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.