> the programmers all have Eastern european names

That's at best a borderline slur and you don't need it to make your point.

HN is an international site, and nobody here deserves to be categorized based on their name.

> 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.

As an Eastern European programmer I'm actually offended by your 'argument'.