Does ETH debacle prove the importance of marketing?

[thejaytiesto]

To be honest here, I have no idea how ETH isn't collapsing as people move their ETH to BTC or fiat or gold or whatever. I mean, how come people has still thousands of BTC on the ETH market? I have no idea beyond thinking marketing is a very powerful thing to raise the price of an asset.

I mean fuck, who believes in ETH long term after Vitalik Buterin told exchanges to stop trading to stop panic selling? I think this fact alone makes ETH something you can't trust.

Im waiting for Rootstock to see if it can replace ETH, but for now I would stay cautious with smart contracts stuff.

[BellaBitBit]

Yes, it does prove the importance of marketing.  ETH has branded itself well and you can ride out storms with good branding/marketing.  When Vitalik speaks the markets react and this is a result a good branding/marketing strategy - they have had ample press, appear at events, and present themselves well.  In a Charles Hoskinson video he said Vitalik was traveling all over the world as much as possible to get the word out while the legal team was getting everything ready before people knew that much about ETH.  

[iamnotback]

To be honest here, I have no idea how ETH isn't collapsing as people move their ETH to BTC or fiat or gold or whatever. I mean, how come people has still thousands of BTC on the ETH market? I have no idea beyond thinking marketing is a very powerful thing to raise the price of an asset.

I mean fuck, who believes in ETH long term after Vitalik Buterin told exchanges to stop trading to stop panic selling? I think this fact alone makes ETH something you can't trust.

Im waiting for Rootstock to see if it can replace ETH, but for now I would stay cautious with smart contracts stuff.

Even the DAO attacker explains ETH is not dropping because buying demand is printed out-of-thin-air by the insiders employing margin trading with the ETH they probably deceptively obtained by buying the ICO from themselves. Review the following linked posts for the details:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15343686#msg15343686
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15363783#msg15363783
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1526067.msg15362605#msg15362605
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15364284#msg15364284
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1526614.msg15365639#msg15365639
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1526990.msg15364629#msg15364629

Im waiting for Rootstock to see if it can replace ETH, but for now I would stay cautious with smart contracts stuff.

RootStock is technologically flawed, because Sidechains can't be secure. Review the following linked posts for the details:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15284907#msg15284907
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15286570#msg15286570

CounterParty is technologically flawed, because Bitcoin's block chain can't secure what it doesn't validate. Review the following linked post for the details:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15283868#msg15283868


Edit: another confirmation of my stance on CounterParty and RootStock:

Counterparty and RootStock are two smart-contract projects building on top of bitcoin this way. But, Counterparty bundles its state (how much the guest owes you, etc) into bitcoin transactions, which weren’t designed for this purpose.

This also limits Counterparty transactions to bitcoin’s 10-minute block time, rather than ethereum’s 15-second one. Meanwhile, RootStock is far behind ethereum in development, arguably falling further behind every day, and involves some technical challenges (how to reliably transfer coins between the bitcoin blockchain and RootStock blockchain) that don’t appear to be fully worked out yet.

In both cases, you’re now dependent on two separate networks and technologies: bitcoin, and Counterparty or RootStock.

XCP is not the only smart contract for bitcoin
rootstock and i think maidsafe

I explained a few posts above that XCP is a flawed.

RootStock doesn't have that same flaw, because it is its own side-chain and can verify every transaction. But side-chains have other problems and I expect them to be a clusterfuck.

[European Central Bank]

It was 100% marketing to start with. All that talk of goldman sachs and fancy foundations and an identifiable boy genius. that's way more reassuring than your average heap of shit coin on here. now i guess its continued survival is down to the collective desire to keep it alive.

[JoeyD]

I really wanted to like ethereum, but all the rumors and signs of behind the scenes powers and manipulators with direct contact to or even part of the group "founders" are giving me the heebie-jeebies. Also, even somebody like me who has next to no clue on trading, the ethereum and dao price after the dao-malfunction looks artificial to say the least.

Bitcoin has it's fair share of manipulators and power struggles, but I get the feeling that ethereum is a way more coordinated and well funded attempt at a coup.

Might just be that I've been put in the wrong frame of mind when Charles Hoskinson was talking about pulling all of crypto in their sphere of influence and drawing comparisons to monopolies like Microsoft and walled gardens like the Apple AppsStore. But that stated goal of wanting to create a new walled in monopoly gave me a big scare and I can't help to keep seeing ethereum in that light. Despite some people in the ethereum camp professing no bad intentions towards bitcoin, I can't shake the impression of an attempted power grab. The vocal group of people insisting that ethereum should wipe out bitcoin and rule the world aren't really helping either.

I'm not a fan of the bitcoin elitists camp. I don't like the idea of any monopoly or one chain to rule them all philosophy. But if the powers that be are behind ethereum in an attempt to control this new system and are so successful at marketcap manipulation combined with their pervasive marketing, I can't help seeing them more as a threat to cryptocurrencies in general than a boon. Also despite the argument that it's none of anyone’s business argument by the vocal majority in favor of manual intervention (including shockingly people like Andreas Antonopolous from the looks of it) and slamming everybody outside their group, the precedents they are trying to set do affect all the other cryptocurrencies. So why wouldn't those communities react?

Sorry for the long rant, apparently I needed to vent. In short if the price of ether had dropped more as a consequence of this wake up call in respect to "smart" contracts, it would have made me way waay less apprehensive about ethereum and more willing to help in their endeavor.  But with these blatant price manipulations and sliding arguments in favor of manual interventions (mostly driven by greed than anything else from what I've seen), has the complete opposite effect on me. I do fear for the future if "the market" really falls for tricks like these, despite all the discussion about the problems the bitcoin-revolution was supposed to solve. I really really hope this revolution doesn't end up creating a bigger pile of shit than we have are already.

PS
I've been asking and looking around for a while now without finding any satisfactory answers to these questions.

How has ethereum "solved" the consensus and decision making process?
I've been bombarded with statements that Ethereum has solved the problems like the blocksize debate, but I can't find anything in relation to that. I really hope they aren't talking about the technicality of the blocksizes, instead of the challenge of governance. As I see it, wouldn't the increased complexity of their model make it an exponentially bigger mess than bitcoins simpler situation. Please don't tell me their solution is having a centralized party or foundation control everything.

How has ethereum solved scaling?
I'm not a computer scientist so it might be I missed it due to information overload and me lacking the means to separate wheat from the chaff. But from what I understand about how the network is supposed to work it sure sounds inefficient to me. No matter how I look at it, but for all the verifying nodes in the system having to individually recalculate all the onchain scripts/programs does sound more redundant than efficient to me. Isn't there a more efficient way to do it instead of having a massive amount of cpu-power redoing the exact same calculation on every separate redundant core/node? Is it really possible for that to be the best scalable and most effective solution? Sounds very counter intuitive to me.

[BTCwriter]

To be honest here, I have no idea how ETH isn't collapsing as people move their ETH to BTC or fiat or gold or whatever. I mean, how come people has still thousands of BTC on the ETH market? I have no idea beyond thinking marketing is a very powerful thing to raise the price of an asset.

I mean fuck, who believes in ETH long term after Vitalik Buterin told exchanges to stop trading to stop panic selling? I think this fact alone makes ETH something you can't trust.

Im waiting for Rootstock to see if it can replace ETH, but for now I would stay cautious with smart contracts stuff.

What I see is majority of ETH is controls by a handful of whales and insiders who want to destroy Bitcoin reputation. I think ETH is a useless vaporware scam and I will never touch it.

[r0ach]

[Spoetnik]

@OP
Yup.. agreed something is not right.
It should have had a far larger sustained drop in price i think.

fuck sake's how did "fuel tokens" asset smart contract bullshit ICO coins get to $20 each ?
Like WTF people ?  

@BTCwriter
Agreed !
I thought that when i seen it's scammy launch + Coindesk advertising in 2014.

[alyssa85]

Marketing has played a huge part in Ether's rise and it's "apparent" stability. Just before the DAO got launched every one who had ever posted on the r/bitcoin and r/bitcoinmarkets got spammed with personal messages about Ether.

It was effective in that that's how I first found out about Ether and DAO - through spam! So while people were annoyed at the spamming, and deleted the messages, it was effective in that it drew their attention to something they hadn't heard of before.

As for the price now - it's down to teh sunk cost fallacy. People are holding on to their coins for the same reason those who bought BTC in 2014 for $1000 are holding. They don't want to crystallise a loss.

[LoyceV]

To be honest here, I have no idea how ETH isn't collapsing as people move their ETH to BTC or fiat or gold or whatever. I mean, how come people has still thousands of BTC on the ETH market? I have no idea beyond thinking marketing is a very powerful thing to raise the price of an asset.

I mean fuck, who believes in ETH long term after Vitalik Buterin told exchanges to stop trading to stop panic selling? I think this fact alone makes ETH something you can't trust.

Im waiting for Rootstock to see if it can replace ETH, but for now I would stay cautious with smart contracts stuff.

I completely agree! Eth has proven a. people don't understand the smart contract they're "investing" in and b. Eth is not reliable.
It has also proven that a slick presentation, slick website, and slick creator can get very rich if enough people want to get in hoping to get rich too.

Bitcoin got populair without all this. It didn't need slick advertising.

[SmirkinPepe]

slick presentation, slick website, and slick creator

But it had none of these, lol.

It's just the will of a large group to believe in magic, see for example religion. The pure beliefs of the bagholders will actually keep ethereum from crashing to zero for quite a long time, bar a second big disaster like DAO happening. Making it actually entirely possible it will pump many more times, much to the chagrin of bitcoin holders (ironically suffering from the same kind of blind beliefs).

[Spoetnik]

Marketing has played a huge part in Ether's rise and it's "apparent" stability. Just before the DAO got launched every one who had ever posted on the r/bitcoin and r/bitcoinmarkets got spammed with personal messages about Ether.

It was effective in that that's how I first found out about Ether and DAO - through spam! So while people were annoyed at the spamming, and deleted the messages, it was effective in that it drew their attention to something they hadn't heard of before.

As for the price now - it's down to teh sunk cost fallacy. People are holding on to their coins for the same reason those who bought BTC in 2014 for $1000 are holding. They don't want to crystallise a loss.

I keep forgetting about that.. i did not get PM spam about ETH.
I don't do Redditt ..or even know how to spell it LOL

And i agree with the price theory too.. makes sense.
I just can't grasp how in gods name it even got $20 a coin for ICO DAPSS "Fuel Tokens" WTF ?
They should not have been worth more than one dollar !

[European Central Bank]

i got tons of spam on reddit about it. i'd love to know who was behind that stuff. it's hard to believe it would be anyone to do with eth itself but maybe all they did was pay someone off. either way resorting to that shit is an instant no from me. well done to anyone who made a big pile of bitcoin out of it all the same.