-> (if any)
So if you are not interested, dont vote.

Ethereum investment poll:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=436725

EDIT:
Closed due too much Spam/FUD:

Reopened as self moderated poll here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=436795

EDIT:
Closed due too much Spam/FUD:

Reopened as self moderated poll here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=436795

It was not about discussion about Ethereum, it was created as a POLL.

Leave the trolls alone....


Original post:
If you are new to Ethereum, here are some links:

Main site: http://ethereum.org
Blog: http://blog.ethereum.org
Forum: http://forum.ethereum.org
Wiki: http://wiki.ethereum.org
Whitepaper: http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0

Vitalik described here (http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9671/ethereum-next-generation-cryptocurrency-decentralized-application-platform) his problems when working in Colored Coins or other Metacoin projects (Mastercoin,...) . It is not only the limitation of scripts but also scalability problems (need full blockchain to operate).

He also introduced other new exciting ideas and concepts (mining algorithms, way how to store the balance, inflation model...) which really drives crypto currencies to a new level.
I really think he deserves a more intense attention and discussion from BTC core devs.
For me it seems by FAR the most interesting project since BTC itself. And Vitalik Buterin has gained his high reputation not by chance. He seems to be one of the brightest minds in the community.

SNARK sounds really promising but due the complexity and open problems not a solution we could expect in the next 2 years I fear.

Welcome to my ignore list, Mr. genius.

Thanks Vitalik for the posting. Looking forward for the brilliant project.

But I still have not find any answer yet for one of the most critical questions for me:
How does Ethereum protect itself from an 51% attack in the bootstrapping phase?

A political (non-economical) motivated attacker (Banks, State) could buy in cheap from day 1 with mining a huge portion, stay silent and use the >51% power when they want to break it down. Some altcoins have been killed in the bootstapping phase by such attacks (probably just by someone wanting to demonstrate that its possible).
I guess Ethereum is on the radar of people in charge of securing the states/banks power and those people will see the huge potential in it. So I guess the threat is much higher than with all those boring alt coins clones we have seen in the last months...

I described some ideas and possible solutions to the above proble here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1v78zi/protection_against_51_attack_in_bootstrapping/

I am also wondering about the statement in the paper and the expected fundraising volume.

Original:
"Ether will have a theoretical hard cap of 2^128 units (compare 250.9 in BTC), although not more than 2^100 units will be released in the foreseeable future."

2^100 = 1,26 * 10^30 = 1 260 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.

The issuance rule is like that: 0.0001 BTC for 1 Ether.
If people invest all in all 1000 BTC there will be 10 000 000 Ether from fundraising and 50% of that goes to founders/org + 50% to miners per year. So after 1 year you have 20 mio Ether.
If they get 10k BTC at fundraising -> 200 Mio Ether;
If they get 100k BTC at fundraising (100 mio USD!) -> 2 000 Mio Ether;
If they get 1000k BTC at fundraising (1000 mio USD!) -> 20 000 Mio Ether; But thats very unrealistic (10% of btc market cap)
In that caseFor mining there would be added 10 000 Mio per year, if you count for 100 years thats 1 000 000 Mio = 1*10^12.
So even in a highly unlikely scenario of 1 Mio Btc fundraising there would be only about 10^12 in circulation. So what does "not more than 2^100 units will be released in the foreseeable future" refer to? Or was it just a relict form an older version of a fundraising model or Ether nomination?

I think it will become an issue for a WHILE. Then when users become aware of the electricity expenses and the noise of the computers at night they will be forced to protect their stuff better. At the end I guess it will educate the users to be responsible to protect their hardware. As long as the botnet only send out spam they simply dont care.
So like BTC has and will be a huge incentive to find security leaks, Ethereum can lead to better protected computers as people have to pay a bounty to these botnecks in form of electricity bills (as long as they check at least the bills)....

Another solution could be to use a kind of identity for a miner. See here for more info about that idea: http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1v78zi/protection_against_51_attack_in_bootstrapping/

Sorry did not find any clear answer there. Did you referred to that statemnet from Charles?
"We took this a step further and came up with some innovations in the trust model we think that the community will like. I won't spoil it yet"

Just to be clear. I did not ask for the issuance model, that is clear to me. I was just wondering who exactly will receive the BTC I will spend to buy fundraising Ether.

Charles could you answer the following question?
Who will receive the Bitcoins the fundraisers spent to buy Ether? The founders? The organisation? Will they be locked/destroyed? I assume the founders and/or organisation, but I guess it would be good to clearify that part, just to be transparent. Another option could be to spend it to a group of NGOs (Wikileaks, EEF, ...).

Ah thanks for the info. I just used it once and all worked fine, so my experience was limited. Maybe I shoudl emphasize the word "seems" ;-).

Yes I know it is not easy. Inter-Crypto (IOU, Ripple,...) seems easier, but that does not solve the interface problem to the Fiat world.
One of the very few feasible solutions I found here: http://pauv.org/ - Interesting whitepaper.
https://nashx.com/ is also a project in a similar direction but not p2p.

I think the exchanges are really the highest risk at the moment. How many useful (professional, trade volume, political risk) exchanges we have? Not more then 5-10 I would say. Most are in countries which have already clearly said that they dont welcome BTC (USA, China, India).
At the end only the EU, Japan, Russia, Hongkong and Singapore are (yet) not aggressively against BTC. Canada, Australia, GB and NZL I see as close partners of the USA, so they will follow their policies (otherwise they would not get all these nice NSA data anymore)...
Of course there are many more countries, but if the G8 define the global framework these other countries will follow to not get to a black list (tax heavens, money laundering,....).

Here a small overview about exchanges which with I have more or less experience (You are welcome to add some more)
MtGox: Japan; Political low risk. Very bad experience with services, customer care and security.
Kraken: USA; Political high risk. Very professional.
BTC-e: Bulgaria (or Russia); Political low risk. Pretty bad reputation with customer care, not very professional, unkown operators. Probably high to medium criminal and security risks.
ANXBTC: Hongkong; Political low risk. Seems professional but low volume yet.
Justcoin: Norway; Political low risk. Seems professional but low volume yet.
CampBX: USA; Political high risk. Seems very professional
Coinbase: USA; Political high risk. No personal experience as for people in US only. Seems very professional
BTCChina: China; Political high risk.
BitStamp: Slovenia; Political low risk. Seems professional no personal experience as verification process is more then a pain in the a**.

LocalBTC: Iceland, global; Political low risk. Professional
Bitcoin.de: Germany; Political low risk. Professional

BTC OTC: US?, global; Political low risk. No personal experience, low volume.

So if US and China will attack BTC harder (forbid all banks/money transmitter to operate with BTC related companies) then there are left a handful of exchanges. BTC-e opertes with a czech bank so its partly inside EU influence. If EU follows US policies then we nearly dont have any possibility to change BTC/Fiat anymore. Thats a scenario not very unrealistic! China is already nearly at that point.

If you look at the richest 500 Bitcoiners (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.0) it seems really crazy that there is not more investment in that area. There are people out there with a few hundred thousends BTC.
Are they not worried about that inmature state of BTC?

And its not only the exchanges, there is so much more that needs to be addressed before the state attacks BTC harder or before BTC really become global money.
-The whole security is based on one version of the software running at all of the miners (btclib/sx, bitcoinJ would be an alternative).
- Anonymisation
- Security audits
- Improvements of POW/Security of the crypto algos (make it post quantum safe -see NSA threats)
- Improve scalability
- Mining Pools power concentration
....

Many difficult problems. At the moment there are working a bunch of core devs, mostly voluntarily without payments and with limited resources (I guess most are not fulltime BTC devs).
Alternative implementations could help to improve the stability and make it less risky for attacks.

But investors prefer to put money in a new cool startup rather then help to mature the overall system (does not provide direct ROI).... at least until it will hurt too much....

When people will realize that centralized exchanges are THE PROBLEM in the bitcoin world? Why is it so hard to build an p2p exchange? If many people are sending money from bank account to another traders bank account the bank cannot block these bank accounts. But they can easily kill exchanges with preventing money transfers.

Interesting video...

Jacob Appelbaum & Dmytri Kleiner - Resisting The Surveillance State And Its Network Effects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOiFgUj9bWI

"...The business model of social media is surveillance and behaviour control."

That is an interesting point and I guess that can be applied to Bitcoin as well. Some mentioned that Bitcoin can be seen also as a social movement.
The public transaction log is a heaven for data miners, even if its hard to track the addresses to individual users. As soon as big merchants (or other central points like exchanges) start using BTC they get an additional business model as well. They will know which address belongs to which real person and can follow a larger part of the tx graph to find a lot more about their users like they could do now with credit cards. A user buying a book at amazon (if they use btc some day) and with the tx graph amazon can follow that users shopping behaviour on many other areas. They could sell these data like facebook is making money of their social graphs and behaviour data.

Another interesting part in the video is when Dmytri says that we dont need a new p2p platform. We have had that platfrom from the very beginning. The internet itself was that platform. But somehow the capitalist market created huge central private gardens and people prefer these golden cages instead staying in their open public parcs.

Oh Shit! ;-) Thanks....

Here you can order a BTC T-Shirt:
http://monstroesserioes.spreadshirt.de/rethink-bitcoins-A16848051

Some other related shirts here: http://monstroesserioes.spreadshirt.de/
Slogans:
"BURN MONEY, BURN!"
"FUCK FINANCE!"
"STORM THE BANKS!"
"Do something new and different!"
"Citizen of the Transnational Republic"

Here is a very rough idea of an anti spam mechanism useful for a crypto mail system:
If you send a mail to someone you need to spend x btc to a collateral address which gets refunded to yourself when the receiver confirms that your message was not spam. That way communication between friends or information which has a value to the receiver stays free and unwanted mails get penalized.
Best would be that the receiver could define individually the amount needed to send a msg to him (people have different tresholds what means spam to them). The money frozen from spam could be forwarded to the receiver himself as compensation for reading the spam (unpayed work) or to the underlaying system (development, network, btc miners,...). Additionally there could be a mechanism to add trusted senders to whitelists so they dont need to pay the collateral anymore...

I have not thought more into implentation scenarios but I assume it should be possible either on top or with btc or as a specialized altcoin project.
A simple starting point could be to use a 2 of 2 multi sig tx (sender and receiver need to sign tx so it can pay out). The sender needs to pay in to that tx and the tx output is his own address. If the mail receiver sign that tx the btc amount will go back to the sender, otherwise its lost to him. That will be for sure not enough (creates burned money...) just a rough idea of the direction....

A specialized system would be probably much more flexible and maybe it could be used to other use cases as well: eg. against ddos attacks, forum postings (you need to pay and get a return if people read/like your posts...),....
Basically all use cases where a misuse happens and its currently free or nearly free to misuse. If you need to risk a certain fund and just get it back if the receiver(s) like your contribution, you could establish a effective filtering ans even build a content conpensation scheme out of it.

I am not sure if something similar already exists and if it is really technically feasible. Just wanted to share the idea....

Thanks for the great overview! Helps a lot to understand it a bit better....

The Hawala system is at least in Germany stricly controlled/forbidden:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala


Can you layout a simple step by step scenario with 2 users (if users are issuers not gateways) who are trading BTC/USD in Ripple?
Just a scenario if I want to sell 1 BTC for 1000 USD and then a few days later sell those 1000 USD to x BTC. I dont understand how that could work without gateways (at the end I want real BTC and real USD not IUOs - if a gateway is needed then lets add it to the scenario with all trust implications). Also I would like to see in every step the trust limits (possible loss).
I tried to find on the wiki page a detailed example, but they are too hi-level and not covering all my questions.

Here is an article about Ripple which meets my opinion very close: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7275/ripple-is-officially-open-source/

But thanks for the discussion and I would be pleased if you could give me more detailed information about how it really works (above scenario).

I agree that that lack is a big problem. But I dont see that Ripple is the solution as it needs gateways which are companies (exchanges, banks,...) which can be shut down.
The only possible solution for a decentralized fiat/crypto exchange I see is to use the single users bank accounts. No government or bank can seize the bank accounts of millions of "average joe" users, but they can easily attack companies like MtGox,...


The system only trade IOUs, to bootstrap that system you need a lot of outside real money or many merchants accepting these IOUs. The only way how to get in Fiat are gateways. So for me that seems to be a major part of the system.
The friend2friend network may be ok. The money is debt idea (IUO) may be ok (even I dont like that). The gateways are for me the critical point. In BTC system the exchanges are not a part of BTC, they are the external environment and hopefully we get soon a better solution. The Ripple gateways are the backers of the IUO currencies (if I understood it correctly). Without a gateway you never get real USD for Ripple USD.

Maybe we rotating in circles as I focus on that part of the system and you on the p2p network...