Quote from: charleshoskinson on February 04, 2014, 10:25:47 PM

I agree with you completely and as a person who preordered a butterfly labs miner I understand this concern. Ethereum is a massively interactive and rapidly evolving project. You should factor the appreciation of bitcoin into your investment model; however, the goal here is to build a long term ecosystem, not make you 150x in the short term. You have to ask a question, Do you want to own an asset at a 35 million dollar market cap with lots of growth potential or an asset at the 10 billion dollar market cap with lots of growth potential?

Phrasing the question like that, the answer is no brainer. But factoring the risk factor in, the picture looks different. The two are not comparable, bitcoin is already established, proven and enjoying the benefit of a sound adoption curve and non rushed development prior to release. The ethereum now, while has great potential is only an idea starting to materialize, it still has a long way to go and prove itself.

By factoring bitcoin appreciation I will have to limit my exposure to 10%max considering the current IPO model of take it or leave it early on. This taking into consideration the many unknowns at this stage. Example: the mining algorithm. When pressed against the wall I tend to minimize my risks if I have lack of knowledge base to a proper decision making.

Why is it not possible to split the IPO to 3 stages with each 10K BTC cap? First 2000ETH/btc, 2nd 1500ETH/btc, 3rd 1000ETH/btc?
I'm willing to give more money to the project, this way it seems more fair and balanced.

Quote from: charleshoskinson on February 04, 2014, 10:25:47 PM

The former has a lot of room for rapid growth, the latter has to necessarily slow down. UX, scalability issues and also long adoption arc will retard the growth of bitcoin. Getting to 100 billion is going to be a lot harder than getting to 10 billion in my opinion. For us to grow the same amount is a lower barrier.

Or rapid decline, depends on security and developers performance. I agree completely on the rest.

Quote from: charleshoskinson on February 04, 2014, 10:25:47 PM

Also in terms of things like miners, the VP is front loaded. You miners doesn't magically grow in value over time. It is a depreciating asset like most preordered products. Ether has to either die fast or grow fast.

I haven't mined 1 coin. After consideration I decided to invest the money directly to BTC and LTC and spare myself the hassle. Looking retrospectively it was the right decision for me.

I'm not an expert on mining but regarding the mining algorithm, can you guarantee that you will program it properly in order to avoid the daily mine/dump miners pushing the price down once the mining starts? Considering the current inflationary model will the miners be able to effectively mine in a more profitable manner ether then other alt coins and sell them at the price lower than initial IPO price per ether?

If the mining will be done exclusively on CPU and not GPU then I can somehow see how this could work otherwise if it's less profitable why should anyone mine it, except for ideological reasons?