
Ethereum Price Climbs to $360; Crypto Market Cap Pierces $160B - technologyvault
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ethereum-price-climbs-360-crypto-market-cap-pierces-160-billion/
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TACIXAT
It seems really disingenuous to talk about market caps in cryptocurrencies.
The US dollar doesn't have a market cap. No currency does. Market cap is the
markets valuation of a company. The term is used to contrast it against their
actual valuation. The use in crypto is just a mechanism to dress them up like
stocks.

If you call these currencies, then you need to recognize that they are
extremely deflationary and will never be used as fiat currencies are. If you
call them speculative investments, you need to realize they're not backed by
any actual value.

I haven't done a deep dive on Ethereum yet, so this is mostly addressing
Bitcoin and all its derivatives.

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noddy1
> If you call these currencies, then you need to recognize > that they are
> extremely deflationary and will never be used as > fiat currencies are.

For me, one of the best things about bitcoin is that it is actually going
allow a lot of arrogant economic dogma to finally be put to the test,
including that:

\- currencies must be inflationary or the universe will explode and people
will save so aggressively that they will die of hunger

\- printing free money and giving it to rich banks is a good thing and doesn't
totally fuck the little guy

\- monetary stimulus smooths out economic cycles, and totally isn't part of
the cause of the ridiculous boom-bust cycles we are having now

~~~
TACIXAT
You need some semblance of stability though. No one is going to agree to pay
me 1 BTC per week if they're implicitly giving me a 30% raise in week 2. Just
the same, I would not be happy to get paid in an extremely inflationary
currency that meant I was taking a pay cut week over week.

It has not shattered any belief in traditional currencies or governments for
me. In fact, it has made me realize their value. People are just using it for
speculation which makes it feel a lot more like a multi-level marketing scheme
than a currency.

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cgmg
How does speculation make something a "multi-level marketing scheme"?

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TACIXAT
First, I should clear up some terms. I say speculation as a contrast to
investing. Investing is when you have an understanding of something underlying
value (or expected value) based on some financial fact (e.g. past profits).
Speculation is when you purchase something and hope for it to go up in value.

I see cryptocurrency prices largely driven by speculation. There is no
underlying value that justifies the price. This means that the people
purchasing cryptocurrencies today are relying on someone else purchasing it at
a higher price tomorrow in order to make a profit. I might have used the term
MLM incorrectly when what I meant was pyramid scheme.

~~~
cgmg
> I might have used the term MLM incorrectly when what I meant was pyramid
> scheme.

You are now using the term 'pyramid scheme' incorrectly.

Out of curiosity, do you consider other objects of speculation, including
stocks, bonds, futures, derivatives, commodities and real estate, to be
'pyramid schemes'?

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cm2187
One thing that I rarely hear about crypto-currencies is the environmental
impact. I am a bit surprised to see the environment-friendly silicon valley
getting excited by such an energy-wasting protocol. If we have to burn CPUs
reversing hashes every time someone makes a payment, we should start building
new coal and nuclear power plants now.

~~~
moreati
Ethereum is planning a switch from Proof of Work (burning CPU/GPU/ASIC cycles
to secure the chain), to Delegated (?) Proof of Stake - people lock away some
of their ETH holdings, some of those people are random selected to validate a
block. They attest which transactions are valid, and put them in a block. If
they're judged to be honest/correct they're rewarded with ETH in proportion to
their stake. If they're found to have broken the rules their stake is not
returned, or only partially returned.

PoS has detractors/claimed flaws, but it is definitely much less energy
intensive than PoW.

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johnrichardson
Ethereum's moving to PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant) Proof of Stake.

See this FAQ for more details, it has the most up to date details on
Ethereum's PoS progress:

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-
FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ)

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ashark
Is there some meta-miner project you can use to mine a few of every not-
obviously-garbage new coin, then stop, just in case they turn out to be worth
something?

~~~
omarchowdhury
This is developing along those lines:
[https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted](https://www.nicehash.com/?p=gstarted)

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Taylor_OD
I invested a small (hundreds) into Ethereum and a few other coins earlier this
year. They've since doubled in value. I can imagine if you were a very high
risk investor and believed in crypto's right now you could be making a lot of
money.

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cryptothrowaway
I am up 6,200% ytd.

Some like NEO and Waves did that for me. It took me cycling through 25+
altcoins to reach that level.

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nosuchthing
NEO is interesting if for no reason other than it doesn't even exist yet, and
the market price has risen so quickly. One can easily imagine a scheme with
any of the premined networks where the price is manipulated by only releasing
a small percentage of the total supply and than buying up what's available on
the exchanges with BTC to pump the price and than as rubes buy in, slowly
selling off at the inflated prices.

The 50,000,000 units were arbitrary distributed to unknown parties within
China.

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Retric
I wonder how much of that is is lost wallets ect as it's very easy to have
unrecoverable issues.

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karaokeyoga
Here's an example …
[https://etherscan.io/address/0x4f35f119145b8d599d2b70b37c730...](https://etherscan.io/address/0x4f35f119145b8d599d2b70b37c73086f71cd416b)

I mined these ~1500 ether in the first few days of their going live. Then I
killed all my AWS instances, inadvertently making this account inaccessible as
a result. It's "fun" to watch it go up in value. It was under $1K at one
point.

I don't feel too bad, though, as I would have sold at 2x rather than 500x
anyway …

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paulpauper
someone would have to work 30+ years to make as much after-tax income as
someone made just mining some coins ..just mindblowing

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srge
I don't mean to say that all coins are valuable. But it does ressemble another
gold rush. Do some remember the domain name craze 20 years ago? Any kid smart
enough to have bought generic domain names back then made lots of money.

