Author Topic: Ethereum crowd sale is live  (Read 10040 times)

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Offline CLains

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Toast is probably right, but I can't find where it is written.

If that is right then basically the people who buy in now have no idea what they are paying for. This crowd sale can easily capture 50 000 BTC, leaving investors with slim to no return at launch in an inflationary currency..

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath

Offline luckybit

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I haven't been following Ethereum much, what is it supposed to do better than BitShares that is worth waiting 6 months for?

(I watched the 'what is Ethereum' video and the only use cases that sounded profitable were one's BitShares is already working on.)

Coindesk said the crowdsale announcement came as a surprise. Is it possible they've looked at BitShares X and realised in a few weeks everyone is going to see BitShares is already doing everything they say they 'might' be able to start doing in 6 months?

I mean I have hedges in NXT and I bought XCP at POB stage but I can't see myself putting a cent here at the moment.
What am I missing?

It's not necessarily going to be better it's just more general purposed. If you wanted to build a distributed state for example you might be better off with the flexibility that Ethereum offers you. Ethereum offers you flexibility, options, and a place to experiment with the most cutting edge ideas and technologies.

The way to profit from ETH is because ETH is the gas/fuel and must be mined for running any contract. So if you're a miner you'll make a fortune if the popularity of smart contracts grows (and it's likely going to grow over time).

I think the best way to play is to cloud mine ETH and integrate that into Bitshares. This way Bitshares as a community can diversify through the delegates offering a refund in ETH in exchange for voting for them or in the form of cloud mining assets. This would have to be done by the most trusted delegates.

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Offline Empirical1

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I haven't been following Ethereum much, what is it supposed to do better than BitShares that is worth waiting 6 months for?

(I watched the 'what is Ethereum' video and the only use cases that sounded profitable were one's BitShares is already working on.)

Coindesk said the crowdsale announcement came as a surprise. Is it possible they've looked at BitShares X and realised in a few weeks everyone is going to see BitShares is already doing everything they say they 'might' be able to start doing in 6 months?

I mean I have hedges in NXT and I bought XCP at POB stage but I can't see myself putting a cent here at the moment.
What am I missing?

Offline luckybit

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Considering they have a fixed-price system for their IPO and have set the price at a 10 Million market cap, it is relatively cheap for large investors to BUY IT ALL UP before anyone else can get in the game.   Investors simply make an estimate on the valuation of Eth. at launch and assume it works a 10 Million market cap is probably a "safe" bet. 

This will cause ETH to have the appearance of extreme centralization in initial ownership.   Then they have mining... seems to me that this is the soft underbelly and that by the time ETH arrives mining will be a thing of the past.

The problem is opportunity cost. $10 million in Bitcoins today could be $100 million in 2015. I've seen this before with the Trezor wallet which was going for 1 BTC each back when Bitcoin was around $100 and now it's finally shipping at a price of each Trezor costing the customer $650.

By the time ETH becomes liquid the price of everything else may have gone up dramatically. In the long term Ethereum has a strong chance at being in the top 3 but it's also very risky (not in $ but in BTC). I wouldn't think anything of putting $100 into it but $100 in BTC is like giving it stock which might rise faster than what it's traded for.

Having said all of this I do think even at these prices it's likely to ROI even with the inflation. I can see Ethereum easily having a 10 billion dollar market cap a year or two from now if it works (and that is a very big if).

If we can mine it with our CPUs then the best strategy to have minimal opportunity cost is to invest a very small amount in the crowd sale and focus mostly on mining or providing cloud mining services. Bitshares delegates or users can mine it for us and offer an IOU token so that we can just buy our ETH from within Bitshares itself by buying their ETH cloud mining asset.


« Last Edit: July 23, 2014, 03:52:09 pm by luckybit »
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Offline cass

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Offline toast

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Considering they have a fixed-price system for their IPO and have set the price at a 10 Million market cap, it is relatively cheap for large investors to BUY IT ALL UP before anyone else can get in the game.   Investors simply make an estimate on the valuation of Eth. at launch and assume it works a 10 Million market cap is probably a "safe" bet. 

This will cause ETH to have the appearance of extreme centralization in initial ownership.   Then they have mining... seems to me that this is the soft underbelly and that by the time ETH arrives mining will be a thing of the past.

No, they are adjusting the total supply after the sale so that it is the ~80% which is not premined
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Offline bytemaster

Considering they have a fixed-price system for their IPO and have set the price at a 10 Million market cap, it is relatively cheap for large investors to BUY IT ALL UP before anyone else can get in the game.   Investors simply make an estimate on the valuation of Eth. at launch and assume it works a 10 Million market cap is probably a "safe" bet. 

This will cause ETH to have the appearance of extreme centralization in initial ownership.   Then they have mining... seems to me that this is the soft underbelly and that by the time ETH arrives mining will be a thing of the past.
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Offline luckybit

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So far they have raised over 4000 BTC in a matter of hours. It seems to be relatively few donors contributing a whole lot of BTC very quickly.

I think investing is a high opportunity cost. I think mining on the other hand could be great if its something we can mine with our CPUs.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/ 2000 ETH per BTC.
http://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-launches-ether-coin-millions-already-sold/
http://cointelegraph.com/news/112129/ethereum-raises-3700-btc-in-first-12-hours-of-ether-presale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwPulJKP1_Y&feature=youtu.be

Ethereum right now is an experiment. A lot of variables which keep changing. While it might be a good idea to have some small amount I don't see a reason to throw large amounts of Bitcoins at it.

I wish them luck though. Their project is quite important for the ecosystem.
« Last Edit: July 23, 2014, 02:35:58 pm by luckybit »
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