Guys about the issue of whether Ethereum is running out of funding, my point is that they were running out of funding, except for the ETH they own which before this recent rise in the price was not valued very high. Moreover, there was not sufficient volume so if they had tried to sell, they would have driven the price down (especially factor in the amount of ETH being created from mining ongoing).
Thus I am saying this recent shrilling for the Casper vaporware is likely to drive the price AND VOLUME of ETH upwards to take more money from speculators.
And I am saying they have wasted the $18 million they got. Heck I could probably design a solution for ~$20,000 (or not more than $100,000). It doesn't take $18 million to make smart contracts work with a centralized verification which is what they will eventually realize is the only way to make it work (per my upthread posts explaining why).
They will waste more $millions, because that is what they do. The pattern is already clear. People/organizations don't change (until they are forced to by economic reality, which apparently is discipline the market is unwilling to do as you all are giving Vitalik more money to play with).
How new Alts / Scamcoins steal your Bitcoins
It seems every day a new alt coin pops up. They are easy to make - most are just clones of coins
that were programmed by someone else and just given a new name, a few graphic tweaks, etc. to make it look new.
It doesn’t take much work - a new scam coin is born. Most of the devs who create these coins have only one intention - to steal bitcoins from others. This explains how they do it.
First they clone an existing coin, make a few tweaks, make a website (which helps scam coins look legit) then they pre-mine a good amount of coins which they will dump later on.
After the coin is up and ready for launch it is Announced on various sites - bitcointalk.org, reddit, etc.
They get the coin listed on an exchange or two and then deposit a portion of their pre-mine coins they already
have saved up. They may make a few Bitcoins after their coin gets listed, but this is not the way they
intend to get your Bitcoins. They let their coin do whatever the market wants for a month or two, maybe try to hype it up a little thru various forums and trollboxes to help legitimize it. They don’t want to pump it as soon as it gets listed on an exchange - this would be obviously suspicious.
Then the day comes where they decide to make their move. They start by buying up the orders on
the exchange(s) to start driving up the price to give the illusion that their coin is starting to take of. This doesn’t cost them anything because they pre-mined the coins for free and the Bitcoins they are using to buy up the orders go back to them because they are buying the scamcoin from themselves anyways. After us innocent, unsuspecting users see that this alt
is moving up a large percent is when we start putting our bitcoin orders in so we don’t miss out on this coin that seems to be really taking off. As soon as enough orders are put in / coins are bought - when the scammer devs are happy with the amount of BTC they have acquired, they dump the rest of their pre-mined coins on the order book to buy
up any lower bitcoin orders still on the books. Congratulations, you have just become a bag holder of a worthless scamcoin that is back to its previous price of next to nothing, the devs have conned you out of your bitcoins and will let their scam coin die to start working on their next scam.
Btw, note how the ETH price rises when I am sleeping and someone makes comment doubting whether I am correct. Then I post again reinforcing my points, and the ETH price falls again. The speculators are really confused. And this is going to be an evidence that Ethereum is an illegal unregistered investment security. I don't know if the regulators will do anything about it though. Depends if speculators file a legal case perhaps.
As for whether I am correct and Vitalik is wrong, he will probably go off some tangent trying to devise some algorithmic way to address my point about the Nash equilibrium collapse with partitions due to the externalities of scripting. Because that is who his is. He is not pragmatic. He is unable to see the reason to give up and ship code that is centralized.
Or he will ignore and obfuscate. Yeah I did notice they are sort of trying to hide the fact that they also doubt themselves. They hide it in layers upon layers of complexity of technobabble. But I am able to dig through that. You guys can't easily.
Note I do agree the Vitalik writes some tantalizing blog posts. He is mathematical and he incorporates academic level understanding and terminology. I am not criticizing him in every facet. Researchers are often not good in business. We need researchers. But we typically don't hand them an $18 million budget.
People don't change. Vitalik is a research complexity machine. I am a person who created CoolPage for millions of users and was an early developer of Corel Painter which has shipped to millions of users. I've been very ill for the past 3 years, thus I changed.
If I am healthy, I will do what I do, which is make real products for millions of users and "SHIP IT". And Vitalik will do what he does, which is make complexity, live in fantasy land in his mind, and waste money.
In other words what I mean is I find a way to cut through the chaff and get down the final generative essence, which in this case is:
VALIDATION MUST BE CENTRALIZED. Any one who says different is deceiving you (and possibly themselves).
Btw, the decision to use PoS (i.e. deposits for consensus-by-betting) is to avoid the problems with PoW such as electricity consumption. My point about Nash equilibrium failure modes for partitions with programmable scripting applies even if they tried to use PoW.
So some issues are orthogonal. It is difficult to explain all the ways of thinking about this to others. I surmise that r0ach and enet may understand. monsterer understands some of it. CIYAM may understand, but I need to study his AT before I can comment on his level of understanding.
I was hoping smooth would comment but he may feel he hasn't yet spent enough time analyzing Ethereum.