Vitalik Buterin and others have been very clear that Ethereum may fail completely and that it's an experiment. Others (https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/495300992049479680) widely acknowledge that Ethereum is the most technically ambitious cryptocurrency since Bitcoin; it's not in the same category of coins which changed a parameter and created a new coin.
I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I've offered a chance to Greg Maxwell, and Austin Hill the chance to talk to us and give a coherent critique of Ethereum; they did not take me up on the offer (We had Matthieu Riou give a brief critique of Ethereum at our meetup; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y). I'd be very happy for a coherent and respectful critique of Ethereum from one of you at one of our meetups; you're welcome to contact me; see http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/
Skepticism of individual cryptocurrencies is advisable as is skepticism of their critics. A lot of the vitriol and guttersniping is the product of rivalry between them, bitterness over the fall in value for many of them, and an almost religious division of opinion on the merits of sidechains versus separate currencies. At the moment the Wikipedia page for ethereum has no criticism section, as most controversial subjects do.
This is as much of a scam as any product ever sold. The creators sell you a product that will make them money. You know that you are paying more than its cost because you want it. Am I describing ethereum or a toothbrush?
The point is: even if they get stupid rich because of the block premined for the presale doesn't make the system better or worse.
Nobody buys toothbrushes on the basis that the toothbrush market will go to the moon. This is, however, the standard selling point for cryptocurrencies. As is claiming the selling point is something other than a claim it will go to the moon.
Bitcoin fundamentalism doesn't really change what we've shipped, and as you see products coming out based on our technology over the next few weeks, these questions will be settled, cold, hard and clear.
If you look at how the money actually flowed, it went from the suckers to the premining pumpers who dumped it, and the devs will be paid another seven months before leaving the bagholders high and dry.
Note the irrelevance of the promised smart contract/distributed botnet functionality - which, as that post notes, at present rates won't be working properly for years - to the actual, observed flow of cash.
This is a repeat of Paycoin and Stellar. Totally standard premined altcoin pump and dump.
A lot of claims about this being a scam. As someone who have had same idea as Ethereum and not to scam people, can someone explain to me what makes it a scam.
Because it's not Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, this is the number one piece of evidence that a cryptocurrency is a scam. I've been following Ethereum almost entirely because I'm a developer and I'm interested in using the technology for projects, and I can tell you the atmosphere is maddening. I'm accustom to welcoming communities that care about the tech, not cynical communities that care about pushing their particular interests because they have investments. The cryptocurrency space is awful and polluted with unhelpful attitudes but the tech is too important to be pushed aside for that reason.
Ignore the FUD, Ethereum is not a scam. It's actual open source software with multiple popular implementations successfully delivered from a toxic environment with an impressive level of care toward getting the technical aspects right while being as transparent as possible. It's not perfect, about as perfect as any startup I've watched. Don't dump money into anything you don't understand.
EDIT- just as an illustration, I think it's interesting to use the Bitcoin Talk forum search tool. There are 464,000 results for "scam" and 484,000 results for "currency". Spend 5 seconds on the forum to find the word used like it's the coolest slang around. Everything is a scam, because evidence.
What I see is Bitcoin fans pointing out the glaring problems in every altcoin, but not admitting that every single one of those problems applies to Bitcoin as well.
Because Bitcoin is immutable and blockchains are a codification of the network effect. Altcoins are themselves competing chains, and thus compete with the main chain. Because the 'first mover' is Bitcoin, then the incentive for any miner is to join that chain. The problems in other altcoins are particularly important because their miners always sell that altcoin to the greater fool... in exchange for bitcoin.
Altcoins are (amazingly) even worse, but that doesn't make the Bitcoinsphere good. It still has no actual use case beyond illegal drugs, and is riddled with scammers and criminals at every level.
Agreed. The black market is the smallest sector of the world's economy. If the best Bitcoin can do is service that market, its safe to say the Bitcoin is a massive failure.
Agree. I'm assuming it's because dealing with technical difficulties meets reasonable expectations when diving into a black market. As the pieces come together and the experience improves, it'll fade I hope.
Satoshi releases Bitcoin quietly to the world and doesnt ask for a red cent in advance from anyone despite creating one of the most important/innovative technologies of the last decade, and then disappears with his mined coins remaining for years unused and presumed lost.
Ethereum guys sell Ether(s) in advance (why for bitcoin of course) promising the moon and the stars in the form of a cryptocurrency + scripting
They put the horse before the cart IMHO, imagine if all those years ago Linus asked everyone to give him 18 and half million to develop Linux, would it be where it is now?
Your story might have substance if you had any evidence that it were the truth. But we don't know Bitcoin's origin story yet.
Also, your criticism is only of fundraising politics (which not everyone need agree with you on), not the product. There are many ways to fund great software, and even if you don't like it, crowdsales are one.
A few were but most were just naive. Point is that calling Etherum a scam seem based on claiming to know the intentions of the creator, rather than an actual description of what Etherum is.
If it's a scam, why do they have a Github organization with 50+ repos? go-ethereum alone has 6469 commits by 59 authors[1]. Would be the most elaborate and time consuming scam ever.
Money buys a lot of commits. Give me a few million dollars and we'll get together a group of people that will build an entire computer from discrete transistors. People involved and amount of work doesn't make something worthwhile, reasonable, or viable, it just means that people work for money.
"If it's a scam, why do they have [trappings of an organisation]?" - every dupe of an MLM, Ponzi or pump'n'dump ever, trying to reassure themselves. There's a reason scammers put up fronts.
It's not the _trappings_ of an organization that are important, it's the fact that they have lots of working code. The Ethereum network does exactly what it claims to do, and does it well.
You're saying you've verified this yourself then? This comment notes the curious lack of evidence and that the example relies on handwaving https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027569
One thing we can be certain of in the future: every new prospective altcoin will be sure to prepopulate its Github with Rockstar. https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar/
$18,439,086 raised, yet no legal company exists, no filling were made, the programmers all have Eastern european names and everything in shrouded in mystery
but at least there is as sleek webpage to sucker people in like has happened with Stellar (how is that getting on?)
> DEFINITELY NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE: Personally, I think $2.80/0.01 XBT is low and I would not be in a rush to sell at this price. But, I do understand if you're bearish and you wanted to dump in to the bulls ahead of everyone else.
That's so financial advice, coming from the CEO of the Kraken exchange.
And bad financial advice at that, as the price is quite predictably half that at this moment and probably going much lower. There has to be a shakeout period in the price, no matter what.
But as far as Ethereum itself being a scam... They raised money to produce a product and they've produced it. It's real. It exists. They've done what they said they would do. Whether it was worth the amount raised or not is fairly irrelevant at this point. They've delivered on what they promised.
Is there any evidence that it actually does what it promised? There's a online blockchain to follow, and we can see that digital currency is changing hands, but that's like every other altcoin out there. The selling point of Ethereum seemed to be its "digital contracts" but has anyone made any significant contracts yet?
The other day, there was a post on HN about a 'simple' example Ethereum contract, but it turned out to rely on lots of validators and oracles that 'would exist in the future'.
So, it's not clear to me that they've delivered on their grandiose promises yet.
That's been fairly clear from the start. Almost anything actually useful needs an oracle, and then you get back to the problem of wait, didn't Bitcoin already solve this problem half a decade ago? Once you get past the marketing you've got a rather faulty and expensive clone of Bitcoin with a fairly sketchy history.
The Buttcoin post details the actions of one exchange. In a decentralized system you can't control everybody's actions.
The "premined" coins mostly went to the people who pitched in for the crowdfund. That was open to anyone and well-publicized, and the money went towards Ethereum's development. They hired about thirty people.
The "smart contract" stuff is real working technology, and it's the niftiest thing I've seen since Bitcoin. Ethereum is also the first production implementation of GHOST, which gives the same security with a 15-second block time that Bitcoin's algorithm gets with 10 minutes.
You can actually download tools and run the contracts, and during the public stress test people posted contracts to the test network.
Not every contract needs external data. A simple crowdfunding app, for example, doesn't need one. Hit the funding target by the deadline, forward to the fundraiser, otherwise return to donors. You can try out several sample contracts by going through the tutorials at ethereum.org.
The only reason oracles are complicated at all is that people don't want to trust them. If you're willing to trust a particular account for some purpose, it's trivial. Trusting a majority vote among several named accounts is also simple. It's the fully decentralized and low-trust solutions that may take some effort, but that's not an issue with Ethereum's core technology.
Looks like word got out about the premine: it's straight-up imploded upon hitting the exchanges, losing 75% in a day and still dropping. http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/ Paycoin 2.0!
(And as soon as it stabilised against Bitcoin, Bitcoin went down $20.)
The first prices were posted while Kraken only allowed a few users to sell (Level-4 verified with collateral). It's not surprising that the price went down when the supply went up.
I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I've offered a chance to Greg Maxwell, and Austin Hill the chance to talk to us and give a coherent critique of Ethereum; they did not take me up on the offer (We had Matthieu Riou give a brief critique of Ethereum at our meetup; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y). I'd be very happy for a coherent and respectful critique of Ethereum from one of you at one of our meetups; you're welcome to contact me; see http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/