
ICO startups band together to create $100M grant fund for Ethereum projects - sethbannon
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/16/ethereum-community-fund/
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lumberjack
So much money and yet this is what they are betting on:
[https://www.stateofthedapps.com/](https://www.stateofthedapps.com/). I just
baffles the mind, how much money is being thrown at this. I think Ethereum is
still mostly just a foggy idea of something that might have potential. But it
is nowhere near ready to host any dapp that creates value. The chief problem
is that while you can execute code in a decentralised manner, you cannot
interact with the real world in a decentralised manner. You still need to have
a trusted source of information from the outside world. And if that wasn't
enough of a problem, anything that isn't a stupid game is going to run into
legal hurdles very quickly.

~~~
cslarson
Oh the cynicism here is so sad. To everything there is a season, I guess.
Anyway! Does the Dai stablecoin not undermine this idea that nothing
worthwhile can be built on Ethereum? Don't like ICOs? Neither do I. While the
evolution of ICOs in 2017 was really interesting I think DAOs (and things like
DAICOs) will see more prominence in 2018. It is an exciting world!

~~~
IntronExon
It’s a common error of judgement to assume that people who don’t share your
unvarnished enthusiasm are cynics. One way to test for this is to see if you
can intelligently address the concerns of “cynics” without just waving your
hands and invoking the rosy future you imagine. It can be helpful to look to
the past and present and try to understand why people have reservations, and
address them comprehensively.

~~~
kinggfx
The original comment was cynical wasn't it?

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sago
This is a sensible move, I think.

Of all the cryptocurrencies, ETH at least has a story about why it might have
intrinsic value in the medium-term, beyond pure speculative passion: i.e. its
use as a platform for smart contracts. But that potential only gets realised
if more people use it for more significant purposes, rather than just for
functionless ICOs or trivial games.

On the other hand, if this injection can help ETH grow this year, the backers
of this fund should more than make their money back.

It's going to be an interesting year, I think. It's easy to shout bubble
bubble bubble, and easy to shout buy buy buy. My hunch is that the reality
will be more interesting than either.

~~~
adwhit
My understanding of Ethereum is that it markets itself as a smart-contracts
platform, and you need to have an associated coin (Ether) to pay people to run
the platform.

But the number of Ether is fixed at 100,000,000ish. Which means that if the
platform is successful, the coin will increase in value indefinitely. But I
don't see why those who 'miss out' on the presale etc. (think banks,
governments) would choose to hop on board at a later date - essentially
gifting money to early adopters - when they'd be better off simply creating a
new coin (or indeed forking Ethereum and awarding themselves more Ether). It
all just seems very unstable, game-theory-ish situation.

~~~
jobigoud
> But I don't see why those who 'miss out' on the presale etc. (think banks,
> governments) would choose to hop on board at a later date - essentially
> gifting money to early adopters - when they'd be better off simply creating
> a new coin

This exact same argument has been repeatedly given to explain why Bitcoin
would never break above $10, $100, $1000, whatever, or why Ethereum was doomed
to stay in the pennies. Clearly the late adopters see more value in entering
than they see a problem with gifting money to earlier adopters.

Creating a new coin or forking doesn't solve anything, they would be alone and
it wouldn't have any value if nobody wants to trade in.

The value is what people value it at. Just because the supply is bounded
doesn't mean its value will increase indefinitely.

~~~
adwhit
> Creating a new coin or forking doesn't solve anything, they would be alone
> and it wouldn't have any value if nobody wants to trade in.

Well, is the point of Ethereum to make some cash at the expense of later
investors (basically a Ponzi scheme), or does the platform have some intrinsic
value? Point is, the platform itself can be duplicated at little cost (it's an
open source project after all, just fork it), so the cost to the (new) user
should be low (or more importantly, _stable_ ), even if the value proposition
is high.

This logic leads me to conclude that almost all the value of Ether is purely
speculative and could disappear at any time.

~~~
cslarson
The software can be duplicated but the network of devs, users, validators, etc
is harder to duplicate.

The intrinsic value of ETH is to use it to pay for transactions on the
Ethereum platform. These transactions are used to form dApps that can be run
without censorship. I would have said the value of that is TBD but now I'd
stay that some minimum value has been determined (ICOs, DAOs, the Dai system,
games, etc.)

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marknadal
Really good/bad mixed feelings on this.

\- Is it legal for effectively crowdfunded projects to then fund other
projects?

\- Ethereum has integrity, willing to change its core technology in order to
become more scalable. But...

\- Is "paying off" developers to build apps for it just evidence of the lack
of apps naturally/organically being built?

\- Yet Seed Stage funding from traditional VCs has dried up, so is this
effectively a market response from technical-oriented now-wealthy investors,
to make up for it?

I think these are hard yet important questions. Obviously, who doesn't wish
they were rolling in this kind of cash to dole out? At the same time, we
already have people building P2P dApps with our system
([https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/auth](https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/auth)),
you know, the ones that Ethereum/Dfinity/etc. can only dream of doing even
after they hit their scaling goals (realtime character-by-character updates on
decentralized social networks -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3akdQJs55E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3akdQJs55E)
, 3D multiplayer VR games -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_m16-w6bBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_m16-w6bBI)
, etc.), so it seems nonsensical that so much money is being offered to build
Ethereum apps - is there genuinely a lack of developers?

~~~
bitreality
I think right now the easy money is all in ICO's. Talented developers have
much more incentive to just create a new coin than develop a dAPP on Ethereum.
Eventually, this ICO craze should slow down, and it will make more financial
sense to develop on top of existing coins.

~~~
DennisP
Take a quick look at how many of those ICO tokens are built on top of
Ethereum:
[https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/](https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/)

Most of those are connected to some kind of dApp project.

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RobLach
Every day I'm further convinced that all that's happening in this space at the
moment is that cryptocurrencies are soaking up enough fiat money to push it at
someone to come up with a good reason for them to exist.

