mover advantage (or second, lol MySpace,) and then once they had the masses inertia will keep them on top for a long time. With Bitcoin and Ethereum, the compounding effect of being first to crypto is actually monetized via security. With either Proof of Work (Bitcoin) or Proof of Stake (ETH soon,) the security of the block chain increases over time. The harder it becomes to solve the block hashing algorithm, or the more coin age that can be burned (in PoS,) the more decentralized and secure the network becomes. So, Tooth, you ask why anyone would choose ETH or BTC over a competitor in the future- there is a super clear reason: they will be more secure. No one can ever catch them until they break. It was rumors of future possible breakage for bitcoin that allowed ethereum to catch up in the first place. Now they have the second mover advantage of being able to watch what threatens bitcoin and fix it in ETH before it breaks.

I'm not convinced. Can the crypto with most transactions also have the lowest fees?

Sure, why not? In the long run I see fees going close to 0. Raiden should lower some fees substantially.

if anyone notices secretaries google searching "how to buy bitcoin" on their lunchbreak can you please let me know so I can short it?

fwiw on ethereum I do feel like a bit of an idiot because cowpig told me to buy it 3 months ago and did a decent job explaining why

cryptos cool like that because you're an idiot for buying, a huge idiot for holding, and an idiot for not buying before when you first thought about it a bit.

ETH about to break the $200 barrier, holding steady in the $190+ range. I expect $300 by the end of June.

http://www.coindesk.com/icos-going-m...ch-token-sale/

Messaging service Kik with 15 million users is launching a token sale. Perhaps this is the one and not Spotify. Or maybe Spotify will make an announcement later today as well.