Slashdot Mirror
NYTimes: Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment. (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The price of Bitcoin has hit record highs in recent months, more than doubling in price since the start of the year. Despite these gains, Bitcoin is on the verge of losing its position as the dominant virtual currency. The value of Ether, the digital money that lives on an upstart network known as Ethereum, has risen an eye-popping 4,500 percent since the beginning of the year (alternative source). With the recent price increases, the outstanding units of the Ether currency were worth around $34 billion as of Monday -- or 82 percent as much as all the Bitcoin in existence. At the beginning of the year, Ether was only about 5 percent as valuable as Bitcoin. The sudden rise of Ethereum highlights how volatile the bewildering world of virtual currency remains, where lines of computer code can be spun into billions of dollars in a matter of months. [...] The two-year old system has picked up backing from both tech geeks and big corporate names like JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft, which are excited about Ethereum's goal of providing not only a digital currency but also a new type of global computing network, which generally requires Ether to use. In a recent survey of 1,100 virtual currency users, 94 percent were positive about the state of Ethereum, while only 49 percent were positive about Bitcoin, the industry publication CoinDesk said this month.
Has little to do with the rich. Unless you consider the rich to be :
... but not everyone agrees with you. And black market economy includes the poor okra farmer selling his own veggies.)
Chinese who have spare cash and don't want to put it into a bank account (which can be seized) or buy an apartment in a ghost town.
Indians who lost a lot of their saved (off-the-books) cash. (You may like the idea of reducing corruption and the black-market economy
Or perhaps you missed the socialist paradise of Venezuela? What if you feared that?
Or maybe you lived in Egypt or Cyprus and you had problems accessing your own "safe","secure", "bank-held" currency.
Or maybe you live in places where these events no longer look far-fetched to you and you want to squirrel a little away.
It's not the big movers who are raising the price of BTC. It's the small guys.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Isn't Ethereum the digital currency that arbitrarily rolled back transactions because they didn't like them? Or maybe they liked them too much? In any case, even the ability to roll back transactions make this a non-starter.
There's a new gold rush in crypto currency that is causing video card prices to go up as everyone and their mother tries to mine the latest and greatest from the ether.
http://www.pcgamer.com/it-looks-like-cryptocurrency-mining-is-driving-up-nvidia-graphics-card-prices-too/
I do my best to mark every crypto/blockchain submission in the firehose as 'stupid' - because everyone here should have enough brain cells to put together to have figured out why it's all shit that can't possibly work.
Most of the posters here do nothing but mock these submissions, though there are a few dedicated cultists... and even so they tend to have low discussion participation levels.
Yet Slashdot keeps approving the stupid things. There must be a cryptocultist among the editors. I can't imagine it's just approvals for click bait since they aren't working on that front.
This kind of jump, especially against an well established currency sounds like a Soros-esce pump and dump scheme. The idea is simple:
* Buy a bunch of currency which drives the cost of buying more currency up with another currency or precious metals
* When the currency hits its peak sell off all of your stock of said currency
* When the currency crashes buy back your stock back for pennies on the dollar or what every your currency's equivalent is.
* Rinse and repeat until you become an enemy of the state
Give it 6 months and you'll see a huge crash and then it will normalize at about 1/3 of its current value. After that look for gradual but steady increase in price.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Notes on Ethereum .Money is what people believe it is.
-Key man risk of 22 year old kid. Benign dictatorship akin to Torvalds.
-Supply isn't limited like Bitcoin, annual inflation.
-Currently hugely overvalued due to ICOs, not to say it doesn't have some value
-Its blockchain is huge, bloated and doesn't currently scale very well. Network clogs quickly.
-Smart contracts are promising, interesting technology that have some very useful cases but very specific cases. Prediction markets are gold for this. Put a blockchain on it is the new put a bird on it.
-Enterprise use is mostly vapourware. Banks all trust each other and know each other. The Gov knows itself. They just need better databases. Consultants and innovation theatre practioners looking for a passing bandwagon. What back office is left to automate?
-Premine for the insiders
-Not immutable. Read about the ideological split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Gresham's law gone wild. The bad money turned into the good money and good money the bad. Could be argued Etheruem should actually be $20.
-Bitcoin has been a ridiculous bubble for 9 years. Keep thinking that. If it fell to $1000 the longterm trend still holds. Better money will win.