The Ethereum Paradox

[monsterer]

monsterer is wrong again. Even within the block there is no way to attain commutativity of ordering. Any particular choice of arbitrary orderings of script executions for a block result may achieve a different result for contracts than another ordering (unless the scripts are invariant to ordering but that basically means the scripts can do nothing). That is the definition of indeterminism.

Perhaps I should have said 'within one script execution within one block'. Block ordering is eventual, just like bitcoin. In ethereum this has scope for more dire consequences than it does with bitcoin; it depends on the application.

[piloder]

I do not think Bitcoin will be crashed by Ethereum. Bitcoin has much bigger community. Its value will increase with time.

[TPTB_need_war]

I do not think Bitcoin will be crashed by Ethereum. Bitcoin has much bigger community. Its value will increase with time.

Bitcoin has users. I use Bitcoin. You use Bitcoin. Not just for speculating.

Ethereum has precisely 0 users and will never attain 1 user. A fake $600 million market cap with $21 million in fake daily volume today on Poloneix and not even 1 real user more than a year after the ICO raised $millions (which has all been spent).

It isn't even a joke to compare the two. It is fraud to even remotely insinuate that Ethereum is any where near Bitcoin's level.

And even considering that the perhaps 100,000 serious users of Bitcoin is nothing in terms of millions of serious users adoption compared to even Corel Painter which I was involved (in a minor role) with creating, further exemplifies the pitiful ridiculousness of the Ethereum shills.

And poof it's gone.

[Fuserleer]

Good topic roach, though its grown fast!

Fuserleer has been working on one for years and has been unable to release something.

Indeed I have been working on it for years, because its a feckin hard problem!

That said I have our solution functioning, I've ran numerous local and small scale WAN tests so far and it all functions well.  The next step is a large WAN test, which is what our upcoming Open Beta will provide.

I've viewed information/presentations etc about Eth's proposal for partitioning/sharding and its quite interesting.  If you really dig into how they set it up, it seems to apply some similar ways of thinking as my channeled ledger proposals, and applying them to a block chain.  That is, no UTXO, instead tracking of "account balances" (which they already have in V1.0) and accounts "living" in a particular partition.  They fall short by trying to apply this to a block chain.

I tried a similar approach initially with block chains, and it wasn't too efficient as a block chain's structure doesn't lend itself very well to being "split up", nor would it allow a great deal more scalability in the long term due to propagation.  I ditched it after about 3 months of fighting with it and not getting anywhere near the desired performance and went back to the drawing board.

The problem lies with the fact that the blocks contain transactions from ALL the partitions, and so the propagation of the transaction data is not really improved at all.  A node at the opposite end of the network that is only interested in transactions within P5 has to wait for that block to propagate all the way across the network, with each relaying node storing the information from it that modifies partitions they are holding.

In the case of Ethereum, the block times are quite short, so its at least feasible that each block only contains information for a subset of partitions.  Here though it still can run into trouble as the underlying structure is still a chain, if you have say 32 partitions and the block time is 10 seconds, then on average transaction confirmation times will increase to 320 seconds and beyond.  If you decrease the block time too much, you'll find yourself in a network with a lot of orphans being constantly produced.

There are probably other techniques that could be employed to speed up partitioned transaction propagation using blocks, but at the cost of additional added complexity.

With a channeled ledger, transactions are "independent" elements and can be transmitted directly to the nodes that need them, typically within less than 3 hops from the producing node.  Nodes that are interested in transactions that reside in P5 will receive them almost immediately from other P5 holding nodes, rather than have to wait for a full block.  As there is no mining, transactions are valid and "confirmed" in very short time span (usually instant providing the creator is honest), in the worst case a transaction can be held processing for ~10 seconds until the next ledger state is created if the node processing it has discovered discrepancies.

There is still the matter of the cross-partition problem, and it seems that the Ethereum proposals intend to solve it by way of Merkle receipts and Patricia trees.  This approach may be successful, I had a similar solution in mind if the preferred implementation of compact global state using zk-proofs to prove an account has sufficient balance was impossible.  It hasn't hit any show stopper problems as yet though, so I've not looked deeper into the alternative solution/s and their implementation.

Fundamentally the main cause of issues with partitioning/sharding is the data structure itself, blocks and chains just do not play nice with partitioning.  This is the primary reason why I've taken a different approach, removed blocks and replaced them with independent channels and compact global ledger states that are similar in principle to Ripple's but with the added support of partitioning.

Ethereum is going to have a hard time implementing partitioning on a block chain, and I doubt they will see anything like the 100,000k tx/s that the presentation states they will.  The best that my partitioned block chain implementation could achieve was ~1000-1500 tx/s, and adding additional partitions at that point actually slowed it down.  I doubt that Ethereum will be able to do much better, and certainly not 2 orders of magnitude worth.

[TPTB_need_war]

monsterer is wrong again. Even within the block there is no way to attain commutativity of ordering. Any particular choice of arbitrary orderings of script executions for a block result may achieve a different result for contracts than another ordering (unless the scripts are invariant to ordering but that basically means the scripts can do nothing). That is the definition of indeterminism.

Perhaps I should have said 'within one script execution within one block'. Block ordering is eventual, just like bitcoin. In ethereum this has scope for more dire consequences than it does with bitcoin; it depends on the application.

Specifically the generative essence distinction is that Bitcoin's UXTO history is a directed acyclic graph, which by definition means it has no recursion (i.e. no cycles).

Has anyone proven that Bitcoin's scripts maintain this property?

Whereas, only perfectly dependently typed programs have bounded recursion and can be proven to halt. It may be possible to model commutative scripts that are 100% dependently typed, but this by no means can open (to composition and open) the block chain state to every script that someone wants to create.

If Vitalik even had a clue about Computer Science, the first thing he would have done is model the scripting in a purely dependently typed language such as Epigram or Coq.

I must admit I hadn't really expended more than 5 minutes (cumulatively) thinking about it until today.


Edit: this blog post explains a bit about the insoluble synchrony problem. And not surprisingly he uses the same terminology as I did above.

[TPTB_need_war]

It was the following linked post where I linked to the post I had made on Vitalik's blog about the Consensus-by-betting plan for Ethereum's future version named Casper:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/czcpoez

I explained at the linked post above that Consensus-by-betting is essentially a proof-of-stake/share algorithm in the sense that the financial penalty mechanism is based on deposits (stakes). And PoS has failure modes which don't have a Nash equilibrium (some of which Vlad is not aware of!) and here follows I described how longest chain rule does have a Nash equilibrium:

Thus I have explained there is no Nash equilibrium in Monero's penalty feature (unlike for Satoshi's longest chain rule where there is indeed a Nash equilibrium because if miners don't converge on the longest chain then all their chains are invalid/orphans and worthless without consensus). ArticMine is probably thinking that since miners have different costs, the equilibrium point for transaction fees will be the weighted average but I have explained the holistic economics by which this weighted average is driven by the costs of the largest hashrate miners until they control all the hashrate[1].

Greg Meredith talks technobabble for 15 minutes about the design of Casper.

Greg is talking about the math that says if the bets are rationally motivated by the penalties, then it should be possible to get them to converge on a consensus as to which block from all the validators (i.e. verifiers) is correct and chosen, i.e. that convergence of consensus can be mathematically guaranteed.

Vlad Zamfir had a video presentation and an audio presentation about Casper. I had also seen a video presentation by Vitalik which explained more about sharding and an overview.

But what all three Vitalik, Greg, and Vlad are failing to grasp is a MORE FUNDAMENTAL INSOLUBLE FLAW which is what I wrote in the prior post that consensus requires the the underlying state transformations for contracts are/is bounded on recursion, otherwise the partial orderings diverge and it is impossible to unify them into one block chain ordering. Bob McElrath explained on Vitalik's block the consensus requires fungibility of contracts. By fungibility what he is really wanting to say is commutativity of ordering, which is achieved (other than a double-spend) in Bitcoin by the UXTO history having the directed acyclic graph property.

Edit: Vlad's conceptualization of the CAP Theorem at the 15:17 slide of his video presentation is incorrect! Once you allow Partitioning of the block chain state, it is then impossible to regain both Consistency and Availability. Vlad seems to think you can regain Consensus consistency after waiting for a vote, but that is incorrect because the partitioned state is then irrevocably in conflict and can be reconciled any more! Also Vlad makes many other errors as well.


These three guys are clueless. They are making so many mistakes.

[speaktome]

But will ETH reach 10 USD?

10 or 12 max. After price will drop again.

[mkc]

Something not feasible in the long run doesn't prevent some special interest group from pumping and dumping it. Remember Dash was once traded at 25 dollars. If you have ETH, it will be good to take some profit around 10 dollars, then some at 15 dollars, just don't marry to it.
In my case, I don't own it, and I probably will not own it in the future.

[r0ach]

Remember Dash was once traded at 25 dollars.

Darkcoin was a dysfunctional product and Anonymint gave the Duffler step by step instructions on how to make it kinda work haha.  So thank Anonymint for your Duffler profits.

[StinkyLover]

It was the following linked post where I linked to the post I had made on Vitalik's blog about the Consensus-by-betting plan for Ethereum's future version named Casper:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/czcpoez

I explained at the linked post above that Consensus-by-betting is essentially a proof-of-stake/share algorithm in the sense that the financial penalty mechanism is based on deposits (stakes). And PoS has failure modes which don't have a Nash equilibrium (some of which Vlad is not aware of!) and here follows I described how longest chain rule does have a Nash equilibrium:

Thus I have explained there is no Nash equilibrium in Monero's penalty feature (unlike for Satoshi's longest chain rule where there is indeed a Nash equilibrium because if miners don't converge on the longest chain then all their chains are invalid/orphans and worthless without consensus). ArticMine is probably thinking that since miners have different costs, the equilibrium point for transaction fees will be the weighted average but I have explained the holistic economics by which this weighted average is driven by the costs of the largest hashrate miners until they control all the hashrate[1].

Greg Meredith talks technobabble for 15 minutes about the design of Casper.

Greg is talking about the math that says if the bets are rationally motivated by the penalties, then it should be possible to get them to converge on a consensus as to which block from all the validators (i.e. verifiers) is correct and chosen, i.e. that convergence of consensus can be mathematically guaranteed.

Vlad Zamfir had a video presentation and an audio presentation about Casper. I had also send a video presentation by Vitalik which explained more about sharding and an overview.

But what both Vitalik, Greg, and Vlad are failing to grasp is a MORE FUNDAMENTAL INSOLUBLE FLAW which is what I wrote in the prior post that consensus requires the the underlying state transformations for contracts are/is bounded on recursion, otherwise the partial orderings diverge and it is impossible to unifying them into one block chain ordering. Bob McElrath explained on Vitalik's block the consensus requires fungibility of contracts. By fungibility what he is really wanting to say is commutativity of ordering, which is achieved (other than a double-spend) in Bitcoin by the UXTO history having the directed acyclic graph property.

Edit: Vlad's conceptualization of the CAP Theorem at the 15:17 slide of his video presentation is incorrect! Once you allow Partitioning of the block chain state, it is then impossible to regain both Consistency and Availability. Vlad seems to think you can regain Consensus consistency after waiting for a vote, but that is incorrect because the partitioned state is not irrevocably in conflict and can be reconciled any more! Also Vlad makes many other errors as well.


These three guys are clueless. They are making so many mistakes.

I hear you, honestly I do, but my laptop isn't perfect (it sometimes grinds to a halt at 100% disk usage), my super duper new flat screen sometimes pixelates, my old CDs used to jump and skip, and 'always on' is sometimes 'off'.

There are well known discussions about bitcoin and it's suitability as a financial tool. It is just too slow and bloated!

The point I'm making here is that tech is NEVER perfect. It's all about the best tool for the job at the time that particular piece of tech comes into public usage. ETH is not perfect and it never will be. Once the issues in ETH are addressed in the next big thing in crypto, the next big thing in crypto will have its own flaws exposed, and so on.

With all the flaws of bitcoin, people still believe in it. It is the same for ETH.

Personally, I see complementary blockchains on the horizon. App execution, storage, network interactions, accountability/trust/auditing etc, all contributing to the global network concept (conspiracy theorists please insert 666 aka 'The Beast' here) rather than the one size fits all model.

Imperfect blockchains working symbiotically to simulate the perfect blockchain (with downtime due to hackers on public holidays - fixed by Monday morning after an outcry in the national press!).

Nothing in this world is perfect.

[TPTB_need_war]

It was the following linked post where I linked to the post I had made on Vitalik's blog about the Consensus-by-betting plan for Ethereum's future version named Casper:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/czcpoez

I explained at the linked post above that Consensus-by-betting is essentially a proof-of-stake/share algorithm in the sense that the financial penalty mechanism is based on deposits (stakes). And PoS has failure modes which don't have a Nash equilibrium (some of which Vlad is not aware of!) and here follows I described how longest chain rule does have a Nash equilibrium:

Thus I have explained there is no Nash equilibrium in Monero's penalty feature (unlike for Satoshi's longest chain rule where there is indeed a Nash equilibrium because if miners don't converge on the longest chain then all their chains are invalid/orphans and worthless without consensus). ArticMine is probably thinking that since miners have different costs, the equilibrium point for transaction fees will be the weighted average but I have explained the holistic economics by which this weighted average is driven by the costs of the largest hashrate miners until they control all the hashrate[1].

Greg Meredith talks technobabble for 15 minutes about the design of Casper.

Greg is talking about the math that says if the bets are rationally motivated by the penalties, then it should be possible to get them to converge on a consensus as to which block from all the validators (i.e. verifiers) is correct and chosen, i.e. that convergence of consensus can be mathematically guaranteed.

Vlad Zamfir had a video presentation and an audio presentation about Casper. I had also seen a video presentation by Vitalik which explained more about sharding and an overview.

But what all three Vitalik, Greg, and Vlad are failing to grasp is a MORE FUNDAMENTAL INSOLUBLE FLAW which is what I wrote in the prior post that consensus requires the the underlying state transformations for contracts are/is bounded on recursion, otherwise the partial orderings diverge and it is impossible to unifying them into one block chain ordering. Bob McElrath explained on Vitalik's block the consensus requires fungibility of contracts. By fungibility what he is really wanting to say is commutativity of ordering, which is achieved (other than a double-spend) in Bitcoin by the UXTO history having the directed acyclic graph property.

Edit: Vlad's conceptualization of the CAP Theorem at the 15:17 slide of his video presentation is incorrect! Once you allow Partitioning of the block chain state, it is then impossible to regain both Consistency and Availability. Vlad seems to think you can regain Consensus consistency after waiting for a vote, but that is incorrect because the partitioned state is then irrevocably in conflict and can be reconciled any more! Also Vlad makes many other errors as well.


These three guys are clueless. They are making so many mistakes.

I hear you, honestly I do, but my laptop isn't perfect (it sometimes grinds to a halt at 100% disk usage), my super duper new flat screen sometimes pixelates, my old CDs used to jump and skip, and 'always on' is sometimes 'off'.

There are well known discussions about bitcoin and it's suitability as a financial tool. It is just too slow and bloated!

The point I'm making here is that tech is NEVER perfect. It's all about the best tool for the job at the time that particular piece of tech comes into public usage. ETH is not perfect and it never will be. Once the issues in ETH are addressed in the next big thing in crypto, the next big thing in crypto will have its own flaws exposed, and so on.

With all the flaws of bitcoin, people still believe in it. It is the same for ETH.

Personally, I see complementary blockchains on the horizon. App execution, storage, network interactions, accountability/trust/auditing etc, all contributing to the global network concept (conspiracy theorists please insert 666 aka 'The Beast' here) rather than the one size fits all model.

Imperfect blockchains working symbiotically to simulate the perfect blockchain (with downtime due to hackers on public holidays - fixed by Monday morning after an outcry in the national press!).

Nothing in this world is perfect.

The problem with analogies is category error. Your laptop doesn't fail for everyone. It fails only for you, then you reboot it and learn not to overload its systems. That is decentralization. Whereas when a block chain fails, up to millions of people are impacted.

I have seen many speculators in this forum use this line of reasoning, which basically is "nothing is perfect, pragmatism is how business gets done in the real world".

I am all for pragmatism, but that reasoning does not apply in this case of comparing say Ethereum to for example Monero or Bitcoin, because when a project fails on its fundamentals then it crashes and burns, e.g. the fork of Stellar's consensus algorithm (which was copied from Ripple) before SCP was invented nearly destroyed the Stellar project. That argument about pragmatism does apply in other contexts obviously. I used pragmaticism when I created CoolPage. It in fact never did import HTML but yet it was very popular as an HTML editor because people liked the easy-to-use pixel perfect WYSIWYG placement of photos and text.

Bitcoin's promised Nash equilibrium has never failed (well there was a bug once or twice that required centralized intervention). It was always specified that the 51% attack is a threat. We can say that the 65% of the hashrate that the Chinese miners allegedly control has enabled them to veto the adoption of any block size increase and they effectively have 51% attacked Bitcoin presumably so they can drive transaction fees higher so they can increase profits for the oligarchy they have controlling Bitcoin (and I read yesterday they are also blocking Classic's doubling to 2MB).

So therefor and also including the scalecopalyse ongoing, that Bitcoin is not perfect. However the salient distinction is that Bitcoin has performed exactly as the white paper said it would. Even Satoshi had admitted that Bitcoin would likely become centralized over time in order to scale.

So Bitcoin has been basically perfect to its specification. Bitcoin has been reliable to the specification and I for one have been working on how to solve the issues that Satoshi did not attempt to solve w.r.t. to scaling and centralization. I think I have that solution and I am working on specifying it formally and implementing it (if I can stop foruming!).

Whereas, so many of the alt-coins have either no or insufficient specification (e.g. VanillaCoin, Ethereum, MaidSafe) or their specification is flawed and can't ever work at all (e.g. Ethereum, Storj, Filecoin, etc). There is another class of specifications that is very thorough and will work but only with centralization that they do not fully admit in the specifications (e.g. Ripple, Iota, Stellar's SCP).

Click the links in the prior paragraph for the gory details.

In my next post in this thread, I will try to further explain why Ethereum can't adhere to its implied specification (and I write 'implied' because afaik there is no coherent specification for Casper, one has to piece together the puzzle from presentations by the developers).

[TPTB_need_war]

I've viewed information/presentations etc about Eth's proposal for partitioning/sharding and its quite interesting.  If you really dig into how they set it up, it seems to apply some similar ways of thinking as my channeled ledger proposals, and applying them to a block chain.  That is, no UTXO, instead tracking of "account balances" (which they already have in V1.0) and accounts "living" in a particular partition.  They fall short by trying to apply this to a block chain.

[...]

With a channeled ledger, transactions are "independent" elements and can be transmitted directly to the nodes that need them...

[...]

There is still the matter of the cross-partition problem, and it seems that the Ethereum proposals intend to solve it by way of Merkle receipts and Patricia trees.  This approach may be successful, I had a similar solution in mind if the preferred implementation of compact global state using zk-proofs to prove an account has sufficient balance was impossible.  It hasn't hit any show stopper problems as yet though, so I've not looked deeper into the alternative solution/s and their implementation.

[...]

I want to set aside the performance issues for the moment and focus on the impossibility of granting both Partition tolerance and retaining Consensus/Consistency and Availability/Access, which the CAP theorem states is impossible. I know many developers want to delude themselves into believing the CAP theorem only applies at the a lower level semantic layer of the distributed network, but I intend to challenge your explanation in order to prove that is a delusion.

It is my understanding from evaluating possible designs, that if transactions are allowed to span partitions (a.k.a. shards), then it is impossible to prevent a double-spend by spending on two or more partitions (i.e. maintain Consistency) unless all partitions verify each other, which of course defeats the scaling benefits that partitions were intended to provide (and really just eliminates the partition tolerance). And if transactions are not allowed to span partitions (i.e. they can only transact to the validators in their partition), then it is impossible for a transaction to become unstuck (i.e. regain Availability) if all the authorized validators for the partition are censoring the transaction, are unreachable or have stopped being validators. It is possible to change the set of validators periodically such as based on the progression of the block chain (e.g. Dash Evolution quorum), but this makes it impossible to objectively detect a 51% attack (which is one of the aspects my design attempts to improve). I solved this issue by allowing BOTH partitioned transactions and spanning transactions where the latter conforms to the normal Satoshi longest chain rule (but with my unprofitable PoW improvement). Also there remains the issue that there must be a global consensus that all partitions were validated correctly, yet if all partitions validate each other, then the scaling advantage of having partitions is lost. You mention Merkel and Patricia trees to provide cross-partition transactions? I think it is impossible to achieve my solution and provide security without a (either PoW or PoS) chain, i.e. that Partion tolerance must be limited to intra-block because there still needs to be a consensus around whether a transaction has spanned a partition and thus if we introduce partition tolerance interblock then we will lose either Consistency or Availability. Also note PoS has Nash equilibrium failure modes which PoW doesn't have, so I chose PoW but improved it by making it unprofitable.

Afaics, Ethereum has an additional insoluble challenge which eMunie, Iota, and my design do not have to solve. That is they have to guarantee ordering of contract execution is Consistent even within a partition, which afaik (from Computer Science fundamentals) is impossible unless the scripts are 100% dependently typed; because otherwise they are not commutative and the permutations of orderings with the unbounded recursion of general scripting results in the block chain state being indeterminate. If one instead argues that any partial ordering will suffice (just chose one arbitrarily), this is equivalent to arguing that contract ordering doesn't matter, i.e. that they are commutative. It is a circular logic. So I really have no idea what the designers of Casper are thinking  

Serenity is intended to have two major feature sets: abstraction, a concept that I initially expanded on in this blog post here, and Casper, our security-deposit-based proof of stake algorithm. Additionally, we are exploring the idea of adding at least the scaffolding that will allow for the smooth deployment over time of our scalability proposals, and at the same time completely resolve parallelizability concerns brought up here – an instant very large gain for private blockchain instances of Ethereum with nodes being run in massively multi-core dedicated servers, and even the public chain may see a 2-5x improvement in scalability.

[hashtag101]

Iota seems to solve the scaling problem.

However TPTB, I see you added it to the last category meaning you see it becoming centralized.

I am not challenging you here. I would like to understand how their project will become centralized.
I find Iota very exciting from what I have learned so far, so this news sort of "burst the hope bubble".

Thanks

[TPTB_need_war]

However TPTB, I see you added it to the last category meaning you see it becoming centralized.

I am not challenging you here. I would like to understand how their project will become centralized.

Refer to the same thread which the "Stellar SCP" link leads to.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

All this money flowing into alts is depressing. I had kinda hoped Cryptsy had killed that scene for good.

[TPTB_need_war]

All this money flowing into alts is depressing. I had kinda hoped Cryptsy had killed that scene for good.

Don't worry the market caps are likely fake insiders buying from themselves, so the amount isn't $400 million, perhaps just a few $millions.

Does the pump of Ethereum just finish and the hot money is moving to the Moneoro? I think it is long over due.

Ostensibly Ethereum insiders held a lot of ETH and BTC which they could use to sell it to themselves over and over again to drive up the fake price on the exchanges. The price was not likely driven by very much hot money. The only requirement was that the true buyers (not the insiders) exceed the sellers so that the insiders could be net sellers.

Once there are more sellers than buyers, then the insiders can't continue the manipulation thus the price collapses. But if the selling subsides, the insiders can start pumping it again. But it depends on whether any buyers will be motivated to buy. It is a rollercoaster//yoyo game that extracts money from the speculators. Everyone is a net loser over time, except the bandit insiders who fleece the community.

Monero in theory doesn't have this centralization of the float and thus can't in theory be P&D like that. So it might be difficult to light the speculative fever necessary to get such a dramatic price rise. But realize that not that much hot money was involved in the recent ETH P&D. Only Poloniex and Kraken know for sure. Perhaps only a few $millions or much less 

[Mastsetad]

All this money flowing into alts is depressing. I had kinda hoped Cryptsy had killed that scene for good.

Don't worry the market caps are likely fake insiders buying from themselves, so the amount wasted isn't $400 million, perhaps just a few $millions.

Smart contracts are getting a lot of attention lately. Anything interesting happening yet?

I do not find the reason for the recent rise. Did anybody find why the price rose so much recently?

[TPTB_need_war]

I do not find the reason for the recent rise. Did anybody find why the price rose so much recently?

Possibility is they need to raise the ETH price so they can sell some because they had exhausted their $millions in funding from the ICO vaporware pre-sale:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30?context=3

Another reason one might imagine that perhaps Vitalik could be corrupted to participate in the pump by emphasizing Casper vaporware and hiding the fact they were not close to solving the fundamental technological issues. And yet they were running out of money (but not now if they can sustain these higher prices for ETH and/or have sold a lot of ETH on this price rise ... in either case selling ETH to bag holders).

So one might imagine perhaps the insiders have cleverly realized they could control Vitalik so they would be able to cash out.

The professionals play these games very strategically. You bag holders have no chance against them (unless of course you sell early enough and get out the door before the rest of the bag holders). Note I am not short ETH, but I did play this game strategically also. I waited for ETH to reach a nosebleed price before I started to reveal the truth more aggressively. This is a warning to these professionals (hucksters) to not fuck with my coin when I release it.

Edit: I have just challenged Vitalik directly:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czx5jej

Edit#2: Vitalik admits they've been selling on the pump (in violation of escrow?). And note he mentions raising monthly budget so more money in their pockets (see how this works, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine!):

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/45bhus/so_the_ethereum_foundation_can_now_fund_itself/czwqr30

[sanas]

Do we know who is behind the latest pump of Ethereum. That requires to lock a lot of Ethereum and needs a lot of Bitcoin.

[TPTB_need_war]

Do we know who is behind the latest pump of Ethereum. That requires to lock a lot of Ethereum and needs a lot of Bitcoin.

 

I see ~93% of the volume is on Poloniex and Kraken:

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/#markets

Does anyone know if these exchanges enforce strict KYC and keep records of all trades so that authorities will be able to determine who was selling to whom? So an investigation could determine if the insiders were buying from themselves to manipulate the price?

Afaik, this would be insider trading and should get them jail time (at least afaik according to SEC regulations).

The fools who support these scams by buying the coins and promoting them, are giving the government every reason to regulate alt-coins. You are polluting  the well from which we all drink.

Note though that Peter Thiel had gifted a $100,000 award to Vitalik, so perhaps Ethereum has protection at the highest levels of our corrupt system. Who knows