I was somewhat blinded too, but I think now that, looking back, the DAO was a very, very stupid idea.  After all, what was it ?  It was "making a pot of money" for "VC investment", and then having the contributors vote on where to put the money.  But that is ridiculous.  If you can vote proportionally to your contribution to where the money should go, *then put your money directly there* !  Simple crowdfunding of all the proposals would have been good enough.  No DAO needed.  You like it ?  Put your money in it.  You don't like it ?  Don't put your money in there.  How can it get simpler ?  What does the DAO bring in that simple crowdfunding doesn't ?  Apart from bringing in middle men, profiteers, "developers" and other parasites which crypto was designed to get rid off ?
The DAO was nothing else but a confusing way to do crowdfunding, with the possibility of using other people's money to a certain extend and with funny mechanisms to make "no voting" expensive.  There was not the slightest bit of economic rationale behind the DAO.  The same people who put money in the pot, vote for where the money should go.   Usually people vote DIRECTLY with their money, OR they trust an institutional investor to do it in their name.  But putting it in a pot to vote oneself for it, is totally ridiculous.

The other thing is of course the Turing completeness, which is an utterly bad idea (but which sounded good in the beginning).

So there was *NOTHING* that was a good concept in the DAO.  It was an economically ridiculous idea on a ridiculous platform.  It didn't solve any slightest bit of problem.  

It is a catch-22 for ETH, not for ETC.  In fact, ETC couldn't care less about "replay attacks", which are not "attacks" at all, but just simultaneous transactions on both chains. 

The real catch-22 is for ETH, because after this disastrous fork, they will be scared to death to fork again.

The real difference would probably come when ETH should fork for PoS, but this is even more a "jump in the dark" and they will never dare to do it.  In fact, ETH has put itself in a very, very difficult position, and this is normal, because ETH is in fact the result of a sustained 51% attack on the original chain. 

I think that Poloniex is making the same "error" as the Ethereum foundation, namely by having an a priori neutral platform make "moral decisions" they get involved.  Ethereum was not involved in the DAO problem as long as it was neutral.  By getting involved, ETH is now mixed in with all the hassle and failure of the DAO.   Poloniex was just an exchange, and is now acting as a judge over what is right and what is wrong.  They will end up in deep doodoo if they are not careful.

This is like a phone company suddenly not allowing conversations or altering conversations because the content of the conversation is immoral/illegal according to them.  From the moment they do that, they become responsible for all content.

This is a crazy idea, because it supposes the existence of state and law, but then goes on to do trials in a distributed way.  That's contradictory.  The state exists to oppress and extort people, and law and justice are just two tools part of that system, so it will never be compatible with such an uncontrolled crowd system.  The "reading of the law" is part of the system, and has to be done by state-approved agents (judges).

I really don't.  Each month, I take about $50 to play with on crypto.  Not more.  I used (long long ago) to buy bitcoin but I have now an agreement with my family that I won't do that any more (too bad for them, but hey, I don't care, I have enough money for myself to do what I want to do, which is not needing much money).

For full disclosure: I own 4 (four) ETH, and some 30 (thirty) ETC.  In fact, I owned 10 (ten) ETH I bought for fun, and after the fork, I decided to split the value evenly over both chains.  This is just for playing.  I do not expect anything from it, except losing most of its value.  I consider the money I put in it lost, like the money other people put in cigarettes, because in order to run the stuff for real, you need to own some stuff for real, but I'm not putting any "savings" in it.
I own a lot of small amounts of other coins, because I bought some to play with the system.
I own a small company that does consulting, and cryptography and security in general is part of the services I sell, so I see myself obliged in "playing" with it to keep up to date.  I won't disclose that company here.

I do run (empty) full nodes of several cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, because I believe in the principles of distributed systems, and because I need to keep up with it.  I even run nodes for crypto I don't have any of, like primecoin, because I find it a nice concept.

Personally, I think "making profit with currencies" is a stupid concept, although it is perfectly well possible to do so at the expense of your peers.

Of course not.  I don't do crypto trading.  I am in it for the anarchist principles and the technology, but apart from some bitcoin from long ago, I only play with pocket money on crypto (a few tens of dollars a month).  I wouldn't want to make money with it, because my kids would profit from it and I don't want them to.  I want do die with only debt.  Then I know I have not given more than I obtained and enjoyed my freedom to the maximum

I suppose you never touch a dollar or a Euro or any other big fiat money where the central bank didn't issue new money after some got stolen (like with the great train robbery) ?   I suppose you don't touch bitcoin ?  I suppose you don't touch gold ?  All those "thieves store of value things" ?

It might well be that it is the ETC dumping for ETH, and as such, generating demand for ETH, that keeps the price high.  So ironically enough, maybe ETC is keeping ETH alive, because it has given "free money" to ETH holders to buy more ETH.

That said, the overall market cap of ETC + ETH is about $13.2 and so on a slight decrease since the fork.   It would probably have been much lower if there hadn't been this pumping/dumping swing between both that has attracted a lot of day traders as long as it lasts.  ETC is what is still keeping ETH somewhat alive.

Well, ETC is what remains of the ethereum chain after the 51% attack that was organized by the foundation, and its mutated chain now goes under the name of ETH.  Looking at the mining power and market cap, this attack is not ready to stop soon.

So it is not true that the highest mining power is safest: we see that the highest mining power goes to the attacked chain.  The chain that is still running the original protocol is ETC, the survivor of the attack.

There's a lot of truth in this.  I have to say that I'm dubious about both ETC and ETH, simply because they are centered around a foolish idea, which is complex, Turing complete, smart contracts.  But on a small subset of tiny contracts, they can maybe thrive - but with a much smaller market cap then. 

Everybody was fearing the "dump by the hacker", but forgot the ongoing, monumental dump by the ETH boys and girls who do not possess, like the DAO hacker, a few percent of ETC, but actually, more than 90%.

That said, once they dumped, they dumped.  I think that the Robin Hood boys thing was nothing else but what the rest of the ETH community has been doing: dumping their ETC.  This probably explains the distance from parity that is keeping on ; but at a certain point, they will, like socialists, run out of other people's money :-)

But (fiat) money and governments are two sides of the same coin if I may say so.  You should read the excellent 5000 years of debt by David Graeber.  If you think that the banking world and the middle men are anything else but a pillar of government, then you are missing the most important point.

By doing what Satoshi proposed, one is cutting the most important leg from government and state.  Because with free payments comes also freedom from fiscal theft, and freedom to trade without the rules that are verifiable by all state machinery to keep economic freedom strictly limited.  
Freedom of money is to state domination, what freedom of speech is to religious domination.  However, and that brings us back to my original point, in order to enjoy freedom of speech in a theocracy, you need anonymity.  In order to enjoy really freedom of economic interaction (with some freedom money like Satoshi intended) you need cash-like anonymity, and Satoshi was lacking the technology to do so.  Bitcoin is not anonymous, because you can trace all expenditures and there are sufficient "real world contact points" to be able to resolve most of the network of transactions.


The small fee for the money transfer is negligible compared to the fiscal theft.  Honestly, if you look at the fiscal theft from a rough trade: "I mow your lawn" traded for "you give me a book", with social security contributions, income tax and VAT, you're most of the time far over 50% if you do that all according to the law.  On most raw trades, more than half of it is stolen by the state.  You don't mind adding a few percent to transfer money to the other side of the world if already more than half of it gets stolen by funders of armies, useless state employees, and bank bailouts, right ?

So the REAL freedom in payment is the economic freedom (from fiscal theft), which is implied by the liberty money Satoshi intended to invent.  But for that, anonymity is necessary, and this is technologically lacking in bitcoin.


I agree with that, but even monero would have a practical problem with a huge block chain if every payment in the world happened on its chain.  The 1 MB limit is an artificial limit, but the huge chain is an inherent problem of the technology of block chains.  Newer coins seem to work on solutions for that if I understand well.


I agree with you.  That is why I say that monero has added the needed technology that bitcoin is lacking, unfortunately.


I fully agree with you.  That is why Dash is the best possible solution with bitcoin technology, and is in fact not good enough.


Indeed.

Because another important aspect in anonymity is that it should be automatic.  If anonymity is an option, then anybody using it becomes a suspect.


I think that there is in any case a problem there, and only Lighting-like smart contract solutions can probably solve this issue: by pre-setting up a block chain agreement, and "simultaneously pushing the button" when in person-to-person contact.

It must have taken a lot of time to compile such a list of excuses

"now that we've been taken stealing the ETC coins and trying to convert them, after all, we're going to do what we explained was impossible and why we went to exchanges in the first place: returning the ETC to the DAO holders".

Funny that all the explanations of why it was necessary to convert ETC to ETH (and do a big dump that way on ETC) suddenly are gone like smoke, and why it was formerly considered impossible to give back the ETC is now possible.

The only true thing here is that the market manipulation that happened through this manoeuvre was, as they explained, kept secret.  Because of course, nobody ever profited from it I bet 

No, there's the long weekend with the 15th of August being a holiday in many places.

Indeed.  Sheer, uttermost, blinding beautiful freedom.

True freedom.  No more "crime".  If it can be done, it will be done, and it is then allowed to be done.  If it shouldn't be done, then it must be impossible to be done.  Like the laws of nature.  There' no "crime" in the laws of nature: you simply can't violate them, and if you can do it, by definition you don't violate them.

I would surely love it.

At a certain point, it was very close, when ETC was 3 dollars, and ETH was around 9 dollars.
But essentially, ETC is oscillating between about 1/8 of ETH and 1/4 ETH.

I think the ETC price is still somewhat high, because after all it has the same fundamental problem as ETH: it supports a ridiculous idea of turing-complete smart contracts (of which the DAO illustrated the idiocy).  What I can't get my mind wrapped around, is the price of ETH.  What are all these ETH holders expecting, now that not only the fundamental idea of ethereum has proved to be ridiculous, but moreover, now that they have a compromised mutable and stoppable chain ?

It is certainly not the "currency" usage of ETH that keeps the price up (what black market uses ETH as its currency ?).  I can understand that people buy bitcoin at $500, because there is still the dream that one day, a bitcoin might be $ 2000 or so.  But what people think that ETH will go over, say, $15 ?  It went over it when the dream of the DAO was still alive, but that's now shown as a silly idea which no big investor will ever touch again.  So what are they hoping for ?

Big investors will not invest in any case any more in anything ethereum related.  The DAO showed the idiocy of the concept of turing complete smart contracts.  The ETH chain showed that immutability is not guaranteed, and that sufficient action from the ethereum foundation and an oligarchy of miners can undo anything on the chain.  The Poloniex blocking of the Robin Hood thieves showed the vulnerability of traceable coins and their non-fungible nature.  So much for "unstoppable" and "immutable".  Visibly propriety of funds and their possibility of exchange is dependent on obscure agents, and the whole myth of unstoppable, fungible and immutable is gone now.

While the ETC chain has at least kept the original proposition of immutability and unstoppability, it has suffered a severe blow with the traceability and the fact that Poloniex could stop certain owners to exchange their coins.  ETC also suffers from the same ridicule as ETH and ethereum in general: Turing complete smart contracts, an oxymoron.

So this whole circus is ridiculous, and no serious investor will ever touch it with a stick.  In as much as you are a law-abiding investor, you will keep away from these obscure judges, and deal with the normal legal system, and normal legal contracts ; in as much as you would like to use your freedom from law and state, you know that the whole ecosystem is lying about their neutrality and act upon their own morality standards (read: their profit) as it suits them.

The only thing that ETH can still be used for, and I agree that it is a lucrative market, is scamming people with the consent of the foundation and/or exchanges.

That's backward causality.  The hash rate is determined by the block reward.  Given that the block rewards of ETC and ETH are the same, the ratio of the hash rates is equal to the ratio of their market prices.

There is in fact no reason to fear for the lowest hash rate, because spending effort to attack a low hash rate chain also means spending effort to alter something of lesser value.  So apart from the "desire to spend a fortune to see the world on fire", there is no incentive to attack a smaller hash rate chain, because the gain one can obtain from it is smaller too.

If only the chain with the highest PoW effort is secure, then only bitcoin is relatively secure.  All other chains, having smaller market caps, have smaller hash rate equivalents in PoW and hence exposed.

In as much as there are pump-and-dump altcoins, there are a few that try to solve fundamental problems with bitcoin.

For me, the most fundamental problem in bitcoin is the transparency, and hence I think that coins like dash, but especially, monero, have something valuable.  I'm not a monero shill, and it is not monero itself that is important.  It is because it is based on cryptonote, which itself is based upon ring signatures, the technology that is missing from bitcoin.  If I'm reluctant to use bitcoin (although I do, a little bit), it is its traceability.  Bitcoin is essentially like having your bank account and transactions on a public web site.  The pseudo anonymity of addresses which Satoshi proposed, essentially failed because of the networking effect.

As we can see with ethereum, the fork, and the stopping by exchanges of the ETC the "white hats" tried to exchange, we see the problem with this, and the problem with the non-fungible nature of traceable coins.  Even though this is now done "for morality", soon, when states will mix in, the traceability and the colouring of coins will be worse than with banking.  A thieves/fiscal inspection with bitcoin or any other traceable coin will be worse than with banking.  You will even have to justify the $500,- you got from your aunt on your anniversary.   You will have to justify *everything*.  Power over you will be total with traceable crypto.  And if ever you do something "wrong", your coins will be coloured, no merchant or institution will be able to accept them, you won't even be able to buy some bread with it.

Anonymity is the totally overlooked aspect of crypto, and this is why I think that altcoins like dash, and much more so, like monero, are important, even if they are left aside by most gamblers (private and institutional) that pump the market cap of crypto.

Essentially, how's that different for bitcoin (except maybe that one is expecting the "pump" to be "moon" "in a few years") ?

I think you make a mistake in calling this "a horrendous track record".

On the contrary: this is pure, beautiful freedom.

Humans (like all living beings) are made to rip off one another, and freedom means that anybody can rip off anybody else on a perfectly fair and equal level.  All forms of formal organisation (state, law, ....) are meant to classify people into a small elite that has power to rip off the large majority.  Crypto is one of the few places where the power to rip off others is equally shared amongst us all.  This is, as I said, the beautiful thing of crypto for the moment: the regain of freedom (to rip off one another), against the slavery to be ripped off by the elite.