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Main site: https://www.ethereum.org (https://www.ethereum.org)
Forums: https://forum.ethereum.org (https://forum.ethereum.org)
Github: https://github.com/ethereum (https://github.com/ethereum)

Blog: https://blog.ethereum.org (https://blog.ethereum.org)
Wiki: http://wiki.ethereum.org (http://wiki.ethereum.org)
Meetups: http://ethereum.meetup.com (http://ethereum.meetup.com)

Whitepaper: http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html (http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html)
Yellow Paper: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf (http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ethereumproject (https://www.facebook.com/ethereumproject)
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/ethereumproject (http://www.youtube.com/ethereumproject)
Google+: http://google.com/+EthereumOrgOfficial (http://google.com/+EthereumOrgOfficial)
IRC Freenode: #ethereum (http://bitly.com/IRC_ethereum (http://bitly.com/IRC_ethereum) for weblink)

reserved

Ursium represents us in this thread.

Let me do the honours: Is Goldman Sachs involved in this venture?

Categorically, no.

From Charles Hoskinson:

"We have two people on our team who started their financial careers- as many thousands have done- at Goldman Sachs. They have both since left and started other ventures. In both cases those were hedge funds. Joe retired and moved to Jamaica to be in the music industry and came out of retirement to join us. Costa went to university of Edinburgh to study LCS's relationship to finance for a PhD in Quantitative Finance. He is now running a hedge fund in Kyrgyzstan as well as building a full clearing house in etherscript.

We have no relationship with Goldman Sachs nor are they an investor. I wouldn't take their money if offered. I have great respect for their knowledge of the financial industry as well as quality of talent, but no respect for their business practices or questionable conduct."

Goldman Sachs has no involvement in our venture. We have no current GS employees nor intend on hiring any nor establishing a partnership. We will not accept investment from goldman sachs nor collaborate with them as a partner at any time.

What prevents to make a fork of Ethereum and reset all the fees to zero?

The same thing that prevents a bitcoin fork or any other fork of an open sourced project. The social consensus of the community as a whole. Should the community feel the team, parameters and infrastructure behind Ethereum is optimal, then they will stay on Chain A. If not then they will migrate. You, as a community, should have this freedom. It keeps everyone accountable.

Is there a 50% premine of ethereum or is that a rumor?  ???

I'll add that if you meant 'what prevents someone/a team from forking the github repos and launch an identical project without the requirement for the raising of funds', the answer is nothing.

We're open source wall-to-wall - https://github.com/ethereum/ (fork is top right button at the top).

Cloning the team might be a lot harder as Charles hinted at :)

More importantly, the release of Ethereum 1.0 is not the be all and end all of this project. We have plans for Ethereum 2.0, 3.0 etc via soft forks. Decentral-type incubators around the world to support innovation and many other brilliant open source projects. We've already partnered with OT and there are going to be some exciting announcement in the next few weeks.

The scope of Ethereum extends far beyond the realm of tech, and that can't be forked.

We are testing an endowment and new type of VC model with the Ethereum launch and thus some of the initial Ethereum supply with be premined to allow for compensation of early stakeholders, strategic partners and also the long term health of the Ethereum Project. There numbers will all be disclosed in the business plan and prospectus released prior to the fundraiser for community review alongside a full explanation why we think they are necessary and the vesting terms. Our hope is to leave a template for future projects in this space to use to do things in a fair, accountable and transparent way without having to soliciting funding from angels, VCs or other actors traditionally inaccessible to many billions of people.

We will also release our plans for the conversion of the Ethereum Project's fiduciary hub into a decentralized autonomous organization living completely on the Ethereum blockchain. This also is another template we are planning on well distributing. We want people to use the DAO model for their business and NPO pursuits and use our funding model to get them bootstrapped.  

Well, I think there is a pretty big difference with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin address consumers needs. Whereas Ethereum address a market of profit-driven DAC.

A DAC will seek to maximize its profit and therefore minimize its costs. So if an Ethereum-free exists, odds are that alternative will be deemed optimal by the market.

A feeless system would be vulnerable to the halting problem and thus cannot compete with a fee system. Also a fork of this nature would likely honor the original ownership structure and thus have no impact upon purchasers and early stakeholders of ethereum.

I would also like to point out that Ethereum does more than just enable DAOs. It also can be used for things like gambling, smart property, contracts and linking cryptocurrency infrastructure together.  Larger DAOs will likely have independent economic models and use ether to link to other entities in a trustless way.

BldSwtTrs, for clarity: the fees used by the contract aren't a 'tax' from the Ethereum project, and none of that goes to the team. The fees are 'fuel' for contracts, just like you have trx fees in Bitcoin.

How r blockchain reorgs handled? Computational steps can't be rolled back nor blockchain can be re-rolled from block 0, so u r supposed to store blockchain snapshots each N-th block, which is quite expensive.
Can't a Finney attack be combined with a very long-running transactions to DoS all nodes? If a miner earns all block fees then even without a Finney attack a malicious miner could include a lot of long-running transactions into their block to slow down processing of the next block / transactions.

How many total Ethereum coins will there be at launch and overall? I expect you don't have an exact answer but could you give us a ballpark answer at least?

Under the original model we proposed in the whitepaper for ether supply followed this function:
TS(t) = 1.5X + 0.5X*t with x being the supply created from the initial ether sale and t being time in years. This function is not bounded, but the rate of ether supply growth decreases monotonically. The goal was to divest percentagewise the initial participants in the ether sale via inflation assuming the demand would increase non-linearly thus inferring an increase in the price of ether relative to the initial sale price.

We are now investing a great deal of time in modeling the ether supply and have been considering a model that consumes ether in Txs instead of reallocation. This would eventually result in a supply equilibrium point. Once we have a bit more maturity in the mathematical models, we'll post them on github and you're welcome to review them. We'd also like to get a clear sense of ROI to demand and how our business strategy fits with increasing demand so I can list ranges of potential outcomes in the prospectus prior to the launch of the ether sale.  


Reserved for V

Does this mean ether 2.0 and ether 3.0 or will there only be 1 currency across the platforms?

We know who Charles Hoskinson is. Who is Ursium?

Thanks for the clarification about the fees, I get it know.

Do you still plan to lock in initial investors for at least 1 year and prevent them to sell more than 1/3 per year? If so what's the purpose of doing that? Is it not inconsistent with inflating the money supply in order to divest initial investors?

The current design does have you store blockchain snapshots for every block. That's not that expensive actually; the reason is that we're using functional data structures (specifically, Patricia trees) that automatically provide optimal deduplication, so if blocks N and N+1 are both 1 GB in size but only 100 KB of that is actually different between the two blocks then only 1 GB + 100 KB of space is required; and the savings obviously compound for many blocks (eg. 50 blocks = 1.005 GB, 500 blocks = 1.05 GB, etc.

Initial investors are not locked in. Only people benefitting from the first part of the premine (ie. "us") are affected by any lockin.

Similar to Intel with a tick tock style, we'd like to have a process to seed the cryptocurrency research group for a period of time (say 3 years) and then release all innovations in a 2.0, 3.0, 4.0... chain. The idea would be a soft fork from one to the other that honors all positions. Think of it like windows without ever having to pay for an upgrade. You can choose to stay on one chain or migrate to the new one. We'll engage the community at a later date for suggestions about what the best approach is for this process. Some suggest a PoB system whereas others suggest a rollover. Clearly some economic modeling needs to be done, but once proven, it would be quite nice to use on bitcoin itself.


Our future director of communications.

http://j.mp/stual
I organized the first meetup: www.meetup.com/ethereum/

Does that means that the same ether will be usable in ethereum 1.0, 2.0, 3.0... or you'll need to have "ether 2" to use ethereum 2.0?
And will some "ether 2" be create when ethereum 2.0 will start?

Yes this is the goal. To ensure ether compatibility, regardless of chain version.  


Deeper versions like 4.0 and 5.0 a decade away may require this mechanic to restore the endowment; however with the fundraiser we are planning and the premine structure, Ethereum should be paid in full for a long time. My hope is that eventually the applications in the ecosystem will simply cover the cost of future development after they are well established, but this is hard to guarantee thus you have to plan ahead. 

Ask your question here: http://forum.ethereum.org/categories/code-and-builds

My question is if you guys are willing to reconsider a PoW approach?

In the contemporary age where environmental policies are being implemented and respected around the globe, with a clear focus on sustainability, durability and eco-friendliness, to me this feels like a step backwards instead of forward.

Is it possible that a same level of functionality and security can be reached without using the PoW but a (more eco-friendly) alternative?

There has been a lot of discussion about what to replace dagger with. We love PoW as a distribution mechanism. There are other mechanisms for security that fare well. Also if one can find ways to enable socially beneficial PoW, then this would be the optimal solution. There is a proposal for refined ether, but nothing is yet set is stone. The process we will use is as follows:

• Fix distribution goals and economic parameters
• Decide on the proper level of security the network requires for population
• Discuss integration of consensus mechanisms into the network (necessary for DAOs)
• Hold a NIST AES style contest in academia to produce a hybrid PoW/PoS replacement for slasher
• Test winner and integrate into Ethereum

Charles,

Can you confirm the estimate for the main net launch to Q3-Q4, 2014?

Thank you.

I'm pushing us into SCRUM and really hammering down the development process. Once we have those operations where they need to be, we will have significantly better predictivity in our development flow. This said, we have a checklist that needs to be resolved prior to the value chain being launched. That will be the ultimate guide for when things get launched. Q3-Q4 seem reasonable, but cannot be committed to until a later date.

Has there been any thought about equitable mining opportunity? Some people live in areas where electricity is extremely expensive relative to others, which obviously makes distributed mining among interested parties difficult. Part of the appeal of a CPU-friendly mining algorithm is that cloud mining becomes possible for people who are limited in this way. I'm wondering whether Ethereum envisions building partnerships with mining providers that can provide people with mining services in areas where electricity is inexpensive (in the event that a GPU mining algorithm becomes more preferable, thus ruling out traditional cloud mining)?

Do you have any recommendations for SCRUM and online collaboration tools for doing crypto projects?

I understand. This means that real ether mining and the ability to trade/sell ether by investors of original IPO will only be available at this time frame or later (depending on the development progress).

I want to say that I'm enthusiastic about ethereum and will surely contribute to the development and success of this great idea and system. But as a potential big investor for ethereum I have the following questions/remarks:

At first I was under the impression that the main net will be launched in a couple of months, I planned to invest 100x. After reading and digging more into the matter now, and this is not due to your fault or any mistake it went down to 1x-10x. I'll explain why. 8-11+ month down the road is a hugely immense amount of time in the crypto world as you know. The price of BTC can probably be x5-10 that it's current price in end of 2014. Taking this reality into consideration and the fact that etherium is in it's infancy and early planning stage right now (which is good and I support your recent move to delay IPO and development refinements and not rushing), many of the risks are unknown. I'm afraid that current/former IPO model unless changed significantly to reflect this reality has the probability to become something similar to the ASIC issues encountered in 2012-13. This in turn can make many investors upset. I'll explain why.

Many ASIC manufacturers took pre-orders in BTC when the price was very low for a promise of delivery of yet in development complex tech. When there were delays because of the complexity of the issues, the investors took a deep hit and many lost the appreciation in price of BTC, making their investment depreciate while the manufacturers of ASICS enjoyed the undue appreciation from investors money.

This practice of taking investors money and holding to it, while not delivering the tech and making further delays is questionable. After the manufacturers took the BTC the time pressure became on investors, because manufacturers already took an upfront payment for the full amount of the work and could afford themselves in expense of investors to simply relax and watch "their" money appreciate while not stressing themselves. In my view this practice is highly unethical.

While I'm not suggesting this will be the case with etherium. I see the idea, your team and the spirit in very positive way. However, if the cap of original IPO will remain the same at 30K BTC, then potentially than will amount if price of btc is x5-10, to a whooping $150M-$300M. Considering the fact that Vitalik said on Reddit that you currently don't have plans beyond 10M USD, the other money will simply be sitting in the wallet and appreciating. Making this a similar case to the above.

I suggest to split the IPO to couple of rounds of fundraising attached to major milestones of the project until the main net goes live. This way I and other investors have the opportunity to invest additional sums as the work progresses, while still enjoying the appreciation in BTC and have access to more mature information about the progress of the project to make more informed decisions while investing.

I believe the project will receive all the funding it needs to succeed and you to do the work and still have the motive to continue. Being payed upfront the whole salary makes it less motivating to do the work in the best way possible and this is not good for anyone.

I apologize for the essay, but this is a make or break issue for me.

Team:

1) It is my understanding that you are working on a way to prevent whales from dominating the IPO. Is it too early to ask for any initial ideas as to how that may be accomplished and/or how to prevent Sybil attacks?

2) The Bitcoin blockchain is becoming so large as to be unwieldy and difficult for new users to download (it too me four straight days!). The white paper hinted that Ethereum has made progress toward solving that problem, but the language was highly technical and I didn't understand it all. So this is a two-fold question: have y'all solved the blockchain size problem or made significant strides towards it, and can you explain in layman's terms how you have done so?

3) Much has been written on the issue of Turing-completeness and malware/hostile behavior. Other than the extensive security testing that you are planning, how will you address this issue? With Ethereum potentially creating an extremely valuable ecosystem, even a small vulnerability could be devastating.

I agree with you completely and as a person who preordered a butterfly labs miner I understand this concern. Ethereum is a massively interactive and rapidly evolving project. You should factor the appreciation of bitcoin into your investment model; however, the goal here is to build a long term ecosystem, not make you 150x in the short term. You have to ask a question, Do you want to own an asset at a 35 million dollar market cap with lots of growth potential or an asset at the 10 billion dollar market cap with lots of growth potential? The former has a lot of room for rapid growth, the latter has to necessarily slow down. UX, scalability issues and also long adoption arc will retard the growth of bitcoin. Getting to 100 billion is going to be a lot harder than getting to 10 billion in my opinion. For us to grow the same amount is a lower barrier.  

Also in terms of things like miners, the VP is front loaded. You miners doesn't magically grow in value over time. It is a depreciating asset like most preordered products. Ether has to either die fast or grow fast.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

Phrasing the question like that, the answer is no brainer. But factoring the risk factor in, the picture looks different. The two are not comparable, bitcoin is already established, proven and enjoying the benefit of a sound adoption curve and non rushed development prior to release. The ethereum now, while has great potential is only an idea starting to materialize, it still has a long way to go and prove itself.

By factoring bitcoin appreciation I will have to limit my exposure to 10%max considering the current IPO model of take it or leave it early on. This taking into consideration the many unknowns at this stage. Example: the mining algorithm. When pressed against the wall I tend to minimize my risks if I have lack of knowledge base to a proper decision making.

Why is it not possible to split the IPO to 3 stages with each 10K BTC cap? First 2000ETH/btc, 2nd 1500ETH/btc, 3rd 1000ETH/btc?
I'm willing to give more money to the project, this way it seems more fair and balanced.
Or rapid decline, depends on security and developers performance. I agree completely on the rest.
I haven't mined 1 coin. After consideration I decided to invest the money directly to BTC and LTC and spare myself the hassle. Looking retrospectively it was the right decision for me.

I'm not an expert on mining but regarding the mining algorithm, can you guarantee that you will program it properly in order to avoid the daily mine/dump miners pushing the price down once the mining starts? Considering the current inflationary model will the miners be able to effectively mine in a more profitable manner ether then other alt coins and sell them at the price lower than initial IPO price per ether?

If the mining will be done exclusively on CPU and not GPU then I can somehow see how this could work otherwise if it's less profitable why should anyone mine it, except for ideological reasons?

One more question. I'm currently watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw27x_xAPmI#t=7 and Vitalik mentions that you all are exploring the possibility of not allowing U.S. investors! (For legal reasons.) How big of a likelihood is this?

(His exact quote, began at 31:20, was: ""Depending on what legal advice we get, we may or may not decide to block U.S. investors.")

Will BTC be usable inside the Ethereum blockchain?

I've been working with lawyers from three different countries and this is a difficult issue because no government has taken the necessary regulatory steps to clearly define Bitcoin as an asset. Also crowdfunding laws are still immature as its a recent development invoked by technology. We hope to include US Citizens in the ether sale (I'm from the United States myself and I'd like to invest 50 percent of my net wealth into this project), but ultimately this has to be decided by our analysis of the legal landscape.

Our goal is to ship Ethereum with a strong ecosystem in as many markets as possible. Therefore, if we can't accept US purchases, then we will build out a lot of infrastructure there alongside hire as many US personnel as possible to ensure ether still gets distributed in that market.


Our chain is Bitcoin aware and will be able to communicate with the Bitcoin blockchain via the data layer's APIs through the reference client, but more generally this is possible for all blockchains. One can also deploy an SPV client via the contract system. The issue isn't ethereum --> blockchain it's actually the other way around. Bitcoin is blind and deaf in this respect.


Higher risk of hard forks damaging returns to early investors. One and done with an endowment.


First, here is why SCRUM is awesome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU0llRltyFM and here is the tool we are using: http://www.scrumdo.com/

These are solid reads http://it-ebooks.info/book/494/, http://it-ebooks.info/book/2803/

Charles, thank you for your response!

I'm sure you all have considered this, but if it becomes necessary to block U.S. investors, it seems logical that it would be necessary to block investors in other jurisdictions as well (if those countries had similar legal framework as the U.S. and/or similar regulatory bodies like the SEC). If enough people get excluded based on what jurisdiction they live in, it seems like the development of the Ethereum ecosystem could be severely hampered.

Obviously this is all just speculative so there is no need to comment on it, but I hope the team is considering this possibility.

How do I invest? Are coins already bieng given out with the alpha client, and will these remain in circulation when the final product comes online?

http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/196/investment-faq-live-updates#latest

The alpha client is on testnet only - these coins will have no value when Ethereum launches.

Hi Charles!

I am new to the crypto world.  Could you give some insight how the actual buying process will likely be structured?  

I have a vague idea from the MasterCoin Foundation "IPO". 
I've heard that we will send BTC to an address.  

1)  How do you know who the sender was, and do you just send ether back to that sender?
2)  Would there need to be a QT client, and the user provide you with a receiving address?

Just want to be prepared for the "opening bell".

Thank you.

Kevin

If investments are in BTC, how will anyone differentiate US investors to the rest of the world?

What's the estimated launch date for ethereum?

We're aiming for a go live of the main net by Q3-Q4 2014, but cannot commit to anything at this early stage.

Question above directed to you also Ursium!
Regarding this last statement.  The launch you're referring to.  Is it the IPO that was supposed to be Feb 1, now Q3 or Q4 ?

im curious about this also

Ok here is my question.  

During the Etherium introduction video Charles Hoskinson made the obvious mistake of mentioning that former Goldman Sachs employees have worked on the Etherium project.  

Many people have taken issue with these statements.  My issue is Mr. Hoskinson when he mention this appeared to be completely tone deaf or insensitive to the mood of the cyptocurrency community.  Even worse is no one who was involved with the video realized this would become a major issue.  So how experience does the Etherium team have in the community, and what steps will be taken so such blunders don't happen in the future?

You can take it for what you will; as for myself, I was encouraged. Goldman Sachs as a corporation may be unethical, but they only hire the best and brightest (and there is NO REASON to expect that run-of-the-mill employees share their company's disdain for ethics).

Charles, if you want to hire some of the best cryptographers in the world, and they happen to have once worked for the NSA (as many of the best cryptographers in the world do), you have my permission to do so! I want you guys to put together the best team you possibly can, irrespective of where they FORMERLY worked.

My issue is not with the involvement of former Goldman Sachs employees, I know you need to hire good people.  My issue is with how the heck could they have made such a horrible PR move?  Surely someone would have said...."Hey Charlie mentioning GS is probably a BAD THING"

Like anyone, I'm excited to see what you come up with.

That said, what is with the massive premining and IPO when you don't have anything ready to go?  It is like saying trust us, we promise we are not going to screw you.  Which, sadly, many people on this board have fallen victim to already.

Are you going to address this issue?

You should know that I asked about Goldman Sachs (jokingly) in the first question on here. I hoped that people would see it and use it as a reference instead of asking about it over and over. Check out their responses below. If you believe them to be truthful, then that's good. If you don't believe it, then that's good too. But there is only so much they can do. They're giving you direct information, directly from the man who said it.

They have plenty ready to go. It's very alpha, but it's all open and free for you to play with: https://github.com/ethereum (https://github.com/ethereum). As I post this, their lead Go dev updated the Go repository just a few minutes go.

If you look at the facts, this already beats out 99% of the projects on here that end up taking your money with nothing to show (I'm looking at you Mastercoin!). They're showing you things and haven't taken a dime for it.

Even though he seemed to have just mentioned it in passing in the video, I'm happy he did. Can you imagine if people discovered someone worked for Goldman Sachs after the project got up and running and completed a fundraiser? I think the Internet would have exploded. They've been honest, and it's stupid for us to crucify them for their past actions. They left Goldman Sachs, didn't they?

Thanks for following up with answer. Scrum was great for Wikispeed!

please explain the reason for the IPO and the premine.

Someone said earlier that the IPO was for developing the client/application, and the premine to pay the founders.

But that is one in the same ... it's really a turn-off for investors when you're asking money from them and then immediately diluting their shares with the premine.

Also, explain the Q3-Q4 launch date? 

Q3/Q4 launch = main net launch
The pre-sale of Ether we haven't announced yet, and will do so as soon as we have sorted its details.

That's not at all what we're saying, if we did say something ridiculous and mickey mouse like that I wouldn't be involved in the project, I'd run away in the other direction as my name is public. I think it's fair to say it's true for the rest of the team, too.

When the ether presale is announced, there's going to be:
- a list of every project we plan to develop and support
- total transparency on where funds will be assigned where and by whom
- exactly how any potential legal entity will be formed
- what would happen should things go 'wrong'
.. and of course when the project is launched, total transparency on accounting through an independent accounting firm

I've personally been involved in raising funding for three startups in the past, and many more on behalf of third parties, including conducting due diligence exercises on very large enterprise projects and M&A. Things are going to be done by the book.

What we can't do is give you answer to the above questions today, because nothing is set in stone yet. I hope this clear things up. I also encourage you to conduct your own due diligence exercises, as one would do for ANY investment of ANY size.

The premine is used to pay current and future developers as well as serve as a long term endowment for the project after the bitcoin reserves run low. As for a turn off, silicon valley has been accepting that people who start companies have equity in the company for over 50 years. This is what built apple and google. It makes people work harder and have a vested interest in the long term growth of the market. If I just pay you a salary, then you can walk away with a clean slate.

We are not a company but we are not a traditional open sourced project. It's really something new and a test for a different way of doing VC. My hope is that our model can eventually be refined and become a permanent part of the startup landscape for projects that don't have equity in a traditional sense and are more mission oriented than profit.

+1

IP blacklisting, similar to Satoshi dice. It's not an effective means technologically, but legally it satisfies our end. I am working very hard to make sure we can accept US investment; however, it's still a topic for debate.

Take it for what it's worth.  My biggest problem with this was using Ethereum to try and fund V2, V3, V4, V5 upfront.  I have no problem with the amount the founders are taking.  But it seems like the massive premine is imposing a HUGE tax on the present at the expense of lowering the probability it will fly in the first year.  If it doesn't fly in year one, it won't. 

If it works - the ongoing tax should sustain it after year one.  

My vote is lower the premine, up the recurring tax.  Even if I understand why you are trying to eliminate the pump and dumpers initially ... if it doesn't fly in the first six months.  It probably isn't going to.  Seems to me initial premine is lowering your chances of success. 

Agree completely. In the business world, this is called "Golden Handcuffs." It aligns the interests of all involved parties.

What "ongoing tax" are you talking about? There is no ongoing tax. What they get through the premine is it, period, end of story.

Exactly, and even if we wanted one, then we'd get forked. The market has no incentive to pay a tax even if its good for the network. One and done and then get it done.

I don't quite see how the price to execute etherium code will be determined.

there has to be some sort of clever system based on realtime or near realtime demand for, well what ever the limitation is to get things into the next block?

I am also wondering if some sort of of chain processing can be done, and results are somehow integrated back into the etherium chain, that can be verified thus reduce bottle necks.....


it could be an etheirum fork would set fees lower......

For some reason I was thinking there was an ongoing 12.5% (or some amount) allocation of released coins going back into the pre-mine fund for ongoing development.  Most of the information has been taken down - I stand corrected.

Something I'd like to point out is that there is a difference between releasing a currency and a search engine.  Not sure there is a "right" way to do it insomuch as ... comparing this to Google or Apple or Microsoft doesn't seem equitable to me.  I get incentivizing founders and I'm ALL for it.  And building warchests for development - all for that too.

But when trying to justify allocations to the screamers (many of whom should be ignored) - I think it's important to remember at some level releasing a currency type platform is quite a bit different than company built around advertising, marketing, or operating systems.

I don't see why so many people think of it that way. When you're getting VC funding for a startup, it's common practice to hand out something like 10-20% in the first round. Nobody ever thinks of that as some kind of evil plot where you sell the company and then pull the rug out from under the hapless venture capitalists and dilute them 80-90%; people think of it as, well, you creating X shares and only handling out 0.1X-0.2X to the VCs. It's the same here; we're taking preorders for 67% of the initial issuance instead of 100% of the initial issuance.


Actually, we never were planning to have a miner collect more than 50% of transaction fees. Now, we're debating between 0% (tx fees burned), 50% and something in between.

Thanks, for coming up with such an innovative idea. I am cool with the founder receiving their share, this is part of the corporate IPO process.
However, as with any top innovation, this project carries a great deal of risk which is borne by the IPO investors and founders. The 0.4X inflationary model exacerbates this risk. Would it be possible to decrease this inflation to a more manageable number.

And what about the Finney-like attack?

1. Alice finds a block but doesn't send it to peers
2. Bob finds a block and sends it to peers
3. Alice sees this coz she connected to a big part of the network
4. Alice sends her block to peers
5. Some nodes accept Alice's block, some accept Bob's one
6. The next block triggers chain reorg that invalidates Alice's block with some probability (if she knows who r the biggest miners then she shouldn't send her block to them to make this probability very high)

The catch is that Alice's block contains very long-running transactions and nodes that accepted it wasted their computational resources. The situation becomes worse if such the nodes r computing her block when the next one arrives.

I think you should say 10000 wei = 1 ether  ;)
watching  8)

What are the legal issues holding up US investors?  Is it the risk of being accused a money launderer? Seems the new "witch".

Does ethereum permit people to make transactions containing executable code in the blockchain? So it's like a huge botnet?

It could be because crypto's are money itself, not just another VC startup. The former relies on the shear force of the idea itself, the latter relies upon a huge kickstart, makes a lot of people take risk.

ETH = best thing since sliced bread and eth needs $100 Million (or whatever) does not compute.

Further BTC, LTC and PPC has proved that you can do it with out asking for huge funds up front, and those three are in the top market cap.

Sunny King exemplifies good practice. He spent a year on PeerCoin, and was out their having to buy up, mine or mint his own product. Zero premine, zero funding. The Same for XPM.

SK goes to the point of refusing donations.

so far in ETH, you are going to
raise 30K btc, that puts you $20~30 Million
then, do a premine as well.

Its hard to think of any thing else that has anything near this in startup terms, in crypto's, ripple maybe.

I'm not saying the ETH offer is wrong, or bad, but his IPO model garners a lot of negative feed back.

However this why a judge can never judge himself, thats why

"You don't see why so many people think of it that way."

It would be near impossible to be objective in your position, thus this weights out the counter argument in your mind. Wetware usually cannot occupy a subjective domain and function objectively.

Okay, that seems like it can work and cause nodes to waste computational resources. But the cost of such an attack is very high, as Alice needs to  do the attack instead of mining an entire block. Furthermore, miners should only broadcast a block once they are done processing it, so Alice would not reach very many nodes with her block. The issue can also be mitigated with a software change: when a node hears about Bob's block and the successor to Bob's block, and it is still processing Alice's block, it can start processing both in parallel, and then when it finishes the successor to Bob's block it would pause processing Alice's because Alice's block would not be the longest anyway. Thus, Alice is only slowing processing down 2x for one minute. So my intuition is that this is one of those "interesting in theory, not particularly worrisome in practice" situations like selfish-mining.

Ethereum has the limitation that every node needs to process every transaction, just like Bitcoin. So on the computational side, it's not more powerful than a single smartphone from 1999. Hence, I don't think saying that Ethereum "is a botnet" is accurate. Can Ethereum be used to help monetize other botnets? That is a more interesting question; I suppose with the decentralized dropbox protocol you can also earn money by renting out other people's hard drives, but an unknown program taking up lots of disk space is something that would be very easy for antiviruses to detect.

vitalick could you please answer

[1] I don't quite see how the price to execute etherium code will be determined.

there has to be some sort of clever system based on realtime or near realtime demand for, well what ever the limitation is to get things into the next block?

it could be an etheirum fork would set fees lower......

etherium = a bundle of switches, how do you price using a switch? ( iasked the same question of master coin and still don't have  an answer....)

[2] I am also wondering if some sort of of chain processing can be done, and results are somehow integrated back into the etherium chain, that can be verified thus reduce bottle necks.....

I still think there is some confusion about fees here. Fees do not go to ether holders nor the project developers. The fee structure has no impact on who owns what.

I would also like to know this.  Thanks.


I was thinking about this issue while reading your quote.

"The revolution begins with the mind and ends with the heart. Knowledge for all, accessible to all and shared by all"

Question: Will the IPO be built in a way to reward early investors ? or is the double reward thing not listed anymore

Our goal and what we try to do every single day. But we have an obligation to work within the legal framework. If the United States wants to make the deployment of Ethereum difficult, then we can't change that reality. We just have to work around it as best as we can and eventually get Ethereum launched.

so pick a different jurisdiction, or no jurisdiction.

my understanding of fee in this context is the fee goes to the execution of eth code, I don't think I am confused on that point so the question stands

There are a lot of guys on this forum who want to make the world better and u have lost them right now. Sad, but I see that success of Ethereum will be beneficial for banksters, not for ordinary people...

You know, I just don't understand this sentiment. Does our government have problems? Hell yes. Does our government nonetheless serve a vital function in the world? Hell yes.

IMO, setting up this organization in a legal, legitimate manner will bring in 100 people for every 1 anarchist that's turned off by the idea of following the law.

Bottom line: You have to operate within a legal framework, or else you risk going to prison. Rightly or wrongly. Most people don't look forward to the idea of prison, not to mention that it would be rather difficult to maintain the Ethereum code while sitting in a jail cell. Or while running from the cops. Or while hiding in a third world country. Go figure.

Ok. Never mind.

Which crypto law would Ethereum be breaking that the other 300 or so crypto offerings didn't?

What a naive thing to say.   Do you think VC's are spending their own money when investing?  They have zero risk when investing other than a diminished return..  We are talking about spending our hard earned cash on this project, not spending other people's money.  Don't compare the community here to VC investing, such bullshit.

No fighting between each other please :)

In other news, we're doing an AMA - right now

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1xb5rj/hi_were_the_ethereum_founding_team_ask_us_anything/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1xb5rj/hi_were_the_ethereum_founding_team_ask_us_anything/)

well no, its open source so there are plenty of people to maintain the code if its worth doing.

And you can jurisdiction shop to set up etherium in as well, e.g. Singapore or Denmark would be good.

There is no reason to be in the US , and every reason not to be.

FWIW, they are planning on setting up in Switzerland, however a number of the "core" team, including Charles, live in the U.S. (And may not want to become expatriates.)

Ursium, that was a fantastic AMA! Thank you for setting it up. I sent you a PM a few days ago, when you have a chance could you get back to me? Thanks a bunch!

Apologize, I'll keep it civil.  Thanks for posting AMA

IMO, this is the biggest hindrance in all of the IPO in crypto:

http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

What happened to the original "Ethereum Welcome to the Future" thread?

Did you delete it?

more likely locked it ;)
but if they did delete it... that was stupid

From : http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1xb5rj/hi_were_the_ethereum_founding_team_ask_us_anything/

Question : "What is the most common misconception/myth about the ethereum project that you've seen so far?"


I thought that was the case. So can you explain basically what is the purpose of Ethereum?

Still up and not locked

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0)

Before the Accredited Investor issue comes in to play, there has to be a determination if they are considered securities.  If they aren't securities then it's irrelevant.

Seems like you're on to something  ;D

I have an ethical question which I do not want to post in public - who do I contact with this issue?

If I invest 100 btc what could I expect?

So if I invest 1 BTC and get my 2,000 or so Ether, what happens when people start mining?  Is some dude with a jacked up rig going to be able to mine 10,000,000 Ether in the first couple hours?  How is this being handled so that my investment is actually worth something?

Well just like any other project, we will be detailing potential ROI models in the document that we will release when announcing the Ether pre-sale event. At the moment I cannot answer this question.

PM sent

@bitcoin_watcher compiled all 357 comments from the AMA and categorized them here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1xb5rj/hi_were_the_ethereum_founding_team_ask_us_anything/cf9zuek

I'm glad I have the same right as others :)

What is your long term vision for Ethereum? What do you want it to accomplish for the future? I hope you express that clearly in a mission statement.  What steps are you taking not to create a new class of super wealthy but rather, to empower everyone? I think ethereum is great and you are doing amazing work.  It helps to articulate your mission and your direction clearly so everything you build is in line with that mission.

I'm working on the website copy to answer just that :) I'll post a link as soon as it's up.

With ethereum envisioned to become a generic platform with a specific new code to be used for various decentralized applications, DAx's ets., what is really the meaning for it as a currency? will it force all transactions to be in eth? if so than it is not as generic anymore. If it is the "TCPIP" protocol to a currency than I should be able to use BTC based or NXT based currency on it no? please clarify the conceptual vision here. if it is a generic base platform than why is it also a currency? Thanks   

Ether = Oil

Although properties of Ether can enable it as a currency, we see it also as a fuel, powering the contracts which themselves could represent currencies.
This can be done through the implementation of meta-coins on our block chain (a trivial few lines of code), which in turn can be traded and used as currencies.

As for what 'fuels' contracts, yes it would be Ether, although we are considering some very interesting options of 'coloring' Ether, for example for having folded proteins. 'Colored' Ether could therefore be used on special contracts to reward users having completed certain actions.

Well, I never understood why this community continuously refers to these offerings as IPOs and investments.  It's an incorrect term for these purposes and it will only serve to get us in trouble.  I think each individual crypto coin could be considered a commodity if anything, but they don't trade on a centralized commodity exchange and the CFTC hasn't issued a ruling yet.  As long as it's clear that you aren't offering an investment with the possibility income, then I don't think they will be considered securities.  Could the price rise in the open market?  Sure, but so can the price of milk.  It's a product you are offering, not an investment opportunity.

Just my 2 cents.

Exactly.

Sorry for my English.

I saw some launches of CPU coins and it seems that after 2-3 hours after launch botnets are starting to mine this coins. No matter of code etc.

It seems that Eth can be target of such networks too.
512 MB per thread is not too much  when I can usually see that my Firefox is eating 2GB easily. So 4core CPU can be used without much trouble to user.

Will be our GPUs usable or not?

Check out our latest hire: http://www.ethereum.org/#who

+1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Koblitz

Will ethereum accounts be secure from day 1? to reassure early investors.  two-factor authentication?

Can you define what you mean by 'account' Majik? If you mean online wallets, their security implementation (and therefore support for 2fa) will be the responsibility of the people building them.

As for the reference (mobile and desktop) wallets, they will function in a way that's similar to say, BitcoinQT or <insert name of your favorite wallet here>.

The Ethereum reference wallet will be far more secure than QT from day 1 (launch of mining). We will have it pen tested thoroughly and even take it to DEFCON next year with a big treasure pot (you hack it; you own it). On a personal note, Bitcoin theft or loss really makes me sad and also I believe is a significant roadblock for mainstream adoption. Mainstream consumers need better security and more tools to protect themselves from themselves. 

I apologize for my ignorance in advance. What's wrong with 75% (or 100%) of transaction fees going to the node that actually validates the block?

Hi I posted this in the other Ethereum thread a few days ago, but it looks like this is the main one.

Is this the Ethereum gameplan...

Hypothetical scenario

Right now in the US they are busy struggling with how best to regulate crypto-currencies.

These are the potential conclusions I think they will draw...

1. It is too hard to try to regulate the hundreds of crypto-currencies that are out there.
2. Banking compliance is a serious business and issuing bit-licenses and trying to monitor hundreds of new untrusted exchanges is not feasible.
3. Crypto-currencies have deflationary tendencies which run counter to most existing currencies.

The potential solution...

1. It might be possible to regulate 1 base crypto-currency on which other things can be built.
2. Only large existing retail/investment banks with sufficient experience in banking compliance can be trusted as exchanges.
3. A reasonably inflationary crypto-currency would be ideal.

How does Ethereum stack up?

1. Yes Ethereum could be the base crypto, lots of things can be built on top of it, but link back to it when you need to transfer out to fiat.
2. Large existing banks might already have an interest in Ethereum, there is a very large pre-mine, where is it going?
3. Ethereum is very inflationary.

Result...

'They' will decide Ethereum gives consumers the benefits of crypto-currencies while giving the regulators the ability to regulate it and  ensure there are as few bad actors as possible.

They will make it legal for on-line retailers to accept Ethereum as payment and they will make legal Ethereum to fiat exchanges, administered by large existing banks.
However moving to fiat or making online purchases with any other crypto-currency will be illegal.  

Some investment banks are incredibly powerful and influential with large global footprints, they will be able to help ensure this model is also adopted in many other countries. This could make Ethereum insurmountable

______________________________

This is only a hypothetical, but I came up with it because I thought the pre-mine and inflationary model was unattractive.
There's also not a lot of reason why people wouldn't fork Ethereum and create their own competing models with more attractive parameters. (less inflationary and no pre-mine.)

However Ethereum's inflationary model & large pre-mine (Which goes to?) would be appealing to TPTB.
By influencing regulations and laws in favour of Ethereum they could also ensure no competing models could threaten it.

The above hypothesis is obviously a wild stretch, but my question is

Edit: I've re-phrased it

A. Do you recognise that the large pre-mine and inflation won't be attractive to most users?
B. How do you hope to prevent forks to something more favourable if the code is open source? 

Is the inflation distributed to stakeholders and miner's through the POS/POW?

Thanks Charles. I will participate in the Ethereum fund raising.  As a non-miner, would my 2000 Eth per btc be deposited/maintained in a secure wallet?  or perhaps you have other plans on how Ethereum ownership is accounted for during the pre-mine pre-wallet period?

Sorry for my English.

I saw some launches of CPU coins and it seems that after 2-3 hours after launch botnets are starting to mine this coins. No matter of code etc.

It seems that Eth can be target of such networks too.
512 MB per thread is not too much  when I can usually see that my Firefox is eating 2GB easily. So 4core CPU can be used without much trouble to user.

Will be our GPUs usable or not?

If I recall correctly Vitalik decided to get rid of crypto-opcodes (like SHA256). The point was to make Ethereum language more universal. R u going to do the next step and get rid of 256-bit numbers? Their usage don't make much sense coz 512-bit cryptoalgos will require to use different tricks to work with 512-bit numbers. Could we have only 64-bit numbers, this would help a lot to implement Ethereum interpretator in Java (which doesn't have native support of 256-bit math).

Edit: Maybe 32-bit is the best choice, JavaScript guys would be happy too.

The hardest ECC scheme (publicly) broken to date had a 112-bit key for the prime field case and a 109-bit key for the binary field case. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography) So 64-bit obviously won't do and at the same time it's a long way until 512-bit keys will be needed, if ever.

I meant we could use four 64-bit numbers to represent 256 bits. Regarding the long way until 512-bit keys will be needed - I want to implement RSA with 4096 bits.

Edit: Not everyone has hardware with AVX support, why not 128 bits at least/most?

It is well-known that RSA needs much longer keys to achieve the same crypto strength. Ethereum uses ECC, and I was talking about ECC, so it is not clear why RSA is relevant here (or ROT13, for that matter).

It's relevant coz Vitalik wants Ethereum to be universal. Also ur position that 256 bits is enough reminds me the myth about Bill Gates and 640K.

When you say that a pre-mine won't be attractive to most users, you actually mean miners. There is nothing that miners bring to the table but pump and dump. OK, practically nothing. Most miners are swirling around the newest coins waiting for the starting gun. Massive computing farms turned on and ready to go, or at the very least a few AMD 7950s.

Once the mining begins they all pretend to be part of the "community". Once that "community" raises the bid on the coin enough, it's dump, dump, dump and these dedicated miners are off to the next coin.

Then, to top it all off, they act as if they are doing everyone a big service with all of that "hard work" of mining the coin for them in the first place.

Mining started out as a fun and interesting new internet project. Now, on every forum, it's dominated by vultures who's only concern is their coin acquisition rate and at what price they can dump their coins. They can hardly even conceal their greed by pretending to be a part of the crowd that actually likes the coin.

The faster mining dies, in its present form at least, the healthier crypto-currencies will be.

Hi JTB800, thanks for the reply.

1 100% agree with your assessment of miners and that mining is obsolete. POS is the way forward. Unfortunately that doesn't answer either of my questions though.

POS does not equal Pre-mine. POS currencies distribute the currency to investors during an IPO period and the trend is for more & more fair distribution not less. There is no precedent for such a large pre-mine (Going to developers + ?) being successful.

What about the inflation?
The advantage in full POS is obviously 0% inflation and right now they're even working on formulas to  make the transaction fee as mathematically cheap as possible, only increasing it if the network gets too full or the number of decentralised nodes becomes too low.

I just can't fathom a scenario where someone would devise Ethereum's model knowing crypto-currencies especially Vitalik, who is obviously a genius. Pre-mine and high inflation ONLY appeals to TPTB. So as far fetched as it might be, IMO the only situation I can think of where your model makes sense is if TPTB are involved AND can provide assistance in ensuring no fork or competitor would be legal.

Again if someone could please answer why they think Ethereum's large pre-mine and/or high inflation would be viewed favourably by users please enlighten me.

Well, to be honest, I am looking at them warily as well. But, I really have little problem with pre-mines as a (very) general rule. If we want real developers that can bring real innovation, then they have to get paid. Better that, then having little skin in the game and quickly turning their attention to another coin or just sticking to their day job. Now, are the people behind Ethereum worth the money? I have no idea.

I think inflation is a problem for many currencies, but I also think it can be exaggerated. There is going to be a percentage of coins "lost" or unrecoverable due to forgetting one's password, computer crashing with no backup or just forgetting they had a tiny bit left in a wallet somewhere. I don't recall what ETH's inflation was off the top of my head, but that is definitely a consideration for any coin.

Now, I am one of those people playing around with some of these coins for fun, mostly. So, my due diligence will be less than a lot of people's will be, of course. That is a roundabout way of saying that I don't have a full analysis of Ethereum for you and that you will have to wait for the more serious investors to get a complete picture.

But, investing is investing and if the founders are good, honest and working hard toward their goals, then any percentage one can grab will be a good deal. Now, if you could tell me who those people were, I'd buy those coins!

Sorry, I couldn't be much more help -- hope you get the answers you are looking for.

Thanks for the discussion. Again I 100% agree with 'skin in the game.' But I prefer when some of it's their own skin (own contribution).
I also have no problem with some funds helping with initial and also medium to long term development. But I think anymore than a 10% distribution of funds received given to 'devs + ?' will be received very badly.  

For me, unlike regular companies, crypto-currencies are the answer to the problem of a small group of people having the power to control a money system that eats away at people's purchasing power via inflation. Using this model (40% pre-mine/distribution of funds received to 'devs & ?' & high inflation) Ethereum seems to solve neither of those problems and makes fiat seem quite attractive by comparison. Like you I haven't been able to look in depth at everything yet, so hope to be proved wrong!

Team:

Since the funding for this projected will be collected and held in bitcoins, do y'all have a contingency plan in case of a significant drop in bitcoin prices over the short- to intermediate-term?

you asked for 32-bit key because it would be "convenient for java and javascript guys". this is the opposite of "wanting to be universal". obviously, you are not familiar with cryptography at all, otherwise you would know which key sizes are considered secure. also, you would not compare RSA key length with ECC. it would be interesting to observe whether your arrogance will overwhelm common sense and you continue to argue.

256 bits will be enough for quite a long time, unless quantum computers appear (actual ones, not dwave-type), in which case 512 will be as useless as 256.

Looks like my previous reply insulted u, coz now u r discussing my personality.

Of coz I know that EC key length is not "equal" RSA key length, that's why I wrote

Regarding "256 bits will be enough for quite a long time"... Well, looks like u've never heard of Ed25519 which would be easier implemented if we had 512-bit numbers, or Curve25519 implementations that require even more bits.

PS: I'm going to stop discussing this issue with u, obviously u r unable to contribute anything valuable.

uh-oh. a project is DOA once lawyers get involved. I liked Ethereum a lot, but this is not a good sign.

I don't think that's true. Going ahead without doing our homework on the other hand is irresponsible.

I like their work ethics.

or bitcoin 2.0

Agreeing with you both -
We never used the word bitcoin 2.0 by the way - we don't like either! :)

Bump

Best use a library which supports ints larger than 8 bytes. Go uses big.Int, C++ uses Boost's library and there are plenty of other libs in other languages that support 8+ bytes. As for ridding of the opcodes, nothing has been decided.

Performance will be slow in this case.

It won't be an issue.

It will be an issue.

Its 2014, we don't want slow performance.

This was kind of huge to read.  Are we just talking "for the purposes of paperwork related to addressing potential regulatory restrictions? Or are we actually accurately describing Ethereum value over time?   If the former, disregard this paragraph.  If the latter, then it seems Ethereum is a platform for startups to build products and services on top of.  It is not considered an investment opportunity. I mean if an accurate comparison is the value increase of milk over time ...... If I completely missed the point, just reply with "former not latter".

-B-

still no answer to [1]...

also if NXT gets turning complete scripting/language (and it appears to be happening now) what advantages remain for etherium over NXT?

Regarding #1, it's something we're currently actively researching and modeling. You can read some of Vitalik's though on the subject at http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/01/on-transaction-fees-market-based-solutions/

And what about https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448923.msg5115679#msg5115679 ?

Ok, so it looks like I hit the nail on the head this is a crucial question, and etherium is a bundle of switches waiting to be arbitraged out by a fork, if fees are too high.

Thinking out loud

Perhaps you need a special attribute of "time" to colour etherium with, So ethreium coins have two core attributes, on of unit of sale like bit coin, that is 1 eth = 1eth,  and the current usage of the computational power of ethrium weights in a relative value to each etherium.

that multiplication of the two gives the market rate of etherium.

thus the usage / demand  of the network can dynamically colour an attribute of the coin. say the whole processing network is operating at 1000/s Unit, and has a capacity of 10000 units/s then, the number of eth in existence can be weighted by PRactual/PRcapacity *1/Number of eth.

So the code must have some sort of ability to detect execution requests, so that overcapacity can be dealt with, e.g. 1Million / 1000.

this raises the problem of knowing how much a program will request before you execute it......to solve this, the task should be thrown that allows a code to run on vm local cpu of with test net ruthenium, and an execution rate per second, that has its power defined as current ethrium network CPU.

thus your entering into a PID sort of feed forward/Feed back control system, (better brush of those nyquist stably theorems etc). I'm not sure there is any other way around this. The market does exactly the same thing but at a slower pace by simply releasing etherium forks.

A final note maybe that some how to allow all process to be run on an executors own cpu and only results at the interface be verified.Etherium seems to be pose the question of distributed computing needs to be tied together and pooled to solve a single problem in an efficient not cheat able manner.

Thanks could you also answer

lso if NXT gets turning complete scripting/language (and it appears to be happening now) what advantages remain for etherium over NXT?

Everybody keeps missing the critical point when they talk about forking Ethereum: the user base.

I can create a brand new TV network and sell my advertising for pennies on the dollar, compared to Fox and TNT and TBS. But is anyone going to buy the advertising? Not unless I can somehow attract the users, too. And in order to attract the users, I have to do something better than what everybody else is doing. I can't merely copy content from a major network (even if that were legal) and run it on mine--nobody would pay any attention. To gain users and market share, I would have to actually innovate.

depends on the product.

eg satoshi didn't advertise bitcoin that much

Looking at your team- it's quite impressive and probably costly.

1) what is the current burn rate for team, offices and other expenses? I would imagine that it can run up to $250k a month

2) how is it being financed? are there big seed investors? any commitments ALREADY from the IPO?

Thanks

1) It's completely self funded, people contribute what they can. I was at our Swiss 'prototype incubator' and we slept 11 in a 2 bed apartment. Fun times, we got to know each other really well.
2) It's self funded. People volunteer on the project.

Did you guys have a pillow fight?

What happens in Zurich stays in Zurich ;)

haha^^

Guys, what about my question (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448923.msg5115679#msg5115679)?

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

Are we any closer to an IPO announcement date, where the date for the IPO will be announced lol ?

Can you outspend Visa/MC/Discover? What's stopping them from branding a fork and incorporating it into their userbase? They could build a nice point of sale system based on your work. Is that you real goal?

when will ipo start？ and mining start？

Interesting article about fractional reserves and audits in the wake of the Mt Gox demise:

http://www.coindesk.com/prove-exchanges-really-money/

Firstly, I was surprised to learn that not all exchange transactions are blockchain transparent.

Secondly, as I read it, and particularly at the bit about decentralized audits, I couldn't help thinking about Ethereum as a potential solution.

Thoughts?

Two things:

1) Exchanges, decentralized or not, should be fully transparent - including accounting no matter what. Do they really hold the funds they say they do? One solution is Open Transactions, another one is independent audits.
2) Full decentralization is in my view inevitable. The second a decentralized exchange goes online, it will become the gold standard - no need to 'trust' the issuer, and users retain full control over their funds.

Once the cat is out of the bag, it's game over for centralized marketplaces, exchanges, cloud file systems, etc.



 

How you gonna make sure they hold enough cash?

Can a decentralized exchange be properly explained to me please? In as much detail as possible, how it works, benefits over regular exchanges, drawbacks, potential weaknesses, how money (say, USD) will be transfered to it (where would that money go?), etc..
The only difference i know is that it is....well, decentralized. I need more detail (I'm not that tech savvy).

I made a post on ethereum forums...got no answer
I contacted you, Ursium via reddit....no answer

Thanks

Decentralized solutions r unable to compete with centralized ones coz blockchain-based HFT is impossible.

Decentralized != blockchain based.

You're correct, blockchain-based solutions are unlikely to be able to support HFT, even in the medium term. However, OT is decentralized and can handle HFT just fine (amongst other things). The ideal setup would be decentralized exchanges operating their 'backbones' on a blockchain and frontends (including HFT) over OT.

after this comment I would have expected a link to an elaborate report, of how exactly OT handles anything at all, let alone sub microsecond precision.

OK people, I know what HFT is, but WTF is OT?

OT = http://opentransactions.org
HFT = highfrequency trading


It's not a surprise if you understand the issues. Mastercoin went from 100M$ marketcap to 25M$ in 2 months.

Any decentralized solution won't be able to handle HFT. Brewer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem) says so.

how HFT works is you co-locate a server next to the exchange in a couple of meters of proximity. there are an army of PhD's working on the lowest latencies possible, approaching compute cycle level (<100 ns = 1e-07 sec).

if you want to do "HFT" speed of light is by far the most important factor. if you pick two locations on the surface of the earth at random the maximum distance is ca. 20'000 km. with a dedicated line you get a factor of ca. 30% of speed of light (fibre optic cables in labs achieve 99%*c), which implies a latency of 0.2 sec ( = 1e-1 sec). and if you do TCP packets you have latencies of 1-2 seconds which is seven orders of magnitude away from HFT. so trading over the internet to a random server has nothing to do with HFT. there are possibly other ways to get to at least stable 1 second latencies, which the bitcoin exchanges don't achieve. the internet's transport protocol (TCP) doesn't care about latencies. CDN's and other infrastructure partly solve this problem, a rather new development.

incidentally if one has studied this one understands why bitcoin uses blocks in the first place. it's impossible to coordinate time under a certain scale. which is the reason the GHOST chain selection algorithm suggested is nonsense (IMHO). it takes quite a lot of experience with these things, which is why I believe satoshi was working on bitcoin for 10 years+. There is evidence to suggest he was working on it since the late 80's. I do support the idea of alternative cryptocurrencies, but more humility couldn't hurt.

good sir, may I ask as to how to subscribe to your newsletter?

where can I learn more about all this? Reference sites would be appreciated.

How do I make money with Ethereum?

You posted these questions hours before posting here saying you didn't get an answer hehe
I'm aware of several team working on decentralized exchanges - start here: http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/382/p2p-fiat-bitcoin-exchange/p1

Same way you make money with say, Java or C++.
Build a startup, write a program, write a book, etc.
You can also purchase Ether at Exchanges when it comes out, or mine etc.

go to www.ethereum.org - we have a newsletter signup form :)

Cheers!

When will the mining start?

When Do you think will We be able to buy  Ether coin?

it's a bit like hacking - a lot of is private knowledge and public information is usually inaccurate / unimportant. best bet is http://www.nuclearphynance.com . the boom in the HFT world is mostly over though. the social utility of HFT is remarkably similar to miners. it is conceivable that cryptoexchanges can outpace other exchanges, but not over the internet.

If you mean the mainnet mining, it will start when the project is launched live, Q4 of this year.

We haven't announced anything yet, but we are looking an Ether pre-sale likely to take place during March.

How many days/weeks of notice will you give for the pre-sale?

Good question, for which I do not have an answer unfortunately :(
I know however that whatever reward level exists for 'early birds' will last for at least 7 days.

Is this a coin and can we buy it !?

It's both a programing language and a decentralized distribution platform that borrows from the bitcoin concept of distributed consensus, and applies to contracts.

It has an internal 'fuel' called ether which can be traded (that would be your 'coin'), in order to prevent people from running infinite loops and so on.

As to when you can buy it, we haven't announced anything yet, but likely during the course of March.

Cheers!

What is Ethereum?

just kidding :)

Sounds like a positive

If you want some REAL investors, I have the Glangarry leads. But first you must outsell Mastercoin.

:)

Can we please get a reply to this prior to the IPO.


"So if I invest 1 BTC and get my 2,000 or so Ether, what happens when people start mining?  Is some dude with a jacked up rig going to be able to mine 10,000,000 Ether in the first couple hours?  How is this being handled so that my investment is actually worth something?"

#1 - we haven't announced the structure of the Ether sale yet
#2 - that's not how mining works, thankfully :) Just like Bitcoin, inflation comes from mining. The amount that can be mined is controlled by the network, and corresponds to a fixed percentage of what was raised in the ether sale. This is mean inflation is rapidly decreasing year on year, eventually tending to 0.

Thanks for the reply.

So what will be the " fixed percentage of what was raised in the ether sale." ?  An estimate is fine.

I guess what I am trying to figure out is what would be the better way to go, build a mining rig, or invest in the IPO the same amount that I would spend on the rig.

I'm guessing the algorithm used is very important to inform that decision, and IIRC they're hosting an AES-style competition to select it

Whenever they do this, I hope they give enough time beforehand in case we need to get btc from coinbase (or wherever). I am not sure if I'll invest or not, but it'll be annoying if I decide to take part, then coinbase holds up my coins for a week+, and then the 1st week bonus is over. They really should announce the sale a month in advance, with a set date ... that way, everyone can make an informed decision and get any funds moved over in time. So in other words, it's better to start this in April than a week or so from now.

How much Can I earn if I will buy 2,000 Ethereum? I want to make at least 2 million

Fair questions, the previous number we used was 0.4x of what was raised going to miners. Say that represents 100,000 ether (making numbers up for the sake of example here), then 100,000 ether will be mine the first year. 100,000 (the same number) will be mined the second year. The 3rd, 4th, 5th... etc same thing. Hence, decreasing inflation.

As for 'what is the better way to go', well, I don't think anyone can tell, including us, because Ether is subject the same market forces as anything else, and what mining resources you have are unique to you.

I wouldn't recommend investing anything anywhere for speculative purposes. Please reconsider as speculation is incredibly dangerous, and unwise. I would rather if you read a little bit more as to what we are trying to achieve, and if you still think it's a good idea, purchase only what you can afford to lose. This is true for any investment.

In my opinion you will not get rich quick with the ethereum. Because the popularity is high and the risk is low. The return will not be as high as buying LTC last year. I think ethereum will be like Googol... long term investment. At least this IPO is not a scam.

Speculation is very risky, but after the world war 2, the speculators made the most profit post war.

Thank you for the reply. Some more questions...

1- What exactly is the need for ether? Could the system, run without it? How exactly does it support the system? And are individual computers in the p2p network actually assisting in the " processing work" in any way?

2- What is preventing someone from making a clone should ether become too expensive?

I know you can't clone the dev team, but if ether becomes too expensive then you can bet there will be a cheaper alternative available right? The language of the clone would then be compatible with any new layers/plugins being built on the ethereum protocol and they would essentially offer the same experience. Correct? Is there anything in place to help minimize the risk of this? 


2a- Regarding the above question, would this mean a strong increase in price would actually hurt ethereum, thus making huge price gains not a likely scenario? Because it would be too expensive to use? Or can the ether cost to the system (or whatever it cost to use a service) be changed on the fly? If so, would that be done automatically?


3- Is there any reason why you guys can't patent the technology but still keep it open source? To prevent copycats?

4- When you use ether to "pay" for a service, where does that ether go?

5- Is there something wrong with your webpage, http://www.ursium.com  It wont load....



Sorry for the newb questions, but I am pretty new to this all.

lol, obviously trolling...

1 - If there was no Ether, then people could write contracts that run infinite loops. Having a cryptofuel prevents them from doing so. There are other reasons (rewarding miners, the need to have transactions to trigger contracts, etc).
2a - Nothing prevents anyone from forking Ethereum at anytime - all code is open sourced wall to wall. I don't think forking to a 'cheaper' Ethereum would work for that specific purpose though - the 'clone', even if maintained regularly, would be subject to the same market forces.
2b - How the computing fees are processed (ie, what is the base fee, do they fluctuate, would they be voted on or arbitrary, etc) is still being worked on. We have economists looking at the question and building models.
3. I don't think we want to prevent copycats using patents. We want to prevent copycats by being the best :). Also it keeps the whole team on its toes and honest. I quite like that idea :)
4. To the contract providing the service. Contracts have balances.
5. Sorry, my personal webpage needs a bit of work, I've been focused on Ethereum in the last month :) I'll try to fix later on, thanks for the heads up!

Thanks again for your time, you have cleared-up many things for me. I am excited for this project.

http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/196/ether-sale-faq-live-updates

Ether sale in 2-6 weeks?

Yep.  That was the time estimate on Feb 1 also.  :-/

From the outside the hubaloo over this has died down quite a bit (fine with me) - but I was just wondering.  How many man hours do you think are going into this each week?

I think the best strategy for investing in Ethereum is a 50:50 split.   Invest only half of whatever you were going to invest in the premine and use the other half to buy Eth when mining begins.  No one knows but it's likely the price of ether will drop when miners begin selling their mined ether.  This strategy also helps the X factor to be a more reasonable number for inflation rate in subsequent years.

100s of man hours. I physically moved to Switzerland and have been traveling around europe. We are rapidly scaling up.

I think your strategy is good. I will invest 100% at premine and then manage my winners when it hit the exchange. Will buy again if the price is extremely low.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMBtKMZYdN8

I like the video but I'm becoming a little bit upset. No a reply to my question (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=448923.msg5115679#msg5115679) in this Official QA thread...

Awesome!

'date of this post: March 7th'

Few more questions.

1- Will any of the IPO bitcoin be used to fund personal expenses like food/travel/accommodations?

2- Are we going to get a breakdown of where exactly the funds go?

3- If underfunded, we will all get refunds correct?

4- If ethereum "fails" for any reason after launch, and Vitalik decides to scrap the idea and do something else, will the investors get stake in whatever new project Vitalik takes on?

5- There seems to be a fair amount of risk involved here. Why is it that early investors are only getting 2K ether for 1 BTC? How exactly was this number arrived at? It seems very inflated for an IPO considering it is still a brand new tech that needs to be created, could very well fail, be copied, not have enough interest to see a return on the investment etc etc.

5a. Why not reward the early investors more for taking on huge risk? 10,000 ether per 1 BTC seems fair considering the risk involved.

6- Theoretically will the cost of using Ether cause the price to always remain low? Because people would not use it if it's too expensive right?

Any updates on this?  ???

2 to 6 weeks  ;D

Really hoping to get some answers to my above questions before the IPO....

I would like someone to answer those questions too.

I've seen a lot of videos about Ethereum online but they are too technical for non-technical people like myself.

I just want to know if it's worth my time and money to invest in Ethereum or not.

My friends and I approached Vitalik at the first Texas Bitcoin Conference to ask him some questions to help us determine whether or not we should invest into Ethereum when they launch.

We wanted to ask him more "investing" related questions versus "technical" questions about Ethereum.

Conducting the interview are myself, my buddy Leon Fu, and James D'Angelo from the World Bitcoin Network.

This is video 1 of 6:

http://prisonorfreedom.com/what-is-ethereum-eth/

Enjoy!
Tai Zen

In video 2 of 6, we ask Vitalik how and why we should in Ethereum and how the ethers (currency used in the Ethereum network) will be distributed:

http://prisonorfreedom.com/how-why-you-should-invest-in-ethereum/

We pretty much ask all the "investing" related questions that you would want to ask before pouring money into Ethereum.

Enjoy!
Tai Zen

In this 3rd video interview with Vitalik Buterin (one of the co-founders of Ethereum (ETH)) at the first Texas Bitcoin Conference held in south Austin, we ask Vitalik for the truth about Goldman Sachs’ involvement with Ethereum:

http://prisonorfreedom.com/is-goldman-sachs-involved-in-ethereum-eth/

Enjoy!
Tai Zen

In this 4th video interview with Vitalik Buterin, I will hammer him with some tough questions on why potential investors should trust him and his Ethereum team members to not run off with everyone's money & do they have the talent needed to make Ethereum successful.

http://prisonorfreedom.com/can-you-trust-the-ethereum-team/

Enjoy!
Tai Zen

cool can u make the same video approach with BCNext, cfb and co plz ?

Mining is a huge draw for any new alt coin, therefore, in this 5th video interview we ask Vitalik Buterin:

--Is there any mining involved in Ethereum?
--Who can participate in the mining process?
--Is Ethereum ASIC resistant?
--What prevents Ethereum mining from becoming centralized like Bitcoin?
--What is unique and different about Ethereum mining?
--Etc.

http://prisonorfreedom.com/what-is-ethereum-eth-mining/

Enjoy!
Tai Zen

For me, new ventures and projects are all about the communications, setting expectations, managing the questions.

Thats something I don't see happening here.  Did I miss the bit where everybody was off on holiday or something?

The challenge that every new project has in the crypto world is:

1.  A centralized place to get updated info about the project.
2.  Who the key players are?
3.  Project updates announcements?
4.  Most coders do not like to speak in public or be on video.
5.  Most coders are too busy working on the project and don't have time to respond to inquiries.
6.  etc.

These problems plague every new project in the crypto and not just Ethereum so I would not freak out over it.

This is why I posted those video interviews here with Vitalik because i figured others had the same questions as well.

Tai Zen

Hello Tay.

Bitcointalk is not where we push updates. I think from a coms perspective we're not doing a bad job considering we are currently self funded and working around the clock. Here are useful links:

Forums: http://forum.ethereum.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethereumproject
Main site: https://www.ethereum.org
Code: https://code.ethereum.org
Blog: http://blog.ethereum.org
Wiki: http://wiki.ethereum.org
Meetups: http://ethereum.meetup.com
Whitepaper: http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ethereumproject
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/ethereumproject
Google+: http://google.com/+EthereumOrgOfficial

Cheers.

So is QA officially over now?

I asked some questions almost a month ago but still no reply. Ursium dropped in to post links but still no reply..... Pretty sure I am not the only one with these questions, and without them answered I don't feel comfortable investing.

I would really appreciate a reply so I can make an informed decision on whether or not I should take part in the IPO...

I asked one question at least 3 times and got no a reply.

Ursium said:

It seems to me that he is very busy. Maybe u'll get the answer one day...

We're here, we're answering questions, and we've been working 17 hours days for as long as I can remember.

Ask away! :)

Here is a re-post of my questions:

1- Will any of the IPO bitcoin be used to fund personal expenses like food/travel/accommodations?

2- Prior to IPO, are we going to get a breakdown of where exactly the funds go?

3- If underfunded, we will all get full refunds correct?

4- If ethereum "fails" for any reason after launch, and Vitalik decides to scrap the idea and do something else, will the investors get stake in whatever new project Vitalik takes on?

5- There seems to be a fair amount of risk involved here. Why is it that early investors are only getting 2K ether for 1 BTC? How exactly was this number arrived at? It seems very inflated for an IPO considering it is still a brand new tech that needs to be created, could very well fail, be copied, not have enough interest to see a return on the investment etc etc.

5a. Why not reward the early investors more for taking on huge risk? 10,000 ether per 1 BTC seems fair considering the risk involved.

6- Theoretically will the cost of using Ether cause the price to always remain low? Because people would not use it if it's too expensive right?

7a- Added these since last post: Will any of the devs/mods be investing their own money into the project to purchase for Ether, at the set 2k Ether/1BTC ? If so, approx how much will be purchased?
7b- What kind of appreciation are you expecting at one year, two years and 3 years? I know this is really does not matter, nor can it be accurately predicted at all. But I just want to know what is going on in your minds, even if it is not accurate at all. Helps me to better gauge where you guys are coming from. If you guys are indifferent that is useful to know as well. And yes, I understand you guys are primarily about developing tech, not creating another speculative investment. But I still would like to know where exactly you guys stand.


Thank you for your time, I understand that you guys are working hard, which is why I tried to not bug you too much. But I really hope I can get some solid answers so I can gauge where I would be standing as an investor.

Answers in bold.  I'm not a member of the team - just decided to share some of my common sense.  Not trying to be rude or a shill.

I prefer to address NXT in the NXT threads/forums and not in the ETH thread.

Tai Zen

Is there somebody who can tell me now the date of the Pre-sale or IPO?  ???

We won't issue further comments regarding the Ether Sale, until we have completely finalized the framework for it. In the meantime enjoy the free technology, people are already building apps on it, which is exciting Smiley

finally a thread!!

So, when is the pre-sale?

I think in the 3rd or 4th quater.

1. Will Ether mining start with CPU mining as was the was the case for Bitcoin ?

2. Will it be required for miners to hold Ether to mine more ? I mean is initial buying is mandatory for miners ?

3. Multiple contracts will be made on top of Ethereum with the course of time. Will all those be mined under a single blockchain or individual contracts will have individual chains ?

4. I'm interested in developing/testing Ethereum before it's release. Can I download the client and join the network now ?

I shot this video of my friends and I discussing the differences between Ethereum Vs. Bitcoin Vs. NXT the night before I had to speak at the Texas Bitcoin Conference.

We tried to keep the discussion as non-technical as possible so it will benefit everyone:

http://prisonorfreedom.com/what-is-the-difference-between-ethereum-vs-bitcoin-vs-nxt/

Enjoy!

Tai Zen

ursium,

what are the differences between ethereum, nxt and ripple?  and what are the pros and cons of each?

Is this main thread about Ethereum at this forum?

Is it safe to use the wallet version that is on github, although it is a beta release?

Recognizing the rapid development of Ethereum in terms of market, user and customer base, the popular TV show Silicon Valley introduced Ethereum to its large target audience as an important decentralized network and technology needed to develop a new generation of internet And community of useful applications.

Hi, I installed Ethereum Wallet for Windows, and it's stuck after 1% downloading blocks.
Same after restart, and run as Administrator.
I have the latest version of software 0.8.10.
I would appreciate help :)

I found a way to transfer my funds to another account. I created a backup of my mist wallet and used json file to send eth to another wallet using https://www.myetherwallet.com (https://www.myetherwallet.com)

What would stop Eth from becoming skynet?

How much GWEI must pay for a confirmation under 10 min?
40? 50? 60?

I don't understand how to keep the wallet synced. It took forever to sync, but I thought that was just the initial syncing. A few days of not syncing and I'm at 4,172,778 of 4,184,728, and it uses as much as 2500 MB of the memory and 12 MB/s of the disk. Please advise.

Thats an irksome topic. I havn't used my wallet for almost 5 month. Now it is syncing for several days with the progress that I downloaded 80,000 of 540,000 blocks. Running the sync for 6 hours gives me 2% ... sorry, but this sucks. Especially, that you should transfer coins only, befor the whole chain is synced. When it synced finally, I am going for a cold storage or the paper-wallet. And then I will delete this piece of everlasting frustration immediately ...

I'm pleased so far with Eth development, particularly teh onboarding of developers and growth of ecosystem.

I didn't like the developers' embrace of some ICOs, particularly more questionable ones - is there the possibility of having some code of conduct for those employed by ethereum about their role in erc20 coins? Maybe regulators by stepping in solve this themselves.

Cool!  :)

Raiden Release: Simpler Micropayments Go Live on Ethereum's Testnet


https://www.coindesk.com/raiden-release-simpler-micropayments-go-live-ethereums-testnet/ (https://www.coindesk.com/raiden-release-simpler-micropayments-go-live-ethereums-testnet/)

I have created an unofficial Raiden Network group on Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/D4nnnk-cJZkakNXkU70vlw
Feel free to join and to share the invitation link!

Here's what I don't understand - relation between Ethereum (ETH) and ERC20?:
- ETH is a cryptocurrency listed on exchanges like this: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/
- and I thought ERC20 is a token standard based on ETH, but it is also listed? https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/erc20/

Why are they different? And why ERC20 is gaining 400% while ETH goes up by only 5%?

I would appreciate any explanation. Thanks!

Isn`t ERC20 just another token like all the rest? They conveniently based their name as the platform used to create these tokes?
From what I have read so far (warning : it will be my view not an exact explanation) ERC20 is a system used to create Tokens based on the Ethereum blockchain.
I hope my understanding of this complex system is at least a bit right  ;D

That's what my understanding here is as well :) Which makes it even more strange to see these exchange rates and ERC20 as a Token in it's own right :)