1) They've conveniently ignored many crypto coins with high transaction levels
2) It's believed that 68% of all ethereum transaction value is controlled by just one system - https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c - A large number of ethereum transactions are just mixing coins to hide ownership.
Which coins with high transaction levels do you mean?
I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.
The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.
Forgive my ignorance but how does mixing achieve privacy? The blockchain is public, so you should be able to trace back ownership regardless of the number of addresses it's been through?
A good distinction to make, 68% of the value is going through the mixers. I saw a calculation that it's only about 17% of the actual number of transactions.
Bitcoin was a good proof of concept, the true value will come from things like Ethereum and others.
Even thought the ICOs are in a clear bubble right now, the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one and could provide low friction VC funding for the next generation of Start Ups. Taking out rent seeking institutions like Private Equity banks, VCs and traditional banks will create a lot of value.
Ethereums first mover advantage for the ICO market will proof to be of a huge value in the race for the dominating world crypto currency.
...the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one...
Only if you ignore the very large risk of SEC enforcement, given that most ICOs are securities. (and claiming that ICO investments are 'donations', like some have tried, isn't going to cut it!)
I’ve had the same thought—what’s the value of a decentralized ledger when you can trade digital assets just as easily? Why use digital cash when you can pay for your coffee with your Tesla stock or your Linode credits or whatever.
But I’m not nearly as certain as you that a pure digital cash will have no value in that world. Yes, Ethereum’s practical value (as a token redeemable for computation) adds volume and provides a price floor, which could make it a more stable store of value. But it also places it in a competitive landscape with other tokens that can perform the same function.
Bitcoin is a pure finance play, which should make modeling it much easier, which should give it some unique appeal. Plus the first mover advantage is huge.
Even if BTC never works out its transaction rate issues, I think it could solidify as a simple, auditable, modelable store for large value transactions.
Sometimes adding features makes a product worse. Twitter was more than Blogger even though it ostensibly did less. In the same sense, I’m not convinced Bitcoin++ will beat Bitcoin.
I am very intrigued though. The “BTC is Friendster” hypothesis is an ok one.
No - selling a 'fantasy number' in exchange for real currency is not 'solid' model.
ICO's have been big recently because buyers were hoping to get in early on a pyramid-like scheme. (Yes, I know it's not quite pyramid), i.e. it's been hype.
Because ICO's offer no ownership of assets ... well ... in the long run they're not worth much.
And 'ownerhip of an economy' is not saying much if there is no economy.
Kik's Kin coins are down 80% and not only that - Kik has 900 Billion of the Kins they can dilute the 100 Billion in market with, meaning another 90% devaluation is coming.
And Kin's get you a share of what economy exactly? The 'Kik' economy? There is no Kik economy.
Anyone who has worked with ETH will tell you that it isn’t really designed as a currency.
A large chunk of the transactions are exchanged who must transfer deposits to other addresses.
This is a hack that everyone does because Ethereum doesn’t allow you to send from multiple addresses reliably.
Also tracking deposits from contracts is a nightmare. The nodes don’t work well at scale. Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues with parity multi sig contracts).
As someone who has worked with ETH, I tend to disagree. If there are issues with Ethereum, they mostly stem from it being ahead of other blockchains in terms of features. With that I mean that other blockchains don't have these issues because they don't offer the features in the first place.
Is it then a good idea to have these features at all if they introduce new risks? I believe so, they enable many interesting projects that are hard to develop on other blockchains. The growth of Ethereum is an attestation to this. As a consequence, many skilled developers are now creating solutions to the (relatively minor) remaining issues.
For bigger issues, like privacy and scalability, no-one has a good answer yet. The Ethereum community is working on promising solutions (Casper, Plasma, zkSNARKs, eWasm).
>>Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues with parity multi sig contracts).
Contracts can be changed if they're made upgradeable. The execution environment is Turing Complete, so it's up to the developer to make contracts secure, upgradeable, etc.
Ethereum has a different blockchain design and ledger security properties than Bitcoin, an archival node is not required for a similar level of security (and is quite extraneous).
From Vitalik, on the link you shared:
> That chart is highly misleading. 300 GB is the size of a full archive node, which stores the history, present state and all historical states. The state itself is only ~1-2 GB and the history is ~10 GB. A pruned node would still store the full state and history, and so would be able to recompute any historical state if you really needed it, but it would only consume around 20 GB. If you only care about present state, you can go much lower.
For those who don't follow the markets, ETH just cleared its all-time-high of $420 about twenty minutes ago. This is a big deal because such numbers weren't seen since June.
This is really misleading. ETH may handle more than the top crypto m by market cap, but Steemit and Bitshares dwarf all of these combined by number of transactions.
Looking like ethereum is very mature technology these days, it's the companies and smart contracts that are built on ethereum that are a risk now, much like Bitcoin how we have centralization from having exchanges or wallets like coin base everyone uses.
Is there any way to know which transactions are for goods and services and which are for speculation? That is a necessary number to interpret this headline.
[+] [-] joosters|8 years ago|reply
2) It's believed that 68% of all ethereum transaction value is controlled by just one system - https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c - A large number of ethereum transactions are just mixing coins to hide ownership.
[+] [-] DennisP|8 years ago|reply
I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.
The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.
[+] [-] cordite|8 years ago|reply
Isn't that the definition of laundering?
[+] [-] kompiuter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisClark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valsoltow|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mrwong|8 years ago|reply
Even thought the ICOs are in a clear bubble right now, the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one and could provide low friction VC funding for the next generation of Start Ups. Taking out rent seeking institutions like Private Equity banks, VCs and traditional banks will create a lot of value.
Ethereums first mover advantage for the ICO market will proof to be of a huge value in the race for the dominating world crypto currency.
[+] [-] joosters|8 years ago|reply
Only if you ignore the very large risk of SEC enforcement, given that most ICOs are securities. (and claiming that ICO investments are 'donations', like some have tried, isn't going to cut it!)
[+] [-] guiomie|8 years ago|reply
Don't you think if a better alternative comes up companies could deprecate tokens and relaunch them on another blockchain?
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
But I’m not nearly as certain as you that a pure digital cash will have no value in that world. Yes, Ethereum’s practical value (as a token redeemable for computation) adds volume and provides a price floor, which could make it a more stable store of value. But it also places it in a competitive landscape with other tokens that can perform the same function.
Bitcoin is a pure finance play, which should make modeling it much easier, which should give it some unique appeal. Plus the first mover advantage is huge.
Even if BTC never works out its transaction rate issues, I think it could solidify as a simple, auditable, modelable store for large value transactions.
Sometimes adding features makes a product worse. Twitter was more than Blogger even though it ostensibly did less. In the same sense, I’m not convinced Bitcoin++ will beat Bitcoin.
I am very intrigued though. The “BTC is Friendster” hypothesis is an ok one.
[+] [-] alexasmyths|8 years ago|reply
No - selling a 'fantasy number' in exchange for real currency is not 'solid' model.
ICO's have been big recently because buyers were hoping to get in early on a pyramid-like scheme. (Yes, I know it's not quite pyramid), i.e. it's been hype.
Because ICO's offer no ownership of assets ... well ... in the long run they're not worth much.
And 'ownerhip of an economy' is not saying much if there is no economy.
Kik's Kin coins are down 80% and not only that - Kik has 900 Billion of the Kins they can dilute the 100 Billion in market with, meaning another 90% devaluation is coming.
And Kin's get you a share of what economy exactly? The 'Kik' economy? There is no Kik economy.
[+] [-] retube|8 years ago|reply
so people will invest money for free via ICOs?
[+] [-] js4|8 years ago|reply
The protocol has so many other issues.
Anyone who has worked with ETH will tell you that it isn’t really designed as a currency.
A large chunk of the transactions are exchanged who must transfer deposits to other addresses.
This is a hack that everyone does because Ethereum doesn’t allow you to send from multiple addresses reliably.
Also tracking deposits from contracts is a nightmare. The nodes don’t work well at scale. Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues with parity multi sig contracts).
The list goes on and on.
[+] [-] remcob|8 years ago|reply
Is it then a good idea to have these features at all if they introduce new risks? I believe so, they enable many interesting projects that are hard to develop on other blockchains. The growth of Ethereum is an attestation to this. As a consequence, many skilled developers are now creating solutions to the (relatively minor) remaining issues.
For bigger issues, like privacy and scalability, no-one has a good answer yet. The Ethereum community is working on promising solutions (Casper, Plasma, zkSNARKs, eWasm).
[+] [-] Buttes|8 years ago|reply
Hah wow you weren't kidding. Amateur hour.
To add to your list: no checksum for addresses. If you typo the recipient address, the client will happily render your ether unspendable.
[+] [-] CryptoPunk|8 years ago|reply
Contracts can be changed if they're made upgradeable. The execution environment is Turing Complete, so it's up to the developer to make contracts secure, upgradeable, etc.
[+] [-] tromp|8 years ago|reply
http://bc.daniel.net.nz/
[+] [-] shazow|8 years ago|reply
From Vitalik, on the link you shared:
> That chart is highly misleading. 300 GB is the size of a full archive node, which stores the history, present state and all historical states. The state itself is only ~1-2 GB and the history is ~10 GB. A pruned node would still store the full state and history, and so would be able to recompute any historical state if you really needed it, but it would only consume around 20 GB. If you only care about present state, you can go much lower.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...
More interesting details in this subthread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tempay|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] seansoutpost|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CryptoPunk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chanfest22|8 years ago|reply
https://www.cointracker.network/rates
[+] [-] heheocoenev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seansoutpost|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] billylindeman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viach|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lee101|8 years ago|reply
Keep up to date with the live forecasts at https://bitbank.nz
Ethereum doing fairly well recently
[+] [-] rothbardrand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koksikus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmalade92|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kapauldo|8 years ago|reply