[ANN] Ethereum: Welcome to the Beginning

[tk808]

^That's why I'm liking this project.  The people behind it seem to have enough power to be able to pull the necessary strings to achieve success

So you like corrupted politicians etc too?

This seems a bit sketchy.


They are giving you near nothing of ETH, for X thousands of dollars in btc. And it's an unproven concept.


I'm ready to invest, but, i'll wait and see

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[btcdrak]

^That's why I'm liking this project.  The people behind it seem to have enough power to be able to pull the necessary strings to achieve success

So you like corrupted politicians etc too?

This seems a bit sketchy.


They are giving you near nothing of ETH, for X thousands of dollars in btc. And it's an unproven concept.


I was ready to invest, but this is a little too much bullshit for me.. for now.

The clusterfk called Mastercoin raised a small fortune, is guaranteed to fail in the long term, but still turned out to be a fantastic investment all the same. If you are investing to make money the changes that speculation will drive you into insane profits is pretty high already.

[RGBKey]

So I watched the youtube video a few times and read through the website and wow, all I can say is wow. I plan on investing quite a bit into this. This is truly a piece of work.

[Anduck]

Wonder where these <10 activity Bitcoin Professionals come from?

[justusranvier]

Wonder where these <10 activity Bitcoin Professionals come from?

Is that why newbie restrictions were lifted and this thread is immune to normal categorization rules?

[ThePatient]

^That's why I'm liking this project.  The people behind it seem to have enough power to be able to pull the necessary strings to achieve success

So you like corrupted politicians etc too?

 

The people behind this seem to have established, through their prior work, the appropriate connections in order to place this where it has the highest chance of succeeding . ....while doing so legally.

[Red- Beard]

*** For a monetary unit to be a globally accepted currency it must have PRICE STABILITY!  ***

I'm not so sure about that.  Have you seen CAD / USD lately?

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=CAD&to=USD&view=1Y

Considering we've got $61+ Billion in circulation here in Canada, I would consider our dollar to be anything but stable. -10% over a year is volatile imho.

Besides, no cryptos are mature yet.  Once a crypto is completely mined out (in terms of new blocks of coin), then my best guess is that it would be no more or less stable than the CAD or USD.

[Anduck]

^That's why I'm liking this project.  The people behind it seem to have enough power to be able to pull the necessary strings to achieve success

So you like corrupted politicians etc too?

 

The people behind this seem to have established, through their prior work, the appropriate connections in order to place this where it has the highest chance of succeeding . ....while doing so legally.

Sad.

[vamdor]

The video published on the project's main page mentions Dropbox as one of the examples that could be recreated as a distributed system with this project, but I couldn't find any info on the more interesting question: how?

Which of its facilities would be useful for that? Who would store the data? Would it be a separate system which just happens to use ethereum for user authentication, or would it actually has anything to do with data storage? How would the insanse amount of data stored distributedly in a way that it doesn't choke the individual nodes, but would be readily available any time?

Dropbox really stands out of the other example applications and without at least some basic techincal description it sounds like just a marketing stunt... so can we have some more info?

[TheMightyX]

Q6: Max cap per investor? Have you considered placing a cap on the maximum investment any 1 individual can make? What's to prevent somebody from investing $1 (or 10) Million worth in BTC and owning an excessive % of the system? This would be looked at like a very heavy pre-mine by many.
Thanks,

Hi Vitalik,
I would like to echo this sentiment. I understand accomplishing something like this would be difficult, and since you probably have some wealthy investor backing they may frown upon this kind of setup. But the little guys are looking for any and all help leveling the playing field.

[digitalmagus]

*** For a monetary unit to be a globally accepted currency it must have PRICE STABILITY!  ***

I'm not so sure about that.  Have you seen CAD / USD lately?
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=CAD&to=USD&view=1Y
Considering we've got $61+ Billion in circulation here in Canada, I would consider our dollar to be anything but stable. -10% over a year is volatile imho.
Besides, no cryptos are mature yet.  Once a crypto is completely mined out (in terms of new blocks of coin), then my best guess is that it would be no more or less stable than the CAD or USD.

My layman's definition of 'price stability' infers that street prices of consumer goods and wages remain mostly the same. The value comparison you make here is only with the USD which impacts some % of all Canadian imported goods, but albeit a small overall % (we import most of our widgets from Asia). Sure ~70% of our exports are to the USA and thus the export companies and their employee's wages may be impacted, but again, they are a small % of our total economy.

The $5.00 Starbucks coffee you bought last year, likely still costs $5.00 today ? Likely, your wage is probably still the same or +~2% (CPI)?  Stable prices and wages = price stability.   When  year ago you paid 2000% more for anything priced in BTC than you do today... that's not price stability. Even when compared to 10% devaluation of the CAD vs USD, BTC's volatility is still 200 times in magnitude greater over the same period of time.

You are right in saying that crypto currencies are not mature and this is a catch 22 problem. Until they are widely accepted and massive liquidity exists in the system, they cannot be considered currencies because lack of liquidity = high volatility.... and you can't get them widely accepted quickly because... well, people don't like high volatility currencies ;-)

However, to purposely design a highly deflationary currency (i.e. bitcoin), puts the potential of it being accepted as a currency decades into the future - as you said, after all mining is done. More than likely if bitcoin were allowed to proceed unperturbed by governments, it will cause a global deflationary black hole for all fiat currencies. In other words, everyone will dump all paper money and trade it for bitcoins and the global economy as we know it will collapse. More than likely, governments will shut down bitcoin well before this, whether through legislative means (i.e. bitcoin is now illegal for all businesses to use (aka. China)), or by technical means : TCP port 8333 is firewalled at Tier 1 ISPs - and don't think they can't. At most BTC would only continue to function for black markets.

In regards to Ethereum, I think there's recognition that bitcoin's deflationary model is somehow flawed, although the devs don't offer a thesis for this... but suffice it to say they are taking a significantly different approach closer to our existing Keynesian system. My previous commentary was to suggest that they need more expert brains at work on the economic model to offer justification for what they came up with... else, somebody else will eventually do it better, and Ethereum will eventually be replaced.


And now back to the Ethereum discussion...

[jubalix]

issue 1 is the same  I raised for mastercoin and no one has given an answer from there has given an answer that I am aware of.

say everything about etherium is true, what is the advantages of owning 1 or 100 if what I am getting is access to a bundle of programable switches.

A clone will just come out with all the switches available for any fraction of a coin, or is near free. For example I don't pay much for the bundle of switches that is javascript to make my gmail function.


issue 2,

How will ethereum not bloat itself out of existance?

[TwinWinNerD]

looks intresting, gonna keep an eye on it!

[jubalix]

Welcome to the New Beginning

When the grand experiment that is bitcoin began, the anonymous wizard desired to test two parameters- a trustless, decentralized database enjoying security enforced by the austere relentlessness of cryptography and a robust transaction system capable of sending value across the world without intermediaries. Yet the past five years years have painfully demonstrated a third missing feature: a sufficiently powerful Turing-complete scripting language. Up until this point, most innovation in advanced applications such as domain and identity registration, user-issued currencies, smart property, smart contracts, and decentralized exchange

where are all the services that need this scripted language that painfully demonstrate this need now? please give examples.

ok what you are doing is not a decentralised exchange only a partial one see
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=425317.msg4669283#msg4669283


A true Decentralised trading  requires

[1] a decentralised core trading systems (Ethereum appears to do this part)

[2] Plugins that can interface with various banking systems, individuals in various countries will write these for local requirements, that allow fiat to be sent and received at will without a banks ability to prohibit or detect. Ethereum is not doing this part in any shape of form, all though a programable language might go a long way to allowing its development.


 

has been highly fragmented, and implementing any of these technologies has required creating an entire meta-protocol layer or even a specialized blockchain. Theoretically, however, each and every one of these innovations and more can potentially be made hundreds of times easier to implement, and easier to scale, if only there was a stronger foundational layer with a powerful scripting language for all of these protocols to build upon. And this need is what we seek to satisfy.

Ethereum is a modular, Turing-complete contract scripting system married to a blockchain and developed with a philosophy of simplicity, universality and non-discrimination. Our goal is to provide a platform for decentralized applications - an android of the cryptocurrency world, where all efforts can share a common set of APIs, trustless interactions and no compromises. We ask for the community to join us as volunteers, developers, investors and evangelists seeking to enable a fundamentally different paradigm for the internet and the relationships it provides.

Who is Behind Ethereum?

Our fiduciary team contains 4 members:

• Vitalik Buterin → Inventor of Ethereum, Partner at KryptoKit and Cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine
• Anthony Di Iorio → Founder and Executive Director of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, Bitcoin Decentral, KryptoKit
• Charles Hoskinson → Former CEO of Invictus Innovations and Director of the Bitcoin Education Project
• Mihai Alisie → Founder of Bitcoin Magazine and Egora

We also enjoy a deep bench of developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, evangelists and partners including:

• Dr. Gavin Wood: Core C++ Developer
• Geff Obscura: Core Go Developer
• Dr. Emanuele Costa: Quantitative Analyst; SCRUM Master
• Joseph Lubin: Software Engineering, Quantitative Analyst
• Eric Lombrozo: Software Architect
• Max Kaye: Developer
• Jonathan Mohan: Media, Marketing and Evangelism (BitcoinNYC)
• Wendell Davis: Strategic Partner and Branding (Hive Wallet)
• Anthony Donofrio: Logos, branding, Web Development (Hive Wallet)
• Taylor Gerring: Web Development
• Paul Snow: Language Development, Software Development
• Chris Odom: Strategic Partner, Developer (Open Transactions)
• Jerry Liu and Bin Lu: Chinese strategy and translations (http://www.8btc.com/ethereum)
• Hai Nguyen: Accounting
• Amir Shetrit: Business Development (Colored Coins)
• Steve Dakh: Developer (KryptoKit)

The IPO and Money Supply of Ethereum

The goal of our IPO is to endow an organization, collection of contributors and strategic partners with enough funding to ensure both the Ethereum protocol and the Ethereum ecosystem are bootstrapped to a point of critical mass. We also seek to develop a new type of venture capital that leverages the innovations of cryptocurrencies alongside the traditional of transparency and accountability this community has so thoroughly embraced.

Therefore we have listened carefully to the community’s feedback during the past few weeks, consulted with experts in the field and endured a relentless debate to arrive at the following model:

• Ethereum will be made available for purchase on February 1st, 2014 at a price of 0.001 BTC for 1 Ether (base unit of the system)
• The fundraiser will last two months and close at the end of March
• Early investors for taking a great risk due to the uncertainty of investment will be rewarded by a bonus of 2*initial investment for the first week and then this bonus decays by 2 percent per day for the remainder of the fundraiser until it reaches a floor of the base exchange rate of 0.001 BTC per 1 Ether
• After the fundraiser closes, the total sum of ether produced will be denoted as X and we will instantiate a premine of 0.50*X for the fiduciary members, early stakeholders, strategic partners, a pool for use between the conclusion of the fundraiser and the launch of mining and finally a long term endowment. Specific percentages will be discussed in the Prospectus to be released on the day of the fundraiser (Feb 1st)

so you give half of it to yourself! plus all the BTC you get. PeerCoin DEV refused to even accept donations yet alone premine and went round buying his own product.....Merits of the IDEA should would be much more impressive, that you can rely on them.

• All bitcoin raised will be initially sent to a multisig exodus address controlled by the fiduciary members and then moved to a holding entity established in Canada that will be gradually converted into a decentralized autonomous organization run completely on the Ethereum blockchain within 24 months of the launch of Ethereum for mining

• The holding entity will have both in-house accounting and counsel as well as quarterly audits by an independent firm. All audits, payroll and financial arrangements will be publicly listed on the website for feedback as soon as possible

what percentage do these services swallow. Lawyers/accountants for 3 years are expensive

• The fiduciary members will be vested over a 12 month period and cannot divest more than ⅓ of their position per year thereafter
• We will reserve a percentage of funds raised specifically for R&D within the cryptocurrency space in cooperation with several university partners and the open source community.
• There will be a hard cap of 30,000 bitcoins that if reached will immediately end the fundraiser

so this hard cap pressure people to get in early or miss out combined with the decay.

• The linear inflation rate has been reduced to 0.4*X per year. The formula for total money supply is now TS(t) = 1.5*X + 0.4*X*t
• Given today’s bitstamp price for Bitcoin, should we reach the maximum fundraiser limit of 30,000 bitcoin, this would roughly infer a post-fundraiser market capitalization of roughly $36 million with neutral ROI requiring at least $12 million per year of added market value. Inference from market capitalizations within this space suggests a very positive ROI year 1 and a much more generous long term ROI if growth of demand is non-linear

How does that work ROI on works if your holding value goes up. Do the extra coins go to holder, eg minting or emunie style? Otherwise the formula you gave is about money supply not ROI.

We will switch our PoW from Dagger to a hybrid PoW/PoS system to be developed via a bountied competition conducted by our university partners and open to the general community for participation. The terms will be announced in late february including judges, specifications and the university partners.

So PeerCoin....
[/quote]
Ok so just doing my DD.

The idea of a and lets just call it a programable language (turing complete is a bit sales fluffy), is it object oriented? I imagine it will be like Javascript?

What the advantage of embedding small amounts of data in a block chain and having programs that run locally act on these bits of data, thus keeping computing client side to do things separate from the data side...or is this what you are doing? ( ithink it almost must be waht you are doing)....

If so, would you solution be immediately transferable to any existing blockchain?

[jubalix]

Obviously since the Master Protocol has many of the same goals, I'm keeping an eye on this project.

Regardless of which technology stacks survive and/or thrive, I think we can all agree that the financial world is in for some major upheaval!

it looks like programable master coin

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

"It's not an altcoin, it's a platform for thousands of altcoins."

...except you need ETH to make anything in the system work. So it inevitably becomes the de facto currency of the world in an Ethereum success scenario. XRP all over again.

To be clear I am very excited by the project goals. I just wish people would get past ridiculous premines as a way of funding their projects. If you're a dev and want incentive to work, invest big in mining or purchasing from miners at the start. If Ethereum succeeds you'll have millions or billions without question.

[jubalix]

just looked at some of the codebase

It looks like assembly....

scriptcode_map = {
    0x00: 'STOP',  
    0x01: 'ADD',
    0x02: 'SUB',
    0x03: 'MUL',
    0x04: 'DIV',
    0x05: 'SDIV',
    0x06: 'MOD',
    0x07: 'SMOD',
    0x08: 'EXP',
    0x09: 'NEG',
    0x0a: 'LT',
    0x0b: 'LE',
    0x0c: 'GT',
    0x0d: 'GE',
    0x0e: 'EQ',
    0x0f: 'NOT',
    0x10: 'MYADDRESS',
    0x11: 'TXSENDER',
    0x12: 'TXVALUE',
    0x13: 'TXFEE',
    0x14: 'TXDATAN',
    0x15: 'TXDATA',
    0x16: 'BLK_PREVHASH',
    0x17: 'BLK_COINBASE',
    0x18: 'BLK_TIMESTAMP',
    0x19: 'BLK_NUMBER',
    0x1a: 'BLK_DIFFICULTY',
    0x20: 'SHA256',
    0x21: 'RIPEMD160',
    0x22: 'ECMUL',
    0x23: 'ECADD',
    0x24: 'ECSIGN',
    0x25: 'ECRECOVER',
    0x26: 'ECVALID',
    0x30: 'PUSH',
    0x31: 'POP',
    0x32: 'DUP',
    0x33: 'DUPN',
    0x34: 'SWAP',
    0x35: 'SWAPN',
    0x36: 'LOAD',
    0x37: 'STORE',
    0x40: 'JMP',
    0x41: 'JMPI',
    0x42: 'IND',
    0x50: 'EXTRO',
    0x51: 'BALANCE',
    0x60: 'MKTX',
    0xff: 'SUICIDE'
}

so some one can come along and make a higher level language on to of this....

and looks like your going to be running a local server ala pywallet in a browser to use all of this?

[dzarmush]

Say I invested 1 Btc and received 1000 Ether. I won't be able to sell them withing the first year after IPO is over. And each year after I won't be able to sell more than 333 Ether a year. Is that right?

[dzarmush]

Ethereum is 100% open source. If the community gets angry at the way we handle the funds, they can release a fork and delete whatever portion of the issuance they don't like out of existence. We are thus very aware that we have to tread carefully here.

What stops copycats from doing the same ruining investments of the good guys?

Could you please anwser the question I quoted.

[bbit]

pretty cool project def. will be watching this one !