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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.
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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?
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.