johnnydoebk

Ethereum was created because it isn't possible to do Ethereum with BTC.

I don't think that is true. You can absolutely reuse BTC for your so called "smart contracts".

Sorry for a stupid question but I have to ask. Why everyone is so desperate to start a company and locate it physically in the US? Is it just because of VC money? Wouldn't any safe place with good laws and easy immigration policy do? I don't take seriously Blockchain projects (and consider most of them blatant scam) and they are relatively small now. But longterm can this model solve the part about VC money?

Yeah, just $30 million for development plus 12 million of ETH which is in current price like what $4.5 billion? I'm against of this kind of taxes. But if this is the way it works in crypto world, why should it be OK for some and not-OK for others?

> write your own separate distributed cryptocurrency system

You don't need "cryptocurrency system" for most of the cases, do you? E.g. you don't need to solve double spending problem if all you want is a decentralized forum / messaging app / video chat. I'm not a decentralization expert but it seems to me, DHT has worked so far. And its advantage over Ethereum is that users don't have to buy some currency and pay for every message. They subscribe to the content they like and support it by hosting it. It's easy as that.

You need Ethereum if you want an easy ICO, but if it's a bad thing now, then I don't know why would anybody use it.

> There already exists a common currency through which we can trade. It's called ether

Exactly. For every ICO that pops up, ask does this use case require a special token?

Well, creators of Ether have already got their share, didn't they? What should be the motivation of "dApp" developers in your opinion if they can't earn the way Ether developers did? Do you expect them to use Ethereum for the love of humanity? Because, you don't really need Ethereum to create decentralized applications. There were decentralized (p2p) forums way before the crypto movements. There is a decentralized (p2p) search engine that works just fine without Ethereum. If not ICO, why would I pay the Ethereum network to deploy my contract, develop an app, promote it, and then convince my users that they should pay the network to use my app, too (assuming that I hold 0.0000 of Ether and don't care about the rise of its price)?

I agree. No offence but this is an /r/ethereum quality content.

What will the tokens represent? Will it be an equivalent of company shares or something else?

> an "ICO production" company to create the coins and infrastructure for them to do their own ICOs?

Isn't that what Ethereum is for?

The part about the private messages and huge media files is not clear. If I want to share some message with my friends only should I encrypt the message using their public keys and publish the result on blockchain? Would those be $number_of_friends messages or is there a way to publish it just once? How expensive that would be? Should I use IPFS for media files? Has anybody ever implemented these parts in practice?

How can I convince people to use my Facebook killer app instead of Facebook if they have to pay for every action (update profile, send message, post something, etc.), the price is not clear in advance (who knows how much "gas" every action would cost), and the process of publishing is not instant (IIRC Facebook has 2 billions of active users, can Ethereum handle that scale? It's supposed to be used by thousands of different projects, right?).

What's sidechain? Is it something I have to develop myself (i.e. something Ethereum does not provide out of the box)? If that's the case why do I need Ethereum at all?

Do we have a week of cryptocurrencies on HN?

But considering the fact that the computations are useless, the energy is still wasted.

Do you think they had non-speculative use cases in mind when creating Ethereum? I don't think so. There are way better ways to create decentralized applications. Without the coins part.

Overall I like it but the short centered URL bar, unused space around it, and trimmed URL are terrible.

If you can't fight it, join it. Then lead it.

> marketing speech

> FOSS developers

I don't think it has something to do with FOSS but rather with blockchain developers. Most projects have nice landing pages but very vague messages.

There are some hipster web-sites built by amateurish developers who manage somehow to make them work correctly in Chrome only. I've faced those too and after reporting the bugs (like horizontal scrolling of menus) the reply is usually something along the lines of "most of our users prefer Chrome, so we won't fix it".

> No, that's impossible.

Sorry, but that's complete BS.

There are a lot of efforts to "re-decentralize the web" and none of them seem successful. In my opinion, that's because their authors are trying to implement some elves fantasies.

1. Has anyone of the "redecentralizers" ever thought about how developers would monetize their software? The web as we know it is popular because there is financial incentive. Current web makes it possible to implement any monetization model out of existing 12: product, service, Subscription, Resale, Audience Aggregation, etc. Why would you want to limit that?

2. Has anyone considered compatibility with the existing applications? Yeah, that's non-trivial, but wouldn't it be cool if with minimal effort we could move existing software to a more decentralized model?

3. Don't tell me which stack of technology to use. Not everybody wants to build JS SPAs.

4. Has anyone ever built a useful and successful decentralized service. I mean the one that would be popular even if it's centralized, not just like "Facebook but federated". How about starting with this step instead of creating an abstract protocol?

Why is this downvoted? It's true, isn't it? And as far as I know they had plans to make English the 3rd official language (along with Kazakh and Russian).

The thing is they have already had people been sent to prison for a single "like" in social networks or for expression of dislike in comments section. It didn't look like somebody cared to investigate anything. Something tells me it wouldn't be surprising at all if the "arrested for investigation" is turned into "sent to jail" in this case, too.

Is there a Servo + WASM based alternative to Electron yet? Would it be more effective?

It did, twice actually. 2 applications, a few interviews for every of them. Then for two years there had been a dozen of applications with no answers. And I'm thinking now whether I should bother applying again or I'm in a blacklist of some kind.

I had the same issue, solved it by finding a job. Repeated it twice. Every time I'm not busy with my projects or work for too long, I start doubting.

Fedora has those, too: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/

> What percentage of the work we do has "clear, undeniable social value"

Can we ever define the "clear, undeniable social value"? Isn't it better to just let people vote, say, using money like they do now?

So conscious that they've even forgot to configure SSL/TLS certificate.

I suppose somebody had bad experience with them. Don't know whether it's the case here, but often the downvoted post indicates that the company does not bother answering to applications or posts advertisment of a position for months but not really looking for anybody or something else is wrong.

> I have hear other, more plausible, explanations. Weather is one.

LOL, this is exactly what corrupted officials in a Country-I-Woudn't-Call say when they're asked about billions being spent on building of roads that cannot survive a single season (so they have to be rebuilt every year). "That's because of our weather", - they say.

Looks like, most people here answer to the question "What tech stack are you excited about right now?".

> lol no

That was my reaction as well. I'm surprised that this kind of "deep" analysis is on the front page.