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NYTimes: Move Over, Bitcoin. Ether Is the Digital Currency of the Moment. (nytimes.com)

Posted by msmash on from the current-trend dept.

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.

6 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. BUY TULIP BULBS NOW! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Buy tulip bulbs now! Get rich quick!

  2. Clearly.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The rich have way too much money sitting around. They're investing in nothing backed by nothing on the promise that it might one day be something. It's insane. What ever happened to investing in building something?

    1. Re:Clearly.... by GLMDesigns · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Has little to do with the rich. Unless you consider the rich to be :

      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 ... but not everyone agrees with you. And black market economy includes the poor okra farmer selling his own veggies.)
      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
  3. Really? by Tx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bitcoin is on the verge of losing its position as the dominant virtual currency

    In terms of actually being used as a currency, i.e. people using it to buy and sell things, I don't think I've personally come across anywhere accepting Ether. I've bought software, VPN service, pharmaceuticals (no, the legal kind) with bitcoin, which seems to be widely accepted. Surely before you can say that Ether is replacing bitcoin as the "dominant virtual currency", it would have to gain widespread acceptance as an actual currency, rather than just something to get speculators excited.

    --
    Oh no... it's the future.
  4. Pump and Dump by randomErr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?
  5. bullets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Notes on Ethereum
    -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 .Money is what people believe it is.
    -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.