[snitko]

Whether or not you're aligned with Bitcoin political values and goals, please don't be duped by Ethereum. It may appear as something useful, without the stigma of Bitcoin being black market money. However, you ONLY need black market money. Everything else that's ok with being regulated, does not need a blockchain. The hard problem that Bitcoin solved was "How do we create money that wouldn't collapse and lose value once outlawed". The proof-of-work solution cannot be replicated (for reasons I won't go into here, homework for you). And that's a good thing.

Ethereum is a scam and has always been a scam from its inception. Multiple reasons for that:

1) Overly complex, obfuscating its lack of problem to solve by having lots of features and code

2) Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing" to try and pump the price and keep the interest going.

3) No real world use case. Only promises and cryptokittes.

4) Literally controlled by one guy (see the now famous "Can you guys stop trading" quote).

5) Only produced scam ICOs with 99.99% of ICO projects practically stealing money from investors with no repercussions whatsoever.

There are many more, but the thing to remember is - Bitcoin solves a real problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to outlaw in some way. That is the real pain Bitcoin solves for people: not agreeing to unjust laws peacefully and quietly exiting the system.

[seibelj]

Ethereum is a blockchain for general purpose computing. It’s not a scam, it delivered what it promised. MakerDAO, mentioned in the post, is a cool and useful project running on Ethereum.

I agree with you about the core use case for Bitcoin currently being an escape from the government-forced financial system. It pierced the monopoly successfully. But the Ethereum screed is just lies at this point, Ethereum is one of the good ones.

[jkhdigital]

"a blockchain for general purpose computing" is precisely the problem. Nobody wanted or needed that. Bitcoin was created as digital money. A bunch of people mistakenly thought that the best "feature" of Bitcoin was its programmability, and doubled down on that by allowing arbitrary computations in transactions, which just opened up the Pandora's Box of attack vectors.

And you can't really say "Ethereum is one of the good ones" if it literally enabled the wholesale defrauding of billions of dollars from ill-informed speculators by providing the platform for those fraudulent ICOs.

[snitko]

What has it delivered exactly? Where is it being used that's not itself a scam? MakerDAO - which seems to be some sort of token issuance thing - has no real world mechanism for enforcement. That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents? This is the thing that ETH fanboys are completely delusional about. Securities only work because state regulators enforce the laws guaranteeing their value.

[Zamicol]

Afraid of a little competition? This is the paradox of the bitcoin maximalist: The 'free market' is good but don't try to compete with my 'one true asset'!

I heard about Bitcoin in 2010 a few days before MagicalTux announced Mt. Gox on the Bitcoin forums. Once graphic card mining became a thing I quickly started a small farm while in school.

When I first understood PoW I immediately knew PoW must die for cryptocurrency to become sustainable. It is the single largest flaw with contemporary cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has become stale and unwilling to progress, instead choosing to retreat in maximalist dogma. This prevents bitcoin from solving some of these obvious technical issues. The block size debates is far more than enough to turn me away.

For me the ethereum community has been a breath of fresh air and is far more progressive than those left in the bitcoin world. After seeing the ethereum community gracefully handle the 2016 DOA hack with a hard fork, I was sold. Ethereum's community understood technology serves us, not the other way around while acknowledging and actively working toward solving problems bitcoiners often simply ignore.

I believe in the human spirit of solving problems through technology. Ethereum is not a panacea, but the ethereum project tries to remember that progressive spirit.

[lostmsu]

Disclaimer: I hold positions in both, more in Ethereum.

1. Both are very complex. How did you compare?

2. "Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing"" - this is a fact. "to try and pump the price" - this is a speculation. Even if it is not - I don't know why is it necessarily bad. That is one of the major goals of every company applying to YC, or doing any kind of innovation in business.

3. Technically, all the use cases for Bitcoin are the same as the use cases for Ethereum, AFAIK.

4. It has the same proof of work system with miners, so in the end Buterin has the same 0 direct control over it, as Nakamoto would over Bitcoin. True, a lot of influence.

5. "97.3% of all statistics are made up."

[chx]

Obviously all cryptocurrencies are a scam.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107770

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21145147

[snitko]

Except Bitcoin. And the market justly reflects it via price.

[nootropicat]

Ethereum has the first ever decentralized banking system based on on-chain smart contracts. I'm earning high interest on usd stablecoins for several months now. The interest rate was double digit until very recently, but even 5% is still very good for a completely anonymous system. DAI itself is a decentralized usd stablecoin, meaning it can't be confiscated by the issuer. It's overcollateralized by locked eth. Anyone can generate new dai after locking eth. Those two together make the previously impossible possible - an Iranian or Venezuelan citizen earning interest on a USD-denominated savings. This is all called DeFi. Once mortgages and other external assets are tokenized, it's going to allow fully decentralized mortgages.

https://trade.dydx.exchange/markets

https://app.compound.finance/

>Bitcoin solves a real problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to outlaw in some way.

Bitcoin completely failed, as majority of its hashpower is located in China. The Chinese government can tell miners to censor transactions tomorrow and to orphan blocks from non-compliant miners and it would happen. There's no defense against this. Changing PoW via a hard fork would result in a gpu-secured network that's even more vulnerable than an asic-based one, as it's easier to a large entity to rent or buy enough gpus.

PoS is the only defense against such centralization. Most hashpower is going to be an impossible to hide industrial facilities, while PoS only needs an internet connection, much harder to catch. More importantly, even if a determined attacker acquires a very big fraction of the tokens and attacks the network, a hard fork can just delete the hostile accounts. One a gpu based PoW network is attacked there's no solution, as it's not possible to make the attacker's mining hardware ineffective via a hard fork.

[godzillabrennus]

Bitcoin is traceable.

Bitcoin is slow.

There are better alternatives out there.

[jl2718]

Let’s be clear about the problem with ETH. It has a 60% pre-mine, and the next 35% of the mining was done by just a small subset of the same people. Only 5% of the supply was ever “up for grabs”. A currency requires highly-decentralized float. ETH will always be speculative.

Other than that (fatal problem), its a great technical project.