The price of Ethereum is soaring because of the DAO experiment

http://qz.com/688194/the-price-of-ether-a-bitcoin-rival-is-soaring-because-of-a-radical-150-million-experiment/

by prostoalex • 10 years ago

56 52 10 years ago

nikolay• 10 years ago

A new bubble to burst... All the hype around Ethereum reminds me of Bitcoin. Learn from the past! Sell when the hype peaks! Don't get too greedy!

drcode5• 10 years ago

I sold most of my Bitcoin at 20 dollars because of the hype- If I had held it until now, even after the "Bitcoin bubble" I would have been much better off :)

ianpurton2• 10 years ago

Fortunately money doesn't make you happy and it can't buy you love. So you lucked out.

ChrisClark2• 10 years ago

All those poor people who sold Bitcoin at the peak hype of $3. :( Or $20, or $250.

MichaelGG• 10 years ago

I shut down a 64-core Xeon mining setup because it'd "only" net me 100 coins a month. :(

Artemis2• 10 years ago

Or who didn't sell at $1200!

drcode5• 10 years ago

This article is a bit misleading- The all time high happened a couple months ago, long before the DAO.

gcb0• 10 years ago

probably the people with buying power for the project rushing to make some personal profit out of this?

djloche• 10 years ago

The past few days has seen a spike up to prices near the all time high. The media focus on the DAO and ETH in general has no doubt brought in new speculators and investors.

stcredzero3• 10 years ago

Think of it as venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, but with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz replaced by the wisdom of the crowd.

How wise is the crowd? They gave almost $2 million to Solar Freakin Roadways. That's how wise.

EDIT: How about Twitch plays venture capital?

zkirill• 10 years ago

It is concerning how defensive some supporters of the DAO get when the wisdom of the crowd is questioned in this context. IMO vote by majority is the biggest issue with the DAO.

Has anyone come across a DAO where the voting power lies with the board of directors?

cjbprime• 10 years ago

How would that be different from a traditional VC-funded company?

bresc• 10 years ago

That wouldn't be a _Decentralized_ _Autonomous_ Organization... short DAO...

rasengan• 10 years ago

The price of Ethereum is soaring because of Ethereum.

dfischer2• 10 years ago

I'm still confused on what Ethereum really is and how likely it will succeed.

brighton362• 10 years ago

No one needs this product. It's designed to sell tokens to the clueless.

drcode5• 10 years ago

You should let JP Morgan, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, Deloitte, Merill Lynch and Bank of America know, so they can cancel their ethereum projects ASAP.

ianpurton2• 10 years ago

It's a bitcoin clone but with the secure proof of work removed and replaced with insecure proof of stake. Sounded great at the time and they made lots of money from a crowd sale.

drcode5• 10 years ago

ethereum uses proof of work.

thescriptkiddie• 10 years ago

It's like Bitcoin but with a Turing-complete scripting language and other features that make smart contracts more practical.

natrius2• 10 years ago

Ethereum is a platform for decentralized applications. I think of it as a giant scroll in the sky that everyone can write to, but each line has to be cryptographically signed to identify its writer, and existing lines in the scroll can't be modified.

A giant digital scroll in the sky is meaningless, but Ethereum lets you write actual programs as entries in the scroll that define what new entries actually mean. The DAO defines entries that mean "I'm funding the DAO", "I'm voting for a DAO proposal", and "I'm withdrawing my remaining funds from the DAO". Since these entries can't be modified, any app can evaluate the scroll and display conclusions about what has happened in history.

Since Ethereum is Turing-complete, any interaction between people can be defined as entries in the scroll. Ethereum is the raw material for social coordination. Instead of dreaming of ways the world should work, you can build new ways and see if people want to use them. It's incredibly exciting, and I hope more people join us in building social software that users control.

dfischer2• 10 years ago

That sounds compelling, what are the obstacles for it to truly make a difference?

How much adoption would it require? It seems incredibly ambitious which is great but what can _we do_ to make it more likely to succeed? What does the next 3-5 years look like?

Is it meant to be a new form of government at a state level? Or more oriented to small scale like a company?

heimatau• 10 years ago

I'm fairly green thumb when it comes to bitcoin's interworkings, so please inform me if something I say is terribly off.

I'm of the perspective that Ethereum is the next evolution of Bitcoin/Blockchain/RPOW. In my readings, I'm of the belief that it's not about currency/fiat (although that does play a big role). I think the techies, who helped create Bitcoin, realized that Bitcoin's value is much greater than a replacement currency for a nation (or the world for that matter).

Think of it today. Google, FB, hell Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc, they all have TROVES of data about US as individuals. What if you could create a layer on top of the internet that anonymizes your behavior and you could SELL your data, only when you CHOOSE to release it? I think this is what the 'Bitcoin experiment' has taught many of the developers and they are going to try to flesh out their idea, which, IMHO, is to allow software to improve, in an open data set, without infringing on our personal privacy.

I think this system could be breading ground for an AI birth. I'm not the only one (@aantonop has said something recently[1]) and I know AI has been speculated for a while but...this new model excites me. Mainly because Skepticism is at the root, the blockchain is a trustless system. If AI were to come about, shouldn't it think critically? Anywho, that's my current fantasy/theory/perspective. As for the 'value of Ethereum' I see it in the tech not a monetary value.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0jxX84mzts

jackcosgrove• 10 years ago

I am all for cryptocurrencies as a means to privacy. But when their proponents claim that cryptocurrencies will replace fiat currency with something fairer and more tied to value, all I can think of is the speculation, cheating, hype, and chicanery that has gone on with Bitcoin and now appears to be going on with Ethereum. The new currencies seem to be less fair and more ethereal than dollars and euros.

imaginenore• 10 years ago

The same sh*t goes on in the regular currency trading as well. The only reall difference, they have a lot more liquidity, so all the pumps and dumps are a lot less pronounced. But also a lot more money is involved, so people make huge profits still.

rando18423• 10 years ago

So what you mean to say is that that activity makes up a much smaller part of those markets?

papaf• 10 years ago

I am renting a virtual stake in an Ethereum miner with Genesis mining and I am not seeing anything like a spike in my return. In fact it is about half what it was a few months ago.

Edit: this is not an advert, there has been plenty of speculation that Genesis is skimming from the returns and I was just providing a datapoint.

TylerE• 10 years ago

You do know that every cloud miner EVER has been either a ponzi scheme from the start or turned into one?

Paul_S• 10 years ago

Blink and you'll miss the peak.

I'm backing ethereum because wall street is backing them so I expect them to hype it in the mainstream press enough to provide a steady intake of new users.

I also (not so) secretly believe in the project itself.

brianpgordon• 10 years ago

Token-holders can’t sell out now, because the DAO smart contract says tokens are locked up during this subscription period. But the lock-up period ends in seven days. That’s when we’ll see a drop in Ether’s stratospheric price rise. “As soon as people are able to transfer out of DAO tokens, the Ether price will drop temporarily,” says Joseph Lee, who runs London-based bitcoin trading platform Magnr. “People would want to cash out. The price has been rising rapidly.”

If you're thinking of shorting ETHUSD, I did some digging and found that the creation period ends at 2AM pacific on May 28. You can verify this by looking at the fourth constructor argument for the contract, which is the so-called "closingTime" in the contract:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d...

The fourth constructor argument is 0x57495e10, which is the UNIX epoch time corresponding to 2AM pacific on 5/28.

reddytowns• 10 years ago

I don't understand how people can cash out if the ETH are stilled locked in the DAO's tokens. They can sell the tokens, but no one is receiving any ETH.

Once they start spending money on proposals, I could imagine more ETH getting into the market, but this would happen slowly, since proposals pay out over time.

There is some talk that a single shareholder could, theoretically split his portion of the unspent pool of ETH into a new DAO, which he has full control over and could then sell, but such a process would be complex (he'd have to split it, then form a proposal and vote on that proposal to send the money to an address he controls, all through a command line interface, interfacing with the Dao contract directly. Not impossible, but over most people's heads).

Instead, I'd think they'd rather than just sell their DAO tokens on the open market for ETH, BTC, or whatever else. If they sell it for ETH, they'd be effectively putting even more buy pressure on ETH, which may increase the ETH price even further.

Here is more information on how The Dao can be split in order to get ETH funds out:

https://forum.daohub.org/t/how-do-we-get-our-eth-back-from-d...

jgalt212• 10 years ago

DAO is a horrible idea. Average VC returns over the long run, have been very underwhelming. The only way to win in VC land is to pick* the best VCs.

*some may argue it's just as challenging to pick winning investment managers as it is to picking winning investments. My personal opinion is it's pretty easy to avoid those totally inept, but even after to doing so, is your basket of returns any better (higher and less volatile) than an SP500 index fund?

The price of Ethereum is soaring because of the DAO experiment

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