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I was at a potluck Sunday evening, standing in a circle of and somethings who live in Brooklyn, when the topic of Ethereum came up.
This friend is a documentary filmmaker who keeps a modest lifestyle and does freelance video editing to pay rent, so I was surprised that he would invest in a digital currency. It was conceived of by a year-old programmer named Vitalik Buterin, a recipient of the Thiel fellowship who now lives in Singapore. Ethereum is more complex than bitcoin: It includes a programming language, a system for negotiating contracts over the internet, and a digital currency called Ether.
It was much-hyped by programmers before a bare bones version of the network debuted in July People who bought in received Ether tokens that would theoretically be usable to pay for transactions, such as the negotiation of a contract, once the Ethereum network launched. At the time, Buterin warned people not to speculate with Ether. Of course, speculation happened anyway.
Ether is traded on most digital currency exchanges, such as Coinbase and Kraken, and can be bought for bitcoin, U. Again, this is supposedly a real-dollar value for what is basically a Chuck-E-Cheese token. We talked about this story on our daily podcast, The Outline World Dispatch.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Could the answer be… my friends? My friends and people like them — under 35, college-educated, internet-savvy, and thoughtful with their money — are inflating the Ether bubble.
They became aware of it through word of mouth, or from reading about it in the news, in the past few months. They understood the risks of investing but felt optimistic enough to spend hundreds of dollars on something that seemed to promise a chance at profit. There is a lot of exciting possibility around Ethereum, which like bitcoin is built around a blockchain — essentially a distributed ledger where all users of a network verify what each other are doing.
Ethereum could theoretically power everything from artist-run music stores to encrypted voting, for example — but it needs a robust buy-in from programmers, entrepreneurs, and actual users of the system, rather than from people specualting on just the currency.
The only explanation for the run-up in price is the fact that new people were suddenly buying into the economy and driving up demand. I believe those speculators are non-technical people who are savvy enough to understand the gist of Ethereum but not the nuts and bolts, who have cash to spare, and who remember the stories of people getting rich off bitcoin.
I asked my friend if the tales of bitcoin millionaires were a factor in his decision. Multiple people I know made good money back in June or whenever that shit went hog wild.
I jokingly posed the question on Quora: Most of the answers said to let my friends decide what to do with their money, which is fair and basically what I am doing anyway. There was one person who was bearish on Ether: Zac Sand, who had received 12 upvotes at the time of writing.
Ethereum could end up having the staying power of bitcoin, and the potential upside of investing in Ether is certainly higher than traditional, regulated investment vehicles like stocks or startups. And finally, the people rushing into Ether seem to be violating the most common sense principle of investing, which is buy low, sell high. Everyone in the bitcoin media probably owns bitcoin.
A friend of the author who bought Ether, a digital currency. Shutterstock - Group of friends. Adrianne Jeffries Jul—17— Sign up for our newsletter.