OK I’ve now read parts of the ethereum white paper and updated my quick comment post above - follow the replied-to-arrow to see the updated post.
The sale conditions and selling process for cryptographic tokens have clearly been streamlined since the MaidSafe crowdsale. I’ve found their selling conditions very readable, clear, and as exhaustive as possible in every risk inherent to the project. They also seemed to have raised as much money in a single day as Safe did in 4 days. That is impressive, it seems the level of interest in these projects is significant!
So far it means around ~10M$ in those two projects (if I still got the numbers right…). For comparison purposes, the leading research funding institution in Canada, NSERC, will provide 43M$ for elite Master and Doctoral students in 2014-2015 for the entire country (section 1.1.3 of NSERC - Report on Plans and Priorities - 2014-15)! I am starting to think that funding a long term research project on those topics might be better served this way…
If the Ethereum blockchain is uploaded to the Safe network and Ethereum clients implement Safe API, they could position themselves as the first 3rd party trading/contract accountability apps on the network. They would also have much less to worry about regarding blockchain bloat.
I’m excited about how the two technologies compliment each other.
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Better still, it is market driven. By virtue, we know there is clear demand for the project to be completed.
I got quite excited about ethereum prior to the first crowd sale date. However, IMO, there is a lot of misunderstanding over what it is and does. This isn’t helped by some of the claims made by their devs either.
For example, suggesting it could be used to replace dropbox is pure nonsense. It isn’t what a blockchain is for and if the blockchain is only to do one part of the process, why even mention it?
Having the same code run on every node is also massively inefficient and would only be useful if unavoidable. You certainly wouldn’t use it for distributed data analysis, even if the scripting language was super efficient.
Yes, dynamic contracts are interesting and useful, but they aren’t the be all/end all.
Maybe I am missing something, but maidsafe seems for more powerful and useful IMO.
That’s not true, Ripple has an element of debt in it.
I think Ethereum made it really complicated.
With Counterparty (XCP) you just send your BTC to the announced address and the owner returns assets to the sender’s address. That’s how storj.io did it.
Ethereum seem to be positioning themselves (at least at this point) as a purely contract based network. Vitalik did a Q+A in SF a few days ago and mentioned that uploading a large jpg to the network would cost thousands of dollars worth of ether.
I think they were a bit ambitious in the beginning of the year in the use cases but are much more clear in its capabilities now.
Yes of course. After they take our money now they are more clear about the capabilities.
It still has a lot of potential.
I’m convinced Etheruem is trying to copy Maidsafe. When I first read about it, prior to Maidsafe’s IPO, it was all about DAOs (decentralized autonomous organisations) and contracts for finance and law. Now they are really pushing the ‘remake the internet’ thing and its all about contracts as the foundation for DAPPs (decentralized apps).
I think its a shame because Etheruem before looked great and would compliment Maidsafe, but now they want to compete and whilst their new emphasis is cool, I worry it will mean they won’t do such a good job on the things which initially appealed to me about it because they are to busy trying to replicate Maidsafe in a format which was originally conceived for a different purpose.
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Sounds like you and I were in a similar position until Ethereum failed to keep to their IPO plans and MaidSafe came along and then… wow!
I think Ethereum might have lost momentum and purpose in the interim. It was exciting and creative back in January. The structure of their IPO was being criticised then. Now it is different, but to me seems far worse - with no limit on investment. That’s bonkers. The value of the project is being based on the amount a bunch of people will pour into it over 42 days, but those investores have absolutely nothing to base the value of their investment on, and they have no idea how much money will be poured in or what will be done with it to create value.
The idea is that it is not an investment, but tokens to purchase contracts. But obviously these are investors and speculators, who are going to be left with a massive amount of tokens to offload to who? Maybe Ethereum will turn out as useless as Mastercoin have!
As for aping MaidSafe, they really can’t do it very well the way they are. They are stuck with a duff blockchain approach! Seems a disaster in the making, but who knows. Interesting one to watch though 
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I think you misunderstand a little. Their system is only for creating smart contracts. You would not store any file on the blockchain as it would be silly expensive and inefficient.
What you would do is create smart contracts to incentivize someone to store a data file for you. Say if you do a back up of your system, you would make a contract for someone to store it. Every so often the storer would have to prove that it really does have the file, in return for Ether.
You would also need some mechanism to pay microtransactions whenever you want to actually transfer the file, so you pay for the bandwidth.
You would not get a decentralized dropbox automatically, like you would with MaidSafe, however you would get a very useful tool to help build it.
This reddit AMA answer will explain it better than me
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I would file that under ‘only one part of the process’. It seems pretty far from a dropbox replacement as it was initially pitched.
Thanks for link. I get the concept of ethereum and it sounds handy, but I just think there is a lot of hype and exaggeration surrounding it.
In the Safe network, that is already taken care of via safecoin farming.
The value in blockchain based smart contracts (and blockchain tech in general) is accountability, the global ledger.
Since the Safe network brings so much value to these technologies already (scalability/bloat), there is already incentive for individuals to create apps which utilize blockchains for situations where transparency is warranted.
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But that’s good for MaidSAFE.
Ethereum may become a successful Swiss knife of sorts, but as always building a good solution to any problem is a matter of specailization.
Few months ago I was waiting for the crowdsale, but when it started I didn’t buy for the same reason - they seem to be building a very general platform which means it’ll be mediocre in most aspects unless they’re supreme geniuses. While that may be possible, it’s unlikely.
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